I guess you could say it all started in the summer of 1996. It was at that seminal point in your life when career decisions and exams are foisted upon you and little else seems to matter. Something else did matter though! Music.
Ever conscious of the future, it wasn’t clear to continue with my interest in maths, or aim for the “if you do what you enjoy, you’ll never work” philosophy to enjoy life and a career simultaneously moving away from the notion that work was a chore to be endured. I had taken up violin at the start of secondary school but was otherwise without musical talent or skill. That summer, I began to buy Top Of The Pops magazine and decided that, like a previous soccer interest, to get the most out of the hobby, you had to be a fan and obtain superior knowledge of a particular artist.
Going purely on what I liked the sound of, and having gained knowledge over the summer of the current charts from Top Of The Pops, I made my decision and, come October made my first CD singles purchases with my own money:
Spice Girls – Say You’ll Be There and Wannabe
The latter had been a huge hit over the summer and a debut single. It was on sale and charting when the follow-up Say You’ll Be There came out, which was the first of thousands I must have bought on the opening day of release.
Then came listening to the chart show on Sunday to hear my new purchase had contributed to the new #1 – straight in. Little did I know at the time this was up until then quite a rare event, and that the girls I had chosen to support were to become the biggest global act of the decade. And probably the whole CD era (1993-2006, when CD was the biggest selling format), or speaking from 2019, of the last 50 years. I had chosen well and started as I meant to go on.
I continued to listen to and make a record of the chart from Radio 1 on my old DOS computer and making dot matrix print outs for many years. The CD Singles purchases went the same way, invariably it was pop that I liked that I bought and more often than not, they were bigger hits than what I didn’t like: indie music, guitar bands, or seemingly anything ‘cool’. I didn’t care. I liked what I liked. That was when, if you missed the chart on the radio, you missed it unless you were lucky to catch up from a newspaper the following day. There were no guarantees that the paper would publish the full top 40, let alone the top 75. There was no iPlayer, no reply function or even online publication of the full chart beyond the 2nd week.
Now with, over 20 years of listening, collecting and analysing, that brings us to this blog. A wealth of knowledge, some anecdotal, some statistically provable. This blog looks to explore my anecdotal memories and from reading charts from before I was born to the present day by means of statistical and numerical analysis going deeper than publicly available data (such as that published by the Official Charts Company), exploring different subjects that are rarely if ever written about and using a variety of mathematical techniques to reveal and tell stories of the charts and the hits on them, never told elsewhere. To enhance my scholarly pursuits, in my personal life, I use minimal screen time beyond my musical research, so I am not on social media. My articles will appear exclusively on carbines.music.blog and there will be no conscious effort to commercialise or drive traffic here. There will be no product placement or advertising. The aim is to be a column of the purest form where the quality of the research and writing of the finished article is the sole priority to maintain the ultimate editorial standards and to represent a personal body of work of over 20 years in the making.
This blog will cover my personal progress of collecting all the UK hits using a variety of metrics, chart analysis discussion, literary reviews and my original artwork, music and lyrics/poetry.
If you arrive here from online sources or from my personal invitation, welcome.
David Carbines: The Hit Collector 