Fab 40

Add links
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The "Fab 40" (i.e. "Fabulous Forty") was a weekly playlist of popular records used by the British "pirate" radio station "Wonderful" Radio London (also known as "Big L") which broadcast off the Essex coast from 1964 to 1967.

Basis of the chart

See also: List of Fab 40 number-one singles
Look up fab in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

"Fab" (short for "fabulous") was a very fashionable

Beatles, who were known as the "Fab Four", and much used by such trend-setters as Cathy McGowan, who presented the weekly rock music show Ready Steady Go! on independent television
.

Unlike the

New Musical Express and other music papers (or, for that matter, used by the BBC or the rival pirate station Radio Caroline[1]), the Fab 40 was not based on sales of records. Thus, although it mostly contained what was current and popular, it was often ahead of movements in the authentic charts and was subject to more dramatic fluctuations. Whereas, in the sales charts of the 1960s, many records would climb in stages and then drop gradually, a record might suddenly emerge near the top of the Fab 40 one week and disappear from it the next. Equally, there was often room for records to scale the higher echelons of the Fab 40 without entering the sales charts at all (for example, the Settlers' Nowhere Man in March 1966 [2]
). As a result, a number of records that are well remembered from the mid-1960s were not, in fact, particularly successful in commercial terms.

Fab 40 show

The Fab 40 was unveiled each week during a three-hour programme at lunchtime on Sunday (11 am to 2 pm), which, through such programmes as

Light Programme since 1961.[3]

The final Fab 40 show was introduced by

BBC Radio Essex to mark the fortieth anniversary of the pirates' demise. On 14 August 2022, John Peters recreated this Big L Fab 40 chart rundown for Boom Radio's day Celebrating the Pirates, 55 years after Wonderful Radio London closed, in association with Chris and Mary Payne of tribute site radiolondon.co.uk.[6][7][8][9]

When the BBC opened its own "pop" station Radio 1 in September 1967, its sales-based top 30 chart was known informally for a time as the "Fun 30",[10] no doubt in imitation of London's "Fab 40".

Reconstructing the Fab 40

Some 30–40 years after they were in use, meticulous attempts were made to reconstruct the Fab 40 charts by Radio London Ltd. These drew on surviving lists prepared between 1965 and 1967, at Radio London's offices at 17 Curzon Street in London and informal ones compiled at the time by listeners, although there were sometimes discrepancies between the "official" list and the records that were actually delivered to the ship, the

Moody Blues were at number one with "Go Now".[13]

Notes

  1. ^ Caroline's sales based top 50 was generally known as the "Caroline Countdown" [1].
  2. ^ Radio London – Big L Fab Forty 20 March 1966
  3. ^ Pick of the Pops was first broadcast in 1955.
  4. ^ [2] The final show overran by 22 minutes.
  5. ^ Charlie Gillett & Simon Frith (1976) Rock File 4
  6. ^ "Programmes".
  7. ^ "Celebrating the Pirates". Archived from the original on 11 August 2022.
  8. ^ "Radio London – about the Radio London Web Site".
  9. ^ "Radio London - Field's Final Fab Forty - 6th August 1967".
  10. ^ For example, the Tony Blackburn Show (known formally as Daily Disc Delivery), Radio 1, 30 September 1967
  11. ^ Radio London – complete Fab Forty Index intro
  12. ^ Gillett & Frith (1976) Rock File 4
  13. ^ Radio London – Big L Fab Forty 65 – 24 Jan 1965

External links

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fab_40&oldid=1207441830"
This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article: Fab 40. Articles is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license; additional terms may apply.Privacy Policy