Off The Chart: 1 February 1981

Off The Chart: 1 February 1981

White rabbits! No Jefferson Airplane or Chas & Dave on this first of the month Off The Chart, but we are going back to brutally dissect the UK singles chart from this day in 1981. We’ll have the usual brace of neglected and forgotten hits, plus tracks from three of the week’s new albums, a round-up of the day’s goings-on, a hit from the Israeli chart and the top five singles in full.

  • Whose debut solo single immediately became a much bigger hit than his band ever had?
  • What was the first rap record to reach number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100?
  • And which single was a bigger hit in the UK before it was released here than afterwards?

Tune in and find out!


Listen to Off The Chart on Noisebox Radio at 9pm every Tuesday! You can stream Noisebox Radio via their website, their apps for iOS or Android, or through TuneIn and MyTuner, or ask your smart speaker to “play Noisebox Radio” – and don’t forget to tweet along using the hashtag #OffTheChart. If you’re not around, you can hear the show again on Noisebox Radio at 10am on Friday, or catch up on Mixcloud after that.

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Our subscribers also get access to exclusive shows including Further Off The Chart in which we play some of the records that come up in conversation on the regular shows. You can even download shows to listen offline in the Mixcloud app! Please consider backing us – we really appreciate it and your subscription allows us to keep producing a new episode every single week.

Spotify playlists

If you’ve missed a previous edition they’re all on our Mixcloud page, or for a taster of the music we play, listen to our Spotify playlist Way Off The Chart including one track from each show!

Related:  Off The Chart: 14 May 1986

We also have a Spotify playlist for our #ICEOTWF feature, including all (well, most) of the international hits we’ve played since the feature began in March 2017. There are all sorts of oddities in here, all of which were hits somewhere in the world but not in the UK!

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