It’s the end of the year and the end of an era on Off The Chart, as Steve and Julian take you back to 1981 and find a chart so full of comedy, novelty and just plain weird records that it would be rude not to collect them all together into a special edition. As always there’s as brace of forgotten hits (although this week many of them are forgotten for good reason), plus three tracks from one of the week’s biggest albums, a look at the day’s events, an international hit and the top five singles in full. Who had a top twenty hit by sounding a bit like Ian Dury? Who scored one of their biggest hit singles with a track that was intended as a throwaway B-side? And who was the first British act to have a top five hit with a rap record? Click PLAY to find out!
Listen to Off The Chart on Mad Wasp Radio via their website, their apps for iOS or Android, or through TuneIn – and don’t forget to tweet along using the hashtag #OffTheChart. If you’re not around at 10am on a Saturday, or you couldn’t quite believe it the first time round, you can hear the show again at 6am on Sunday (which is still really Saturday if you don’t go to bed) or catch up on Mixcloud from Sunday morning.
If you enjoy Off The Chart but find it’s just not long enough, why not head over to our Patreon page and subscribe to us for a teeny amount of cash every month? You get access to the exclusive deluxe edition of the show with bonus 12″ mixes and the foreign chart rundown, as well as all sorts of other bonus content including regular Further Off The Chart shows where we play some of the records that come up in conversation on the regular shows. You can have all this for as little as $1 a month – we really appreciate it and it all goes towards the running of the site.
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!
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!
