Tag Archives: Pretenders

Off The Cards

Off The Cards

We asked, you answered, we spent ages with an abacus and several pads of paper, and now we can reveal the twenty most popular Christmas hits of the ’80s – for this year, anyway. This year’s Off The Chart Christmas special delivers a few surprises, but who gets the unexpectedly huge mysterious parcel under their tree and who gets a lump of coal? Join us at 10pm on Mad Wasp Radio to find out!

You can stream Mad Wasp Radio via their website, their apps for iOS or Android, or through TuneIn and MyTuner, or ask your smart speaker to “play Mad Wasp Radio” – and don’t forget to tweet along using the hashtag #OffTheChart. If you’re not around, you can catch up on Mixcloud after that.

Get your Christmas bonus!


If you supoport us on Patreon or Mixcloud Select you can get a head start on everybody else and find out the results of positions 30-21 in our special exclusive Bargain Bin Edition! For a small monthly subscription you also get access to the exclusive Extended Mix of the show every week with bonus 12″ mixes, additional chatter and the week’s top ten singles in full!
Our supporters 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! 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!

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!

Off The Chart: 5 January 1980

Off The Chart: 5 January 1980

Those of you who don’t like ’80s music are in for a treat on this week’s Off The Chart as we’ve gone all the way back to the first week of 1980, when the last chart of the 1970s was … read more

Off The Chart: 22 September 1981

Off The Chart: 22 September 1981

It’s another voyage back into time as we revisit this day in 1981 on Off The Chart! Along the way we’ll collect a dozen or so hits that you might not remember, take in three of the week’s new albums, … read more

Off The Chart: 31 March 1980

Off The Chart: 31 March 1980

Your hosts Steve and Julian have gone to great lengths to ensure this week’s Off The Chart goes ahead – about ten miles, in fact, so the links might sound slightly muffled in places but everything else carries on as … read more

Off The Chart: 21 January 1980

Off The Chart: 21 January 1980

It’s almost a 1970s special on your favourite ’80s chart show this week, as we go back a whole forty years to this day in January 1980! As usual there’s two hours of hits you might just about vaguely remember, … read more

Off The Rooftops

Off The Rooftops

Join us on Mad Wasp Radio at 5pm on Christmas Day for Off The Rooftops, the 2019 Off The Chart Christmas Special in which we reveal the results of our 2019 poll to find your favourite ’80s Xmas Hits! We’ll … read more

Now Parlez 9

Now Parlez 9

Join Steve and Julian as they take time out from their weekly Off The Chart show to rummage in the back of the wardrobe for another Now album! This time they’re playing tracks from Now That’s What I Call Music … read more

Mixcloud Select: Now That’s What You Might, Hypothetically, Have Called Music

Now That's What You Might, Hypothetically, Have Called Music

This Virtual CD is actually a virtual double LP! As part of our celebrations of 100 Now That’s What I Call Music albums, we’ve come up with this hypothetical example of what the first Now of the 1980s might have … read more

Mixcloud Select: “You forgot cranberries too?”

You forgot cranberries too?

To introduce our new Mixcloud Select site, we’re reactivating our classic Virtual CD Of The Month feature and reissuing the original virtual CDs that we tried to entice people into backing us on Patreon! From December 2017, You Forgot Cranberries … read more

Sound of the Crowd – a Discography of the ’80s: Fourth Edition available now!

Sound of the Crowd - 4th Edition cover

Sound Of The Crowd: a Discography of the ’80sΒ is the ultimate record collector’s guide to the 1980s. In the era of multi-formatting, picture discs, coloured vinyl, multiple remixes, funny shaped records and tiny CDs you could lose down the back … read more

Off The Chart: 10 February 1984

Off The Chart: 10 February 1984

Come back to 1984 on this week’s Off The Chart for a spectacular display of how attitudes have changed in the past third of a century – and that’s just the first song. There’s the usual hatful of half-remembered hits, … read more

Off The Sleigh: the Off The Chart Christmas Special 2017

Off The Sleigh

Remember voting for your favourite ’80s Christmas hits back in November? Finally Steve and Julian can reveal the results in this special festive edition of Off The Chart! Find out how your favourites fared as we count down all twenty-two … read more