Join me as I listen to every UK Number 1 single since the charts began. Each and every song to have claimed the top spot since 1952: classics, novelties, long-forgotten hits, one-week wonders and pole-position hogging juggernauts…

I’ve been a chart geek since I was eleven or twelve – recording the rundown to tape on a Sunday afternoon, writing down the top ten, top twenty, even the top forty in a secret notebook when I should have been outside doing something better with my time. But the one position that fascinated me more than any other was, naturally, the Number One spot. Fair enough, really. It’s the pinnacle. It’s validation. Every Friday, and before that every Sunday, and before that every Tuesday, the most popular song of the past week is announced and you cannot argue with the results. You might hate a particular song, you might think it’s the worst abomination ever committed to vinyl, or cassette, or CD, or compressed into an MP3, but you cannot argue its popularity. (OK, a lot of the time you can… Not every #1 gets there fair and square…)

And I know my charts – the artist with most #1s, the artist with the second most #1s, the song with the longest stay at #1, the song with the longest non-consecutive stay at #1, the biggest ever sales at #1, the lowest ever sales at #1, the shortest #1 by length, the longest #1 by length… I got it all down.

But, I realised: I know the titles, and the lengths, and the weeks at the top, of songs that I’ve never actually heard. And so, this blog was born. I will listen to every single UK Number 1 single, from the first published chart to the present day, and write about them. Simple.

Wherever we are on our journey when you join, you are welcome.

Enjoy