Chart Sweep
Saturday, 02 February 2008 17:43
This originally came to me on cassette from a work friend who knew I was a record junkie and she thought I might like it. If I recall the story, she knew somebody who had meticulously collected all of the 45 RPM records of every consecutive number one song, starting in 1956 when the charts began and 45s of the #1 songs were routinely released, ending in the 1990’s when 45s were no longer done for each #1 song. A few seconds from each song has been extracted, compressing many hundreds of songs into just the space of this CD. The cassette, a poorly recorded normal bias copy of a copy (of a copy, of...?) needed work. It has now been equalized, noise reduced, and harmonically distorted so it’s at least listenable.
The only liner notes included with the original cassette are that it was compiled by Hugo Keesing. I created some basic CD artwork ( JPG | PDF ). You can download the tracks by right-clicking (Windows) or ctrl-clicking (Mac) in the playlist.
Epilogue: Hugo has been found! Thanks to some sleuthing and legwork by Wobbly, Hugo Keesing has been tracked down and the full story of Chartsweep has been revealed in a Q&A with him on the Some Assembly Required blog.
