2/7/81 Charts

I’ve mentioned before that I kept rankings of my favorite pop songs between April 80 and December 82; the only catch was that I had to include the current Top 40 among them. I’m going to start posting (at least occasionally) snippets of my charts when a show from that period is rebroadcast. First up is this past weekend’s 2/7/81 show; here’s my top 25 from that week.

A few notes:
–I made my charts at the beginning of the week, so this was based on the songs on the 1/31 countdown.
–“Suddenly” was a former #1. Songs from the Xanadu soundtrack had featured prominently on the Harris Top 50 (TM pending) since June, the biggest of all being “Magic.”
–“Keep On Loving You” and “A Little in Love” were future #1s.  I liked Cliff Richard just fine but this was by far his peak period with me.
–I was a pretty big Alan Parsons Project fan from start to end of their charting years. “Games People Play” would spend 4 weeks at #3.
–Some songs are as high as they are only because of their relative longevity on AT40. Big hits I didn’t dig all that much often wound up peaking between #11 and #20. Here, those include “Celebration” (#12 peak), “Passion” (#17), “Guilty (#13), and “9 to 5” (#14).

As a bonus, here’s my AT40 chart for that week.

The three numbers in the column on the edge are, in order: number of weeks on the Top 40 to date, position the previous week, and predicted position for the following week. I wasn’t listening every week at this point, but the LDDs and Archive #1s indicate I heard this show in real time. For the record, my predictions for 2/14 weren’t shabby at all, at least in the top half. I got the top 9 correct, had #10-11 switched, #12-14 permuted, and #15-17 as well as #20 correct. Much better than I normally did!