CHART BEATS: A JOURNEY
THROUGH POP

Originally posted as 25 Years Ago This Week in 2012. Updated in 2017. Who can remember where they were when they first heard "Locomotion"? I can. I watched it nine times in a row when I played my VHS recording of the Countdown episode it first appeared on. A few weeks later, Kylie Minogue's debut single arrived on the ARIA top 50. Kylie had good reason to smile We'll get to where it entered the chart later (or you can cheat and look at the printout below), but I think it's sa

Originally posted as 25 Years Ago This Week in 2012. Updated in 2017. It was one of Australian television's most watched moments. A soap...

Originally posted as 25 Years Ago This Week in 2012. Updated in 2017. Last week was all about the controversial “I Want Your Sex”, which jumped from 31 to 13 this week on the ARIA singles chart. But there was nothing raunchy about the new arrivals on the top 50 this week in 1987. Thanks to Tom Cruise, an eight-year-old song became a massive hit in 1987 On the one hand, a batch of golden oldies and mature artists hit the chart; on the other, two doses of squeaky clean pop fro

Originally posted as 25 Years Ago This Week in 2012. Updated in 2017. A week after picking up my first ARIA chart, I decided I just had...

This week in 1987, I picked up a copy of the latest ARIA chart from my local record store (remember those?) and studied it from top to bottom, before filing it away for safe keeping — something I would do for the next 11 years. Look, here it is: I still have every chart from July 1987 to May 1998 (when I left Australia to go backpacking), and I would've kept the collection going, but the person I'd lined up to stockpile the charts in my absence turned out to be a bit crap, an