Dave Watson is the proud owner of 1,404 chart-toppers. He looks back on three decades of tracking down obscure vinyl records – and reveals how he copes in the digital era
or 70 years, the UK singles chart has been a constant in our lives: a weekly countdown humming along in print, on TV and the radio. But to Dave Watson, it’s more than just background noise: it’s a lifestyle. The 55-year-old has been collecting copies of UK No 1 hits since the late 1980s; today, he owns all 1,404 UK No 1 singles, reaching back to the birth of the charts in 1952. He believes it’s the only complete collection of its kind.
Growing up in High Wycombe, Watson would get trains to London to scour music fairs and secondhand record shops in search of his bounty. He would respond to adverts in Time Out and Loot magazines and write to record dealers. “I’d spend endless bloody hours searching through dealers’ stock,” he says. “I had a handwritten list that I’d photocopy and take around with me to put the word out. Some would write back to say what they had with their prices scribbled on.
Discovering eBay around the millennium was a turning point: at the time Watson had fewer than 10 singles left on his list: “I remember going on for the first ever time, finding the remaining half a dozen and just thinking: wow, this is crazy. I’d looked and looked and looked, then all of a sudden you type it in and there it is.”
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