Those unfamiliar with the connection between Britain's Radio London (1964-67) and KLIF in Dallas (which still exists today as a talk station), should read both the Big L station profile and the extract from the KLIF 1190 tribute site, run by Steve Eberhart.

There are virtually no singles in common between these two charts from the same week from the stations broadcasting respectively on 1190m in Dallas and 266m MW off the coast of Essex. However, Radio London fans are likely to spot a few similarities in the way both charts were compiled.

The KLIF Forty Star Survey contains many tracks that were virtually unknown in the UK and they remain so today, especially with some of them recorded by artists local to the station. In common with the Fab Forty, though, a number of the records had fared considerably better in Dallas than they did in the Nationals. There's also an indication that the KLIF jocks may have favoured one or two B-sides over A-sides.

KLIF survey used by kind permission of Steve Eberhart (click to see enlarged version)

Unlike the earlier KLIFsurvey that we included from 1965 (see link above), the station was now going out of its way to explain that its listings are based on 'listener requests, juke box spins, authentic record sales, national listings, analysis by KLIF's Professionals and computer forecasts'. Presumably, this collection of sources would pretty much have covered them against allegations of favouritism or payola. Perhaps the station's most fanciful claim, however, was that the chart was 'KLIF's computer-perfect listing of popular records'. It would be very interesting to know what sort of computer system the station used! If KLIF's Star Forty genuinely used any sort of computer analysis, Gordon McClendon must have had friends in high places who allowed him to share their expensive hardware. The pre-microchip computers of 1966 were behemoths that occupied entire office suites, yet they were capable of performing only a fraction of the functions that the average mobile phone takes in its stride today. The only way to input data was via stacks of punched cards, usually involving whole teams of punch operators. Cards would be fed into a 'reader' that transferred the data to large reels of magnetic tape, which in turn downloaded them to the computer's storage system. Such an operation would probably take an overnight run, at the end of which the machine would either have crashed, or produced mountains of paper printouts from the data input. The entire operation was costly and time-consuming and the sort of thing that would have been invaluable for collecting nationwide record sales figures for the Hot Hundred, but was hardly a priority for a local radio station.

Radio London, on the other hand, makes no effort to explain its chart compilation methods. However, it seems very likely that both used the same method – they made the charts up!

Unfortunately, even enlarged, the scan of the KLIF chart is not very easy to read, so we have included a table of some of the more unusual tracks, below.