Field's Fab New Year Forty for Sunday 01/01/67

Monty's Diary
Dutch chart collector Hans Blaaubroek very kindly donated a diary to us. He says:

In the Seventies we had a Dutch chartfreak magazine named Pampus and I was one of the people who typed stencils for it and made several year charts and so on. In that time I got a notebook from someone whose name I don’t remember. He had written down all kind of charts from 1967 – Radio London, Caroline South, Radio City, Radio 270, Radio 227. The notebook has been in one of my boxes for about 30 years.

It's a great pity the chart compiler didn't include his (or her) name, but for now, we shall refer to the notebook as 'Monty's Diary' – Monty being the manufacturer's brand name. There are one or two loose sheets of paper inside the diary, one of which has turned out to be a letter dated 26th June 67. It is addressed 'Dear Peter' (which we guess must be the compiler's first name) and signed 'Roger', who lived at 36 Victoria Park, Cambridge. If Roger reads this and can identify the diary compiler's full name and where he lived, (we believe it was the Netherlands) it would be very useful. The charts are fascinating and very neatly written, with the record label noted beside each track.

Very many thanks to Hans for being kind enough to send us 'Monty's Diary' and to Fab Alan Field for checking the Fab Forty listings against our existing ones. Alan says, "The correlations between Monty's work and mine and Brian Long's are generally excellent. Plus, I think you can tell from the style and layout that his lists are as authentic and accurate as anybody's could be. The new tracks are mainly additional climbers that he must have heard played during the week. I'm quite happy to add them."

For our first updates, we have a couple of additional climbers. As we have colour-coded previous Fab Forty additions from other sources, the 'Monty' additions, which continue till June, will be in green.

Other chart information from it will be added to the Radio London site as and when possible.

(Right) An example of charts from Monty's Diary