16 May 1980

Pos	LW	Weeks	Song		Artist
1	2	7	Fly too High	–	Janis Ian
2	4	6	Sun of Jamaica	–	Goombay Dance Band
3	1	13	Please Don’t Go	–	KC & The Sunshine Band
4	3	7	I’m in the Mood for Dancing	–	Nolans
5	6	7	Message in a Bottle	–	Police
6	9	4	Computer Games	–	MS
7	15	2	Brass in Pocket	–	Pretenders
8	8	5	An American Dream	–	Dirt Band
9	5	13	Rapper’s Delight	–	Sugarhill Gang
10	17	3	Romeo’s Tune	–	Steve Forbert
11	7	14	Do That to Me One More Time	–	Captain & Tennille
12	10	6	We Belong to the Night	–	Ellen Foley
13	13	4	Moskow Diskow	–	Telex
14	12	10	Coward of the County	–	Kenny Rogers
15	14	9	You’re Only Lonely	–	J.D. Souther
16	New	1	Bolero	–	Tomita
17	New	1	Together We are Beautiful	–	Fern Kinney
18	16	8	Shake Your Body	–	Plastik Mak
19	11	9	Carrie	–	Cliff Richard
20	19	2	Spacer	–	Sheila B. Devotion

Janis Ian’s ‘Fly Too High’ became the first song by a solo female artist to take the top spot on the charts in the new decade as it knocked KC & The Sunshine Band’s ‘Please Don’t Go’ off its perch after the latter had spent 7 weeks at 1 during a broken run there. Suzi Quatro’s ‘She’s In Love With You’ had been at number 1 for the first week of the new decade, but it was already at number 1 at the end of the 70’s so ‘Fly Too High’ was the first to take the number 1 spot. This moved the Americans into outright first place for weeks at 1 as their total moved on to 270, going past the Brit’s 269.

The Pretenders’ ‘Brass In Pocket’ took the climber of the week award with an 8 place jump from 15 to 7 while Steve Forbert’s ‘Romero’s Tune’ just missed out, climbing 7 from 17 to 10. It was the only other star rater this week.

On the falling front Cliff Richard picked up his 13^th biggest faller award with an 8 place drop from 11 to 19 by ‘Carrie’. So far only 4 (including Cliff) had managed at least 13 faller of the weeks, the others being The Sweet (13), Abba (15) and The Bee Bees (17).

Michael Jackson’s ‘Off The Wall’ was off the charts this week. It had seen a run of 3 weeks and all 3 of those had been spent at 20. It was the 2^nd of only 4 songs that would have a run of 3 weeks in the charts and all 3 of those were in the same position. The previous one had been Osmosis’ ‘She (Didn’t Remember My Name)’ which spent 3 weeks at 19. The other 2 that would manage this would only do so when the charts were extended to a top 30. Only 1 other song so far had spent 3 straight weeks at 20 and that was Dickey Lee’s ‘Rocky’ but that went on to spend 1 more week in the charts climbing to 18. There would be 7 more songs that would spend 3 consecutive weeks at 20 but that would be in the top 30 era. No song would manage 4 straight weeks at 20. Jackson would have further hits on our charts.

We also bid farewell to Rocky Burnette’s ‘Tired of Toein’ the Line’ which had seen a run of 14 weeks on the charts and it managed to get as high as number 3 during that time. This would be his only SA chart hit. It had been the oldest on last weeks chart and that honour now fell to Captain & Tennille’s ‘Do That to me One More Time’ which was on 14 weeks.

Our first new entry was the first by a Japanese act to make the top 20. Isao Tomita (usually just using the name Tomita) was a pioneer of electronic music and he brought us a version of Maurice Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ and this was the 50^th instrumental track to make our charts. There is a story that Ravel composed the beat to the piece while travelling on train, giving it the ‘clickety-clack’ effect. The piece (although not Tomita’s version) was famously used for the ‘sex scene’ between Dudley Moore and Bo Derek in the 1979 movie ‘10’.  Japan were the 24^th different national to bring us our hits. I have not found any other charting information about this track so we may have been the only ones who took to it (it didn’t even chart in Zimbabwe).

The other new entry was Fern Kinney’s ‘Together We Are beautiful’ which was originally recorded by the song writer Ken Loray in 1977. Two years later a cover by Steve Allen would go to number 67 in the UK charts. Kinney’s version started out life as the b-side to her single ‘Baby, Let Me Kiss You’ but once the DJ’s got hold of the single, they preferred the b-side and it rocketed the song to number 1 in the UK where it spent a week before The Jam’s ‘Going Underground’ took over from it. Elsewhere it would get to 2 in Ireland, 13 in Belgium, 20 in Australia, 23 in New Zealand and 24 or 28 in The Netherlands depending on which charts you use.

The gap between the number of hits the US acts had brought us and those that the British acts had, kept getting bigger. This week it was a new record 48 with the Yanks on 565 and the Poms on 517. Acts from New Zealand pulled ahead of those from Switzerland for weeks on the charts. They were now on 33 and took position 15 for themselves while the Swiss dropped to 16. Much lower down the list, the Belgians clocked up their 4^th week which put them tied 22^nd with Israel and the 2 would have been at the bottom of the list had it not been for the Japanese new entry this week.

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