In fully appreciating what the book is all about, readers should be clear about its - and the charts' own - definition of that key word "indie", because it is a term which has subsequently come to have different interpretations. Most importantly, in the context of this book, indie is not a musical or artistic definition, though it has grown to be one in the music press of the 90s. To have indie status, a record - or the label on which it was released had to be one which was independently distributed: produced, manufactured, marketed and put into the shops without recourse to the corporate framework of the major record companies which have traditionally controlled virtually all aspects of the music industry.

If this may seem a merely trivial point, it is also the answer to certain aspects of the book (and the charts) which might otherwise puzzle some readers - the reason why, for instance, Hollywood Records' MOR duo Rene & Renato, and the PWL label ex-Neighbours popsters Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan, all have major indie chart credentials, alongside punk bands, goths and all manner of alternative acts. It's also the reason why there are no records or artists from the Stiff label historically regarded as a seminal independent success story - anywhere in the book, because for all its entrepreneurism and musical innovation, Stiff was always manufactured and distributed via the facilities of major labels like CBS and EMI.

A few hardy pioneer labels had gone the difficult, self-determining route during the 1950s and 60s, but their efforts were always marginalised by the sheer all-emcorn passing influence of the majors, and generally only those working in specific specialist areas like folk music or jazz kept up anything more than a niche presence. It was not until the mid70s advent of punk, and the let's-get-up-and-doit ethos which this back-to-basics music engendered, that a new grassroots stratum of the music industry also sprang up in Britain - small, entrepreneurial, shoestring-run labels which only existed because of their enthusiasm for innovative new music (in some cases, for only one act), and had no desire to climb aboard the existing, big company-controlled infrastructure. As their numbers expanded exponentially through the latter half of the 1970s, so a new indie industry infrastructure gradually fell into place around them, of which the key ingredient was the independent distribution companies (Pinnacle and Spartan were the best-known, and later the regional indie "Cartel" of Rough Trade, Backs, Red Rhino, etc.) whose business was wholly devoted to taking on board the records of the small operators, and getting them into the shops.

By the end of the 70s, the indie label scene was sufficiently well established, and selling sufficient numbers of records, to make the idea of a weekly chart to track the comparative sales progress of their wares a viable notion. A smattering of independently-distributed product was finding its way regularly into the overall national charts, but the labels were aware from their sales figures that many of their records were getting consistent, repeated sales at a level just beyond the reach of the national top 75, where they weren't being reported in published form. It also became apparent that a lot of these sales were coming from a new breed of small, non-mainstream record shops which were often heavily indieorientated, a majority of their turnover being in small label releases. This was a stage set for the emergence of an indie chart.

The catalyst was the now long-defunct music trade paper Record Business, a weekly publication launched in the Spring of 1978 which innovated much in the field of chart research, including an authoritative UK airplay chart and a widely-quoted sales-based disco/dance chart. Record Business also gave dedicated coverage to small label activities and the indie scene in general, and had a good rapport with the newer breed of record dealers via its personal phone call approach to information gathering. The notion that this coverage could be further focused, and this rapport further utilised, by the creation of independent charts in the magazine, was jointly mooted by Cherry Red label owner lain McNay, and Record Business journalist John Hayward, who was responsible for much of its indie label coverage. The idea was passed on to the in-house research department, in which your present author was at the time gainfully employed, and the outcome, following the establishment of a reporting panel focusing on shops which specialised or had a high turnover in indie label releases, was the publication in Record Business of the first weekly indie singles and album charts during the week ending January 19, 1980 - just a fortnight or so into the new decade. This is what they looked like:

I was the original compiler of the indie charts: it was, and largely remained, a one-person job. I put together the checklists which went out in advance each week to the shops as a reporting guide, phoned the dealers one by one every Monday morning, processed their figures during the afternoon (with the aid of the RB research department computer ARTHER which, by today's PC standards, was a lumbering, clumsy and spitefully unforgiving clicking box, but marginally better than adding up on your fingers), and produced finished charts from the collated figures by the end of the day. This system, wonderfully straightforward, continued to be used with very little change throughout the rest of the decade, albeit by a succession of different compilers.

After getting the show on the road, I passed over the compilation task after a couple of months to Alan Jones, then a fellow Record Business research colleague, and now a well-known analyst and commentator upon chart matters and the industry in general, with a weekly column in Music Week. In the Autumn of 1981, the magazine handed over the chart compilation to newly-formed research company MRIB, while still printing the results every week. Alan continued as compiler for a while under MRIB auspices, before relinquishing the reins to Luke Crampton, whose name was to become synonymous with the chart among the indie labels throughout the mid-80s. When he too eventually handed it on through growing pressure of other work (not least the important marketing of the indie charts to other, secondary users, to which I'll return shortly), a succession of MRIB's younger researchers each got the chance to put his or her stamp upon the compilation, each one in turn learning that essential weekly sharp-end dialogue with the record dealers which I had experienced during the first months of 1980. With apologies for memory gaps which may have missed somebody out, MRIB's Frances, Jonathan, Karen, Russell and Barry (not me -another Barry!) all did their indie chart stints.

Where the charts were actually to be found in print each week changed as the decade progressed - a fact which made researching the entire 10 years' worth of information for this book considerably more complex than it might otherwisehave been! Record Business was obviously the original site, but it was very quickly joined by another. Alan Lewis, editor at the time of (now also defunct) Sounds, was interested in licensing their use as soon as the first week's charts appeared, and a mere two weeks later his paper was also publishing them, thereby giving a much wider consumer exposure which neatly complemented the record insustry and dealer readeship reached by Record Business.

Early in 1983, some 18 months after ownership of the charts had passed to MRIB, Record Business closed down, a victim of advertising starvation. Its larger trade paper rival Music Week, which had been struggling for a while to establish a credible indie chart of its own, immediately announced its intention to continue, unbroken, the publication of both the Record Business Indie and Disco/Dance charts, wisely acknowledging that these were regarded as the industry standards, and came to a rapid deal with MRIB for continuation of supply. This brought a degree of synchronicity to proceedings, since Sounds, which also continued its usage, shared the same owner as music week.

A major change came in the late Spring of 1985, when Music Week, having established an inhouse research department very much along the lines of Record Business' pioneering effort of 1978, decided to produce its own indie charts and also supply them internally to Sounds, and so ceased licensing those produced by MRIB. However, by this time the MRIB indie charts had also found wide secondary usage in assorted UK and overseas magazines and on a number of radio stations, thanks to the marketing efforts of Luke Crampton, alluded to earlier, so their compilation continued uninterrupted. Smaller publications aside, from 1985 to the end op the decade they could be seen in the glossy pop weekly No.1, while during 1988 and 1989 they also found another high consumer profile in Melody Maker.

The physical length of both the singles and albums charts varied throughout the 80s, as publication and customer requirements - and the changing market - required. As already illustrated, the charts when launched in Record Business comprised the top 30 singles and top 15 albums, but when Sounds did the deal to reprint them, Alan Lewis favoured a singles top 50 and an albums top 20, so that was what he got. The longer versions debuted in Sounds for the week ending February 2, 1980, and for a while this was the only published site of what came to be considered as the "complete" version of the charts, until Record Business extended its own listings during the Summer following the urging of indie labels who were getting entries in the 31-50 (or 16-20) region, and wanted the fact reflected in the trade paper. In March 1981, the album chart was extended to a top 30, a reflection of the fact that ever more indie albums were selling in significant quantities. When the charts crossed over from Record Business to Music Week in 1983, the top 50 singles remained, but the album chart was reigned back to a top 25, more to fit the paper's page design than anything else. After the charts left Music Week and Sounds in 1985, the published versions of both singles and album charts tended to be restricted to top 20 listings (these were what both No.1 and Melody Maker used), but MRIB for several years continued to compile longer versions, both for internal reference, and at the request of various secondary users who still wanted to make use of a Top 50 singles and Top 30 albums. Stored copies of most of these still exist at MRIB, and were used during the researching of this book, which therefore includes some information on lower-charted records not actually published in any widely-available form at the time. Only for the last two years of the decade - 1988 and 1989 - do the archives contain nothing longer than the published top 20s, and that again is reflected in the book.

There is, incidentally, one "lost" early top 50 singles chart. When I compiled the first one used by Sounds (February 2, 1980), I went back to the totalled returns for the previous week and ascertained what numbers 31-50 would have been, so that I could include these positions in the "last week" column of the current top 50. However, the records which dropped out between January 26 and February 2 to make way for new entries, obviously didn't show, and since the belatedly-compiled bottom 20 was never published, the identities of the singles in positions 31, 40, 42, 43, 44 and 45 for that week are lost forever. They wouldn't be had I saved that computer printout of returns on which they were pencilled in, but who'd have thought at the time that they would be useful in the compilation of a book 17 years later? Nope. At some point they were binned, probably by yours truly. And I was the only person in the world who ever saw them ....

The following A-Z section of the book lists, alphabetically by surname or group name, as appropriate, every act which entered the MRIB indie singles and albums charts between January 19, 1980, and December 30, 1989. Within each artist listing, all the charted singles by that act are listed in chronological order, followed by the album chart entries, again chronologically. Each record's listing displays first its title, then its label and catalogue number, and then its peak chart position, number of weeks spent on the chart, and the date of chart entry (note that this is not the actual release date of the record, nor the date on which it achieved its highest placing, but when it made its first showing - this maintains the chronological framework of the listings). Hopefully, the format employed for the A-Z listings, which broadly follows that used in previously-published books of chart statistics, and so should be familiar to most readers, makes all this perfectly clear. Occaisional additional notes point out any unsuaul chart particulars - for instance where a record may have been summarily excised from the indie chart because it suddenly moved to a major label or the distribution of its existing label switched to a major.

Note that although the book's coverage closes at the end of the 80s, all the records which were listed in the final week's charts of 1989 have been followed through to the end of their chart careers - which in the case of some of the albums, especially, is well into 1990. This allows the book to present full statistics on chart entries from the latter end of the period, and avoid the potential nonsense of, say, listing a single with a one-week entry at No.17 on December 30, 1989, when in fact it went on to top the chart the following month and actually spent 10 weeks in the top 20 (don't go trying to identify this - I just made the example up to illustrate the general principle). In an ideal universe, of course, we would similarly trace backwards the early chart lives of the records in the January 19, 1980 chart - but since the chart did not physically exist before that, we must ask you to accept that Where's Captain Kirk started its life at No.1. We have also tried to make the finding of records by title easy by including two alphabetical indexes - one of singles, the other of album titles - after the A-Z section. By each title is listed the name of the act which charted with it, so simply turn back to that act's place in the A-Z, and there you'll find all the gen on the record in question. For indexing purposes, any title which begins with "The" or "A" has had that preposition shifted to the end, and is indexed by the second word: this is to avoid having pages of "The"s which could actually make the index harder to use.

Every act listed in the book - except in the rare but nonetheless frustrating instances in which nobody we asked could come up with anything - also has a few lines of biographical and/or descriptive info about that act and their music. If you once had an indie chart hit, but find your entry here unsullied by descriptive prose, then you've escaped the ken of several people who are generally known as walking rock encyclopedias, so we would welcome you writing in to tell us about youself. Should this first edition of the book prove so successful that a second is eventually called for, we will update your listing accordingly. Do the same if we've somehow got everything about you completely wrong. I would hate to think that this was so, bearing in mind the collective brainpower which has been devoted to getting facts and descriptions completely right, but there are an awful lot of artists listed between these covers, and I'm well aware of the workings of sod's law ....