Number One was a British magazine dealing with pop music

Pop music

Pop music is usually understood to be commercially recorded music, often oriented toward a youth market, usually consisting of relatively short, simple songs utilizing technological innovations to produce new variations on existing themes.- Definitions :David Hatch and Stephen Millward define pop...

. It ran for nine years, mostly during the 1980s and was aimed at a mainly teenage market.

Overview

The magazine was published weekly and ran from March 1983 to February 1992. It was intended as direct competition to Smash Hits

Smash Hits

Smash Hits was a pop music based magazine, aimed at teenagers and young adults and originally published in the United Kingdom by EMAP. It ran from 1978 to 2006 and was issued fortnightly for most of that time...

, which was at its peak at the time. Although Number One contained fewer pages and less colour (at a similar price), the magazine claimed "our strength is our weekliness". One of the most popular aspects was that it published the singles and albums charts every week (obviously not possible for the fortnightly Smash Hits). Until 1990 however, these were the unofficial Network Charts. From October 1990, the full official Top 75 Chart

UK Singles Chart

The UK Singles Chart is compiled by The Official Charts Company on behalf of the British record-industry. The full chart contains the top selling 200 singles in the United Kingdom based upon combined record sales and download numbers, though some media outlets only list the Top 40 or the Top 75 ...

 was used until the magazine's demise. It was at this time that BBC Magazines

BBC Magazines

BBC Magazines is the magazine publishing division of BBC Worldwide, the commercial subsidiary of the British Broadcasting Corporation.A list of the published magazines and the age groups they are targeted towards follows:-Adult:*BBC History*BBC Music...

 took over publishing from IPC Magazines

IPC Media

IPC Media , a wholly owned subsidiary of Time Inc., is a consumer magazine and digital publisher in the United Kingdom, with a large portfolio selling over 350 million copies each year.- Origins :...

. When Number One came to an end in 1992, it was incorporated into the BBC's Fast Forward

Fast Forward (magazine)

Fast Forward was a weekly children's magazine launched in September 1989 by the BBC to compete with Look-in. It was aimed at seven- to 14-year-olds and was promoted heavily with trailers shown on Children's BBC. Circulation started at 210,000 copies per week, reached a peak of 340,000 in March...

. The magazine's demise went unannounced - the final issue carried details of the features and interviews that would appear in the next issue, but remained unpublished.

Features

As well as the Charts, the magazine included interviews with pop stars of the day as well as centre pin-ups. Songwords to current pop songs were also featured. Other features were Single and album reviews, competitions and a letters page. Colomnists were used also throughout the magazine with their own pages. These were sometimes by well known people in the industry such as producer Pete Waterman

Pete Waterman

Peter Alan Waterman OBE is an English record producer, occasional songwriter, radio and club DJ, television presenter, president of Coventry Bears rugby league club and a keen railway enthusiast. As a member of the Stock Aitken Waterman songwriting team he wrote and produced many hit singles...

 or DJ Bruno Brookes

Bruno Brookes

Bruno Brookes is a British radio presenter who became prominent in the 1980s.-Early life and career:...

 or by staff writers who went under pseudonyms such as 'Lola Lush' (a glamorous woman with bitchy comments) or 'Snabber' (a depressive dog who answered the letters). At the end of each year, the magazine would run a reader's poll of the top pop acts of the year. These would include best group, best single and most fanciable pop star among others. Number One was the first magazine to champion pop group Take That

Take That

Take That are a British five-piece vocal pop group comprising Gary Barlow, Howard Donald, Jason Orange, Mark Owen and Robbie Williams. Barlow acts as the lead singer and primary songwriter...

and featured them many times on the cover in 1991 before they became famous. Ultimately, the magazine didn't survive to see the group achieve their first top 10 hit.

Competition with Smash Hits

Unlike Smash Hits, Number One made no secret of the fact the two were in direct competition and would very often refer to said magazine as "Sm*shed Tw*ts" and other less flattering terms. The approach it took to feature writing was more personal, in that the writers would show more of their own character and were not afraid to criticise their interviewees, where Smash Hits would remain more neutral. In the end Smash Hits won out due to its higher page count and glossier appearance, while remaining at a similar price to Number One. By early 1990 Number One was selling in excess of 130,000 copies per issue, but this paled in comparison to Smash Hits 780,000 per issue.