Top 35 for the week of February 6–12, 1994 on WHRB’s Record Hospital, as compiled, printed and annotated by me.
Why Top 35 and not Top 20? Damned if I know, even if I compiled this thing. Even though we only broadcast the Top 20 every Monday on our countdown show, I guess I wanted to capture part of the long tail?
I think this was the first and last time I decided to compile Record Hospital’s weekly top songs list using my computer, as it just added more labor to the process. The starting point was already analog, as every DJ wrote out what they played by hand in our log book. I’d begin by writing now every single band/song played until I thought I hit a dupe, at which point I scoured my list-in-progress for that song and put a tally mark next to it.
As for what got played, it’s interesting to compare this week’s list with the one just a week prior, as already documented here. There’s definitely more pop or melodic post-punk creeping in here, including three records in the top 5 that I absolutely played the hell out of: Eggs, This Kind of Punishment, LiLiPUT.
That LiLiPUT double CD in particular was huge at Record Hospital, a great unifier across all of us DJs from pop to noise to hardcore. It’s hard to remember just how special listening to that collection was at the time. Back before you could find everything on the internet, getting this import collection on a tiny label collecting the works of an obscure, Swiss post-punk band, and getting access to that much of the band’s music at once... it was revelatory. Up until then, most of us had only heard their contribution (as Kleenex) to the seminal 1980 Rough Trade label comp, Wanna Buy A Bridge?
