After all of the arguing about which decade is best, I decided to put it to the test. Which meant listening to every single UK number 1 and rating them out of 100.
The results are now in and I can confirm that the average score per decade are as follows:
1950s: 66
1960s: 72
1970s: 73
1980s: 73
1990s: 72
2000s: 69
2010s: 64
2020s*: 68
*to date
I am the anti-Jawa and tend to score quite highly. For a song to get less than 60 means I pretty much hated it - strawberry float you Crazy Frog, strawberry float you. I also scored double A sides and EPs as one package, I did listen to it all though.
The 50s were not great. Lots of very samey sounding easy listening/showtunes type of song. Not bad as such, just not really for me.
There's not much separating the 60s,70s,80s and 90s. Some fantastic music but with some real horrors (Grandma, Blobby, Glitter
).
The 2000s started ok and there was some great stuff there. But music was headed in a Simon Cowell direction and the decade got worse and worse as it went on.
The 2010s were awful though.
The 2020s are (so far) a huge improvement on the 2010s. But it's a long way behind the glory days of the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s.
So there you go, a fully scientific answer to the best decades based on the quality of their number 1 singles.