scaryblog

Continuing my trip back through the 1981 album charts. 13/12/81 : Prince Charming - Adam & The Ants I really like their main singles, but I've never listened to a single A&TA album - I think my concern is that the quality of the non-singles somewhat  tails off, but I guess we'll see. Well, "Stand And Deliver" and the title track stand out a mile in comparison to the other tracks on this album - they both have a strong theme and rhythms and hang together well. Everything else (including "Ant Rap" which was also a single) is just a mess, with weird instruments, sounds and beats thrown into the mix with no obvious aim or attention to detail. All in all, it's a most peculiar album which I imagine resulted in quite a bit of head-scratching from those that purchased it.  We're at #5 in the charts this week on their sixth week of a 21 week run, with it having peaked at #2 for its first three weeks - it spent the first ten weeks in the top five, so I...

Continuing my trip back through the 1981 album charts. 20/12/81 : Dare - The  Human League Our first visit with The Human League and this is considered by many to be a seminal album of the 80s electro-pop era, which is an era I'm pretty familar with - and so, I've obviously never listened to it. I wouldn't say I've actively avoided it, but "Don't You Want Me" was somewhat ubiquitous for far longer than strictly necessary and, whilst I didn't mind it, I didn't love it and I just never felt the need to check out any more of the album than the other singles I heard. You'd still think I should have caught it at some point in the intervening 45 years though... Yeah, I didn't mind this at all - it's of its time, but it also hasn't really dated. It's interesting to remember that THL came out of Heaven 17 because you can hear those roots in there, but Phil Oakey et al have just popped things up a bit and they've done it pretty well....

Something new! 03/10/26 : Holywell King George V Playing Fields  Back in the olden days, I used to get up at 8:30am on a Saturday, pop over to the local park to do parkrun and be back home by 10. But then my eldest got involved and she discovered the joy of the app and the challenges therein - and things got a bit more complicated! In my first 100 parkruns, I attended four different events but in the 15 since, for a variety of reasons, I've attended six further ones. And it's been a whole load of fun and interesting to see how different events are organised - which I'm obviously going to forget unless I take some notes. So here we are! Today's trip was a 15.7 km journey taking us to  the twelfth closest event to us which  is the "other Watford" parkrun (the main one is a BIG one, which we'll be covering later) - and, as you might guess, it's in the King George V playing fields in the Holywell area. The reason for this particular trip was to allow Emily...

Continuing my trip up Empire's top 20 TV shows of 2025 #4 :     The Studio From Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard to Robert Altman’s The Player, Hollywood has always loved to navel-gaze in films about filmmaking. But save for the bro-ier likes of Entourage, this fascination with the industry's navel has rarely found a home on television — and on a streaming service, no less. Enter Seth Rogen’s The Studio, a small-screen satire so incisive, funny, and devastatingly accurate that it has quickly become the must-watch show for industry insiders who recognise themselves in the egotistical, morally misguided behind-the-scenes movers and shakers. (Rogen has reported that nearly every movie studio head has called him to say it was a traumatic watch.) But you don’t have to be a cigar-chomping executive to appreciate cringe comedy this electric, energetic and farcical, often executed in breathless one-shot takes — and stuffed with slyly self-deprecating A-list cameos, from Steve Buscemi, ...

Starting my trip back through the 1981 album charts. 27/12/81 : The Visitors - ABBA Our fifth visit with ABBA (and they're a special case because we've already had TWO best-ofs from them) and I have listened to this before, but not in many a year so I'll be happy to remind myself of it. The opening title track is an odd one because it's very synthesiser-y and lyrically inaccessible (for an ABBA track, at least). And the whole album has a much more downbeat feel than I assume many were expecting with a lot less frothiness than usual - obviously their personal circumstances contributed to this. They still come out with some top tracks here though, with "One Of Us" (with some brutal lyrics), "Slipping Through My Fingers" and "When All Is Said Is Done" being my favourites - I don't think too many people would describe the rest of the tracks as top-drawer ABBA, but I feel the album as a whole works quite well. We're at #1 in the charts t...

So how was 1971? I was expecting 1971 to be pretty close to 1973 in that there would be some gems amongst a whole load of rubbish - but actually there was surprisingly few albums that were obviously tripe here. Yes, it wasn't all to my taste (a higher tolerance for prog would certainly have helped me) but there were obviously a load of very talented musicians at work throughout the year, so there was generally something to appreciate if you looked for it.  The ownership count was a big fat zero amongst the albums we met but, looking at one's we would have reviewed this year had we not already done so, I own Carole King's  Tapestry  and the lovely Mrs Reed has her Dad's original vinyl copy of Simon & Garfunkel's  Bridge Over Troubled Water  - how cool is that? (and I think those are probably the oldest albums we own) And speaking of that S&G album, looking at the best selling albums of the year we can see it was at #1 - which isn't a massive surprise beca...