scaryblog

Continuing my trip back through the 1963 album charts. 19/05/63 : A Taste Of Honey - Acker Bilk Esquire Our second visit with Mr Bilk, although he's had a few mentions over the years with surprisingly high charting albums. I'm expecting this to be well done, but not my sort of thing at all. Last time we met him, I was surprised at how it was all very trad jazz, because I was only aware of him from "Strangers On The Shore" (which was the biggest selling single of '62) - but we catch him here displaying both musical sides of his repertoire. It's all perfectly well done, but sounds incredibly dated these days and you struggle to imagine why anyone would ever have listened to it. It's quite the album cover though, isn't it? We're at #17 in the charts this week on the last week of a four week run, which pleasingly went #20-#19-#18-#17! The top five this week were  The Beatles   (only a couple more weeks left!),  Cliff , Buddy,  Elvis  and  Frank  (Ifie...

Continuing my trip back through the 1963 album charts. 09/06/63 : Girls! Girls! Girls! - Elvis Presley Yup - him again. Taking him up to NINETEEN visits - my expectations are not exactly sky high for this, particularly because it's another of his soundtrack albums. For the most part, this is bang average - the tracks are incredibly uninspiring and feel like they've had the bare minimum effort put into them (which is almost certainly the case). However, this album does feature "Return To Sender" so it's not completely without merit - but it's very much mostly without merit. And what exactly is going on with that picture of him on the cover?!? We're at #15 in the charts this week on the last week of a 21 week run, with it having peaked at #2 for six consecutive weeks, kept off the top by Cliff Richard for all of them. The top five this week were  The Beatles , Cliff Richard , Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley  and  Frank Ifield ,  with the highest new entry being t...

Continuing my trip back through the 1963 album charts. 16/06/63 : Out Of The Shadows - The Shadows Skipping over another week, brings us back to this lot - lordy were they popular back then, with this being the third time we've seen them this year. And I suspect this will be more of the same... And to be honest, it mostly is - although for some unclear reason it didn't quite get on my nerves as much as some of their other offerings. Maybe there's just a bit more variety with "The Bandit" and "Bo Diddley" featuring some singing and "Little B" featuring a drum solo - to be honest, it's nearly all a drum solo, which I totally wasn't expecting. Let me be clear, I didn't love it - but I did find it bearable. We're at #18 in the charts this week on their last week of a 37 week run with it having peaked at #1 in SEVEN separate weeks - I guess there was nothing else to listen to until The Beatles came along. The top five this week were ...

Continuing my trip back through the 1963 album charts. 30/06/63 : Crying - Roy Orbison We've skipped over a week (I think you can guess who was #1) and a couple of albums - a Joe Brown live album which I couldn't find amongst the huge number of Joe Brown live albums out there and yet another posthumous Buddy Holly album. All of which brings us to our second visit with Roy this year and our fourth overall, featuring possibly his best known track. And you'll never guess what the opening track is, will you? It is a particularly fine offering though, suiting his plaintive voice well. And it's followed up by a few cover versions - "The Great Pretender" (which I didn't know was originally done by The Platters), "Love Hurts" (not the first Everly Brothers cover we've seen this year) and "She Wears My Ring" (which was apparently written in 1862 and first recorded in 1906!), all of which work well. The rest of the album is original tracks, n...

Continuing my trip back through the 1963 album charts. 14/07/63 : All Star Festival - Various Artists This is definitely an album that would be ignored under normal circumstances but it's actually an interesting one - you only have to look at the names on the album cover to know something is going on here. OK, maybe not it's not all that interesting musically - except that it is, because of the weird mix of stuff going on. We've got Nana Mouskouri warbling in Greek, Maurice Chevalier and Edith Piaf rambling in French, Luis Alberto del Parana wittering in Spanish and Caterina Valente doing whatever she does in Italian - all very random. The bizarreness isn't confined to foreign languages though because we've also got Anne Shelton doing an incredibly dated version of "Greensleeves". Having said that, I did enjoy Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong's "Lazy River" because there's some serious charisma on display and Mahalia Jackson's "No...

Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts 05/06/26 : The Boys Of Dungeon Lane - Paul McCartney  Our third visit with Paul on his own, but who knows how many times we've met him with Linda, Wings or The Beatles? I think we're up to fourteen altogether, but who really cares - so far, if he's not with his Beatle-y mates then it's very much best avoided. However, I have heard that this is bearable so I'm going in with more hope than I would normally... Well, that'll teach me, eh?!? They say it's the hope that kills you, but the bloody awful music doesn't help either. I can see that his fans will love some of the reminiscing going on but it's not for me, I'm afraid. We're at #1 in the charts with a new entry this week, with the rest of the top five being the Michael Jackson best-of, Boards Of Canada (a new entry),  Drake  (who is listening to this?) and  Olivia Dean . So what's going on with the new entries this week? Boards ...