By the look in your eyes, I can tell you're going to cry

Continuing my trip back in time through the album charts

25/12/83 : No Parlez - Paul Young

And so escaping in our Tardis to 1983, we find ourselves immediately hitting a new problem from the dim and distant past - they included compilation albums in the charts those days.  I'm not writing about a compilation album, but I'm also not going to ignore it either.  Tricky one.  

How about I settle for naming it, the three best tracks, the worst track and the DTR (decent track ratio)?  Will that do?  Good.  So, this week (at #1) we have Now That's What I Call Music.  Without a number!  Yes, even the longest running series (up to 111 currently) has to start somewhere.  The three best tracks are Heaven 17's "Temptation", Howard Jones' "New Song" and The Cure's "The Love Cats" and the worst track is UB40's "Please Don't Make Me Cry" - with an overall DTR of 0.55.  There are far worse entries in the series I suspect - and I'm sure we'll get to meet them as well.

So, on to the main course - which, bizarrely, I'm not sure I've ever listened to, despite there being a vinyl copy of it in the house (newsflash - it's not mine).  I know the singles though and I'm expecting to like it - I also, amusingly, remember the fuss about his cover of "Love Will Tear Us Apart" because it was considered (by some) to not respect the memory of Ian Curtis.  I'm pretty sure it's been murdered by far worse in the intervening period - Google suggests a number of candidates including Frank Sidebottom, Simple Minds, Bush, The Sexbots and Andrea Begley.  This is a good version though.  Anyways, let's just listen to Paul, shall we?

And yeah, I did like it - but it was considerably more 80s (and, in places, quirkier) than I was expecting it to be.  And yes, I know that's a ridiculous comment for an album from 1983, but I was expecting it all to be like "Wherever I Lay My Hat..." - and well, it's not.  On the subject of that track, I knew it was a cover, but wasn't sure I'd ever heard the original so checked it out - and, if anything, Paul's version is smoother than Marvin's (but this was 60s soul Marvin, as opposed to the much smoother later version).  "Ku Ku Kurama" is a very odd track indeed - it's very Japanesque and sticks out like a sore thumb (although "Sex" is a pretty odd track as well).  Generally, I prefer the singles - I think it's pretty obvious why they were selected as such.

Because it's 1983 back when people used to buy music, I'm going to keep a running tally to see how many of the albums me or the lovely Mrs Reed have owned at some point in time and we start with one that TLMR still has on vinyl upstairs - I'm not sure it's been listened to in a fair few years though.

So we're at #2 in the charts this week in his 22nd week in the charts out of 119 in total (5 weeks at #1 and it's last week ever was in February '86).  NTWICM was #1 - only 50 weeks in the chart for that one.  And, as if to prove that we're in very different chart territory to 2021, there are no new entries in the top 100 this week.  And no, that's not a typo - I really meant the top 100.  Although I'm not entirely sure the data is accurate because it also seems to suggest that no albums changed places in the charts - but that could have been something to do with Xmas maybe?  Oh well, let's just move along swiftly, shall we?

Wikipedia doesn't have a lot on the album - it claims that it contains eight cover versions, but that seems a bit harsh because I think all it's really saying is that Paul didn't write them, with three of them being written by Jack Lee, who wrote Blondie's "Hanging On The Telephone".  It doesn't give us any idea what the critics thought of it, but it went down well across Europe, but only getting to #79 in the US.  It has sold over 1.2 million copies in the UK though, which is no shabby effort.

"Customers also listened to" Nik Kershaw, Talk Talk, The Christians and Feargal Sharkey - we're going to get some classic names from the past over the course of the next year, aren't we?  I didn't mind this, but it was more of an exercise in 80s nostalgia (provided by album I'd never heard) than anything I'll be revisiting.  But the singles are fine examples of the time though.

18/12/83 - One that's stood the test of time well
2020 - Another year over