Every time it matters all my words desert me

Continuing my trip back in time through the album charts

11/12/83 : Stages - Elaine Paige

I've seen Elaine Paige live in Sunset Boulevard (in '96/97?) and she was amazing - this tiny little thing making the biggest and yet quietest noise imaginable.  However, she has somewhat spoiled my impression of her in the intervening years by being the most incredibly crap DJ on Radio 2.  I mean, I appreciate it's hard thing to do well but she's just really, really awful.  However, I'll try not to hold that against her whilst listening to this - I'm expecting it to be well done with some fine tracks on it, but maybe a whole album's worth to be a bit too much.

And well, I find a lot of it to be surprisingly average.  The tracks fall into two categories - the lesser known ones, most of which are fine but "Good Morning Starshine" and "One Night Only" don't work particularly well.  Particularly the former - "song, song, song sing, sing, sing, sing song" aren't GREAT lyrics.  And then you have the classic tracks which you'd imagine EP would knock out of the park - but well, she just doesn't.  I mean, she does a good job, but because they're classics then, if you like this sort of thing, you're probably going to know a version by someone else that you prefer.  For me, I'd go for Barbra's "Memory", Barbara's "Another Suitcase" (I think time has been harsh in mostly ignoring Ms Dixon who had a great voice), Judy Collins' "Send In The Clowns" and Julie Covington's "Don't Cry For Me Argentina".  The only one I might give to Elaine is "I Don't Know How To Love Him" (although I quite like Mel C's version and Yvonne Elliman's original is also a fine version).  

The other thing I'd say is that a lot of the tracks are very average 70s/80s versions featuring that annoying piano sound and very little imagination - I'd like to claim that's not Elaine's fault but I find it hard to imagine she didn't have some input into the monstrosities she was singing over.  Maybe it's just time being harsh, but if you listen to some versions by other people from around that time then they haven't dated nearly, so I'm not sure I can quite go for that.  All in all - it's a tricky one.  I didn't think "we" owned this, but it turns out "we" do (or at least did), so we're up to 2.5/3. 

We're at #4 in the charts this week in its seventh week out of 48 weeks in total (no weeks at #1 with it peaking at #2 in the week before this one and its last appearance being in March '85).  Above it in the charts this week we have NTWICM, Paul and Culture Club.  The highest new entry in the charts this week is Green Velvet at #46, which is a collection of Irish folk tracks by the classic artists Foster & Allen, The Fureys and, errr, Gloris Hunniford.  OK.  The highest "proper" new entry is The Whisper by David Essex at #68 - I suspect we'll be hearing more from him when we head a bit further back

Wikipedia doesn't have a lot on the album - apparently, it was produced by Tony Visconti but I can't say the production quality jumped out at me.  The only other thing that attracted my attention was the CV of Graham Ward who plays drums on this - he's also played with Paul McCartney, Paul Young, The Pussycat Dolls, Fred Durst and The Wu-Tang Clan.  Which is quite some breadth of acts.

"Customers also listened to" Marti Webb, Michael Crawford, Barbara Dixon and Ruthie Henshall - I think we can spot the common theme there.  All in all, I believe I went into this with an open mind wanting to like it and it just didn't hit the spot for me - all a bit disappointing.

04/12/83 - Some fine outfits
18/12/83 - One that's stood the test of time well