I acted like a dustbin lid

Continuing my trip back in time through the album charts

06/11/83 : Pipes Of Peace - Paul McCartney


Ah Mr McCartney - the absolute king of trading on past glories.  I remember not hating the single, but I'm pretty certain I'm not going to like this.  

But, before that, we need to touch upon #3 this week which was another compilation album - The Two Of Us.  Which sounds like an album of duets and it seems like that might have been their initial idea because they have some classic duets on there, but they only account for 5 out of the 16 tracks.  The top three tracks for me are "Love Lift Us Up Where We Belong", "With You I'm Born Again" and "Send In The Clowns" - I'd give you a worst track and a DTR, but I only know a couple of the other tracks, so I'm in the dark here.  Oh well, I'll just stay in the dark - I'm happy here.  Now, back to Mr McCartney and whether I like it.

And, oh no, I really don't.  It opens with the title track, which is still bearable - but after that it goes rapidly downhill.  The Michael Jackson duets are poor, "The Other Me" features the blog title lyric and "Average Person" and "Tug Of Peace" are just utter, utter shite.  I actually thought there was a decent track at the end, but it turned out it was Amazon Music moving on to a different album - but it was a Wings album, so there's some hope for the lad yet.  But not on this album - the third album in a row that neither of us have owned (and have no intention of ever owning) dropping us to a running total of 4/8. 

We're at #4 in the charts this week with a new entry at the start of a 22 week run, which was surprisingly slightly more than The Rolling Stones managed, but it finally disappeared from view in April '84 (except for one random week in October '15 - which I assume was a re-release).  Above it in the charts we have Lionel Richie, Culture Club (swapping places from last time) and the previously discussed compilation album. And we have another new entry in the top 10 as well - one of Bob Dylan's albums I haven't yet had to endure.  And I can assure you it will stay that way.

Wikipedia tells us that Paul spent most of the period during which this was recorded actually concentrating on Give My Regards To Broad Street - which I've not seen but is supposed to be pretty bad (and gave the world "The Frog Chorus").  There's also a very amusing critical review from NME - they were never going to like it but they REALLY didn't like it!).  It did get to #1 in Norway though - obviously.

"Customers also listened to" Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder and, errr, Rockwell.  Shout out to all you Rockwell fans out there!  And to all you McCartney fans - why do you do that to yourselves?  Obviously the guys has, at times, been touched by genius - but there's absolutely no evidence of that here.

30/10/83 - One of the best of the best ofs
13/11/83 - All a bit of a mess really

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