Shake up the picture the lizard mixture with your dance on the eventide

Continuing my trip back in time through the album charts

04/12/83 : Seven And The Ragged Tiger - Duran Duran


Everyone with any sense agrees that Rio is Duran's best album (and Thank You is OBVIOUSLY their worst) - but the battle for second best invites much more argument.  Very few people would pick Seven And The Ragged Tiger though - but, that very few people might possibly include me.  I think there are better tracks on other albums, but in terms of a general level of quality I'm unsure it is beaten - but basically what I'm saying is I just like this, OK?  Or at least I think I do - and actually, I've listened to this much more recently than some other albums that I know from back in the day, so I'm hoping I'm not mistaken.

And yeah, I still like it - it has a very strong first side with the weirdness of "The Reflex" and the enjoyable "New Moon On Monday" and "I Take The Dice".  The second side does drop off in quality pretty quickly after "The Union Of The Snake", but it never gets dreadful (although I'm not sure an instrumental was quite their best idea ever).  I don't think it's going to convert any new fans (there's a good argument we're a bit late on that front) but it gives me good retro-feels nonetheless.

This is another one I've never properly owned, but I had a taped copy of - which I think might have been from one of my sisters (but don't worry, I won't tell anyone).  So we're at 3/4 now - I'm expecting an approximate ratio of 0.5 for the end of the year, but we'll see.

We're at #5 in the charts this week - which equals the lowest we've ever been.  And we plumbed those depths in the fourth week of this year so I don't think it will take us long to drop further down - I suspect my time jumping has somewhat thrown things out, but I'll just have to live with that.  This was their second week on the charts out of 47 weeks in total (just the 1 week at #1, with their last week in the charts being in February '85).  Above it in the charts were Paul, Elaine, MJ and Culture Club and the highest new entry in the charts was actually in the top 10 - but it was NTWICM, so we have to ignore it.  Amusingly the highest proper new entry was Ozzy with Bark At The Moon at #24 - which I can live without, but you have to admire the guy's longevity.

Wikipedia tells us that "Seven" referred to the five members of the band and their two managers and the "Ragged Tiger" represented success.  Errr - OK.  Apart from that, there's not much of interest on the album and it kinda downplays the whole thing - the critics weren't that impressed with it and the whole mood is kinda disappointing.  I mean, it "only" got to #8 in the US.  Which "only" equated to sales of 2 million over there and about 3 million worldwide - what a bunch of losers eh?.  Interestingly, this is Duran's only #1 album in the UK, despite having eight albums which have reached the top 5.

"Customers also listened to" Arcadia (who remembers them?), The Thompson Twins (I'm looking forward to writing about them at some point), Howard Jones (ditto) and Kajagoogoo (just no!).  But I've always (for some unclear reason!) liked this album and was pleased to revisit it, even if I'm not convinced that I'm going to convert anyone as a result of this write-up.

27/11/83 - A fine, tight album
11/12/83 - All a bit disappointing

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