She wrote you a song saying that she approved

Continuing my trip back in time through the album charts

04/09/83 : True : Spandau Ballet

Wow - Fantastic followed by True.  We're certainly mining a very 80s seam here, aren't we?  This was the first album I ever bought - it certainly wasn't a cool choice for a teenage boy, but it might not surprise you to hear that I was very much not a cool teenage boy.  

I bought it because of the title track but never regretted the purchase and, whenever I revisit it (which isn't often, but does happen) I always think it stands the test of time pretty well.  Yes, the songs do take themselves far too seriously (one even namechecks Catcher In The Rye - they were serious fellers, I can tell you) but there's not a shabby track amongst the eight on there (about the only thing it had in common with Fantastic).  I like the album cover too - even if it's got a white background which always messes up my blog posts.

What did surprise me though is that the album isn't available on its own on Amazon - I had to listen to it as part of a bumper album that had all their early albums on it (which is a peculiar thing I've not seen before - I've seen a few with two albums on, but not four).  Spotify does have a version of the album on it, but it's got 22 tracks and is basically just 3 different versions of each track - and who wants to listen to that?  All very odd but the original version is, as I've already mentioned, an album I own so we're almost back to 50% with 8/17 - it was most definitely not cool enough for Mrs Reed to own though.

We're at #4 again this week on their 27th week of a 64 week run (with just the one week at #1).  Like Fantastic, it then dropped out for two weeks before coming back for another chunky run - 20 weeks.  And they managed another six weeks across three runs, before disappearing from view in February '85.  Above it in the charts this week were The Beach Boys, The Jacksons and Wham! with the highest new entry being The Moody Blues at #16.

Wikipedia doesn't have an awful lot on the album and for some reason this sentence jumped out at me - "In 2008, the album was given away free with copies of the Daily Mail newspaper".  Again, there's no section on critical reception and again I assume they were really rather sniffy about it, but again the public didn't care - this one got to #19 in the US.

"Customers also listened to" - well, we'll never know because the album isn't there, but I imagine that the list from the bumper album of ABC, Talk Talk, The Bangles (oooh - I hope I get to meet them) and The Human League isn't far off.  I like this album - I can't help but think their odd streaming strategy isn't doing them any favours, but what do I know?

28/08/83 - Not terrible, but not for me
11/09/83 - A fantastic album