As I walk this land with broken dreams

Continuing my trip back in time through the album charts

22/12/96 : Take Two - Robson & Jerome


Ah - Mr Robson and Mr Jerome.  Can you explain to me exactly how you became so popular around this time?  No?!?  I thought not - but maybe this album will explain things.

Of course it doesn't.  It's a perfectly serviceable set of covers, all faithfully done without causing too much offence (for me, at least).  I was expecting at least one of them to been a heinous crime, but it never happened - I even quite liked their version of "Keeping The Customer Satisfied".  But it's still a complete mystery to me why people bought it by the bucketload (maybe Wikipedia will explain matters later).  But neither of us ever did - 0/2.

We're at #2 in the charts this week on their sixth week of an 18 week run - having spent the first two weeks at #1.  They were kept of the top by the mighty Spices, which is a phrase I'll be using for a bit, it appears and there were no new entries in the entire chart, with the top seven all being exactly the same as the previous week.

Wikipedia has an entry for the album but absolutely nothing on interest on it, so I checked out their entry to find out exactly why they were so popular.  And it reminded me it all came out of a random Soldier, Soldier episode where they sang "Unchained Melody" and loads of people got in touch with ITV to see if they could buy it.  Which leads to the following sentence "Simon Cowell was alerted to the interest shown by the public, and pursued the two reluctant actors (and later Robson's mother) for the next four months to record the song, to the extent that Robson Green threatened legal action to stop Cowell harassing them".  So, fair play to the lads, they did resist the call of fame - but once they gave in, it sold 1.87 million copies.  Lordy.  There were also some rumours (and some payoffs) that they didn't sing all the stuff on "their" records - I'm sure it happened, but let's give them the credit of doubt and say they weren't aware, shall we?

"Customers also listened to" - a load of people I have no intention of listening to.  But, surprisingly, I didn't hate this - I didn't need it in my life at all, but it's all perfectly listenable.  But unbelievably, mystifyingly popular back in the strange time that was 1996.

15/12/96 - This one goes out to Alison
29/12/96 - Girl power!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I saw your mum - she forgot that I existed

Image
Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts 22/12/23 :  Stick Season - Noah Kahan Well, this week surprises us on a couple of fronts.  Firstly, and probably the least expected, this is possibly the album I've heard most this year - because obviously I'm a massive Noah fan. Well, it might not surprise you to hear it's not me but my delightful daughter - but you might be surprised to hear just how much my youngest absolutely LOVES Noah, particularly given his folkiness.  She's got tickets to see him next year and (excluding festivals) they're the most expensive gig tickets I've ever bought.  But despite having heard the album loads, I've never actually listened to it, so I'm interested to see what I make of it on a one-on-one basis. You know what - the headline is that, having actually listened to it I can report that, at least in places, I liked this way more than I previously did.  I listened to it over headphones for the first time and t
Read more

She's got a wicked way of acting like St. Anthony

Image
I've done The Guardian's list of the top 50 albums of the year for the last three years and (mostly) enjoyed it, so here we go again with this year's list .  Last year I'd previously met ten of the list - it will be interesting to see whether that is repeated this year.   #50 : Crazymad, For Me - CMAT Coming off halfway between Jenny Lewis and Self Esteem, Dublin’s CMAT sets life’s greatest embarrassments to ritzy country showstoppers – the musical equivalent of piling your beehive high to distract from your tear-reddened eyes. On her second album, she tots up the price she has paid for her bad boyfriends, self-subjugation and knowing avoidance of less-than-romantic realities, always with mordant humour rather than self-pity: “I’m just some stewardess who feeds your pets / And does your dishes and pays your rent,” she sings on the delicate, harmony-heavy Such a Miranda. For all that she has lost in these songs – pride, love, literal cash – her perspective remains a firm
Read more

Croopied in the reames, shepherd gurrel weaves

Image
Continuing my trip down The Guardian's   top 50 albums of 2023 #30 : The Age Of Pleasure - Janelle Monáe Monáe’s last album, 2018’s Dirty Computer, saw the high-concept pop star returning to earth after several albums of space-age fantasia, showing a softer, fallible side for the rest time. Its songs were still divided into three categories – Reckoning, Celebration and Reclamation – indicating an artist who hadn’t quite let go of the structural safety rails. But on The Age of Pleasure, Monáe is resolutely grounded in pursuit of a new kind of body high. To the decadently rendered diasporic sounds of reggae, dancehall and Afrobeats, she hymns pleasure and desire, connecting (as did Jessie Ware also did this year) sex as self-empowerment and celebrating the kaleidoscopic nature of identity. Or, as she puts it on Phenomenal: “I’m lookin’ at a thousand versions of myself / And we’re all fine as fuck.” I have experienced a couple of Janelle albums and I found them somewhat inaccessible -
Read more