I don't care what songs you sing

Continuing my trip back in time through the album charts

17/11/96 : Dizzy Heights - The Lightning Seeds

I owned their previous two albums, but never bought this one.  My suspicion is that I felt that Jollification was enough Lightning Seeds for anyone - and I mean that in a nice "they'll never improve on this" way.  I'm expecting to like it, but not as much as Jollification.  But, before we do that, we have yet another "best of" albums to consider.

Which is FInest - The Best Of Fine Young Cannibals, a new entry at #10.  I liked FYC back in the day - but this was quite an easy one to reject because it really was back in the day.  They were big when I was at uni - and that was a long time before 1996, I'm afraid.  So we move on The Lightning Seeds...

And yeah - it's not as good as Jollification.  "Sugar Coated Iceberg" and "Ready Or Not" are fine tracks, "You Showed Me" is an interesting oddity and the rest of it is merely "fine, I guess".  That's all I've got to say about it really - if you like The Lightning Seeds, you'll probably like it.  But not as much as Jollification.  And, as you can probably guess - 0/7.

We're at #11 again this week - with a new entry this time at the start of a 31 week run, which feels like considerably more than it deserved, although it never got higher than #11.  Which it managed in this week and also, pleasingly, in its 11th week on the charts.  The top five this week were the same as last week but in a different order - R&J (a new entry - our first in the top ten this year!), Spices, East 17, Simply Red and Beautiful South.  A couple of interesting other new entries in the top 20 - Snoop Doggy Dogg (as he was back then) at #15 and Alisha's Attic at #16.

Wikipedia has a surprising amount on the album which says remarkably little about anything.  Although I did learn that "You Showed Me" was written by a couple of members of The Byrds and recorded by The Turtles in 1964.  It's actually been their best performing single (getting to #8) - provided you ignore "Three Lions", which has reached #1 three times.  It's also been covered by Salt'n'Pepa, which I imagine is "interesting".  

It also tells me there are some interesting names involved in the album - Terry Hall (who I have a lot of time for over the years), Nicky Wire (from The Manics) and Stephen Jones (from Babybird).  The critics really didn't like it though - picking on some of the tracks as particularly derivative of The Beatles, which actually wasn't really something that came out for me (any more than anything else TLS have ever done, anyway!).

"Customers also listened to" Space, Dodgy, Badly Drawn Boy and Dubstar - which is a slightly odd mix to say the least.  I thought this was OK but no more than that - it certainly feels like their best days were behind them at this point.

10/11/96 - Very smooooooth
24/11/96 - An album I actually LIKED!