Who's that comin' round that corner?

Continuing my trip back in time through the album charts

15/07/73 : Red Rose Speedway - Wings



I can't say I'm the hugest Wings fan, but from my limited experience, I've found it a thousand times more bearable than Paul's solo stuff (which is generally utterly shit) so I'm quite intrigued to see what I think of a whole album's worth.

And yeah - it's not GREAT, but it's perfectly tolerable.  I'd even go way overboard and venture to say that "My Love" is a decent track - the rest of it is pretty forgettable at first listen, but I guess it might grow given the chance that I'm not going to give it.  The listening experience for me was very similar to George's solo effort from a couple of week's ago - OK, but we've all got better things to do, surely?  And it's really not a great album cover, is it?

We're at #16 in the charts this week on its tenth week of a thirteen week run, having peaked at #5.  A reasonable run, but doesn't quite beat their follow-up Band On The Run, which actually came out this year but didn't really take up until mid-74 and stayed in the charts for two years.  The top five this week were That'll Be The Day, Peters & Lee, Perry Como, George Harrison and Bowie with the highest new entry being Cat Stevens (#9).  A top ten new entry - wow!  The next one is at #37 - Jimi Hendrix with the OST to the film "Jimi Hendrix" and I'm guessing he was probably the best person to write the music for that.  As usual, Dianna and Karen are the top women - and obviously there are no new women in the chart this week!

Wikipedia has a huge amount (207 milliPeppers) but a lot of that is given over to the harsh words the critics chose to use - they were very rude about it indeed.  "Red Rose Speedway sounds as if it was written after a big tea in front of the fire with carpet-slippered feet up; listening to it takes about as much as going ten rounds with a marshmallow fairy".  I feel like I should have been harsher on it - but I stand by my contention that it's way better than Ram.

"Customers also listened to" George and Ringo, but no, no John - the solo fans really don't get on, do they?  And so far, I'd be hard pushed to say who's winning the solo war - probably John wins for the high points and George wins for lack of low points, which leaves Paul nowhere.  But this isn't terrible (at first listen, anyway) and does give me hope for Band On The Run (whenever I get to 1974).

08/07/73 - A pleasing education
22/07/93 - More to this than meets the ear

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