I felt the earth move in my hand

Continuing my trip back through the 2006 album charts.

26/03/06 : Journey South - Journey South

Having said last week that I couldn't remember Journey South at all, I find myself with the perfect opportunity to remind myself.  I've no idea what to expect - for some reason my mind couldn't get past the band Journey, but the lovely Mrs Reed reminded me they were X Factor refugees, so I suspect they're unlikely to sound like Journey.  But let's find out, shall we?

Oh.  OK.  Let's not then.  This album isn't available on Amazon, Spotify or even YouTube - which is somewhat unusual.  Their other album is available in various places, but not this one - looking at the contents I suspect it's because it's an album of covers and so not really worth anyone's while to bother getting it up there (but it's always possible I'm wrong).  I nearly gave it a miss altogether, but I thought they deserved me putting in some effort, so I managed to track down about half the tracks on YouTube which was more than enough for me to form the opinion...

....that's it's "nice".  As in if you were in the pub and there were a couple of lads on their guitars in the corner, you'd pay it no attention until they finished up and you'd say "yeah, that was nice".  It is not, in any way, deserving of being in the charts - but that's The X Factor for you.  It just makes people lose their minds.

And that's very much what happened because this week we're at #1 in the charts with a new entry on the start of an eight week run - and it somehow managed another eight weeks before the year ended as well.  The rest of the top five were Andy Abraham (another new entry courtesy of The X Factor), Corinne Bailey Rae, Russell Watson and Andrea Bocelli - that's a very dinner party kind of a top five, isn't it?  And we had two more new entries in the top ten as well - Prince (#9) and Beverley Knight (#10), both of which I imagine are well worth a listen.

Wikipedia has very little on the album other than noting it's sold close to half a million copies.  Half a million!  Their entry tells us that this was their only album on the Sony/Syco label with Mr Cowell releasing them either after he'd bled them dry or they'd refused to record another album with a load of pointless covers on it.  They did release a follow-up album on their own record label, but unfortunately the lead single was "chart-ineligible due to an alleged printing error" - which is a curious sentence indeed.  A man with a more suspicious mind than me might consider this along with the lack of this album on streaming services and deduce that someone (possibly someone who looks very strange these days) decided to remove them from musical history - so it's a good job I look for the best in everyone and declare it to be simply bad luck.

"Customers also listen to" other X Factor contestants I assume, but we'll never know - and I can't say I overly care.  I hope the lads enjoyed their moment in the sun (and I don't begrudge them it in the slightest) but for an album like this to make #1 just shows how plenty of people went a bit mad for The X Factor. 

19/03/06 - Some lovely mellow warbling
02/04/06 - A nice reminder of a momentous week