All my bare wires are alive

Continuing my trip back through the 1968 album charts.

01/09/68 : Bare Wires - John Mayall Bluesbreakers

I've heard of John and I'm guessing this will be blues-y (the clue's in the name!) - but recent experience has shown that blues-y covers a whole world of sounds, so who knows what we're getting here!  And, interestingly, we're having to go to YouTube to get it because it's not available in any of the usual locations.

And well - it is indeed blues-y, but a different kind of blues-y again.  This feels very English blues, with tinges of folk and country in there - I can't say I liked it, but unlike Fleetwood Mac's effort I didn't get bored with it and there's obviously a decent amount of skill in there.  I'd like to describe it better to you, but I'm afraid it's just beyond my powers of description - it was an interesting listen though.  And, once again, it's an "interesting" album cover!

We're at #9 in the charts this week on their eighth week of a seventeen week run, having peaked at #3 in its second week - waaaay more than I was expecting.  The top five are Simon & Garfunkel, Tom Jones, The Hollies, Cream (the double album, with the single album at #9) and Engelbert, the highest new entry was Fleetwood Mac's dreadful album (#26) and we have YET ANOTHER woman named in the charts - Julie Driscoll, who I didn't think I knew but I actually did because she sang the theme tune to Ab Fab (a cover of Bob Dylan's "This Wheel's On Fire") and a very odd tune it is too.  So the running count is now 7 named and 6 featured - we've almost caught up with 1973!

Wikipedia doesn't have a lot on the album, but it does tell us that, from the previous album, the band changed the bassist and the drummer and it includes "more jazz references than usual".  And lordy, it got to #1 in France - and #59 in the US (which sounds less impressive, but probably involves more sales).  Wikipedia also tells me that he's still with us at the grand old age of 89 and he released his latest album last year - 1968 seems to have more survivors than 1973 managed!

"Customers also listened to" - well, I can't tell you because the album isn't anywhere but I imagine some of the albums we've had recently might well be on the list.  As I said, I can't say I liked it but it did somehow hold my interest.

25/08/68 - A swift repeat visit
08/09/68 - Utterly bonkers, but obviously influential

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