She stood there laughing

Continuing my trip back through the 1968 album charts.

27/10/68 : Delilah - Tom Jones

Only just over two months into the year and we've had two visits with Simon & Garfunkel, this is our second visit with Tom and we would have had two visits with The Seekers if I wasn't ignoring best-ofs.  Was there a lack of artists in this year?  Whatever's going on, I'm expecting this to be peak Tom...

Well, it opens with the title track and doesn't really stop - it's all massively over-dramatic, featuring one murder, one suicide, the death of a child and COUNTLESS lost loves.  He definitely gives off a British Elvis vibe - you can really imagine him giving it all in some dodgy club surrounded by couples sat at tables smoking.  It sounds very much of its time and it has dated - an interesting retro listen rather than something I'd specifically choose to listen to.  It's a cool album cover though!

We're at #5 in the charts this week on his fifteenth week of a 29 week run, having peaked at #1 in its third and ninth weeks.  The rest of the top five were The Hollies, The Seekers, Simon & Garfunkel and Bee Gees and the highest new entry was Jethro Tull at #23, with the only other one being José Feliciano at #28.

Wikipedia has two whole sentences on the album - it's his sixth album and it got to #1 (and it also got to #1 in Norway and #2 in Germany).  To make up for the lack of Wikifacts, I read up on the title track and found this gem - when Tom sang the song on The Ed Sullivan show, the censors tried to get him to change the lyrics.  But not the ones about the singer killing her, they objected to "at break of day when the man drove away" because this suggests that the other guy spent the night with her - shocking!  Tom amusingly stood his ground and declared the whole thing to be "utter bullshit" (admit it - you read that in a Welsh accent).

There's also an interesting section on the Welsh Rugby Union banning the song - I can see both sides of the argument but can't quite decide which I agree with most, so I'm just going to include a couple of quotes.  Nick Cave, after hearing a version from a male voice choir, stated "I'm sorry to report that listening to this did make me feel like murdering someone, primarily the choir" but I think Richard Marx probably comes closest to reflecting my view with "I am not remotely minimising violence, or especially violence against women, but there are a lot of things that we all could be doing to help the situation, other than banning Delilah".

"Customers also listened to" Engelbert Humperdinck (who we'll be seeing soon), Shirley Bassey and Dusty Springfield (I hope we get to see some more of her).  It was nice seeing some vintage Tom though - I'll not be rushing back to it but it was entertaining.

20/10/68 - And there was me thinking Tom sounded dated
03/11/68 - Short but sweet

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