1968 - over and out!

1968 was the birth year of both me and my lovely wife - have the albums from that year aged as well as we have?  OK, OK - let's not expect perfection, but let's consider how they've done.

For a pleasant change, we didn't start the year off with a Take That album - but seeing as none of them were alive at the time, maybe that's not such a surprise.  A lot of the better albums in the year had already been claimed by the Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums, so I think it's fair to say we were left with a bit of a mixed bag, with a lot more soundtracks and live albums appearing (and a LOAD of best-ofs having to be ignored).  Amazingly enough, the ownership ratio was very low this year - we owned a big fat zero albums, which probably isn't a surprise to anyone.

Looking at the best selling albums of the year, I had to rely on a somewhat dubious website (bestsellingalbums.org) but the results look plausible so we'll go with it.  The top selling album of the year was The Sound Of Music OST, which is believable given it spent only two weeks out of the top ten all year.  Second was Tom Jones Live At The Talk Of The Town which also spent all year in the charts (but plumbed the depths of #24) and this is followed up by four greatest hits albums - The Supremes, The Four Tops, The Beach Boys and Tom Jones (again!).  One more soundtrack (The Jungle Book) and best of (Otis Redding) follow before we FINALLY get to two "proper" albums to complete the top ten - Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac and Bob Dylan's John Wesley Harding, which just makes me very suspicious of this list because Bob was #1 for 13 weeks of the year but I can't find any other source, so we'll just have to go with it.  Who really cares anyway?

I've actually only got a top fifteen for you from this year, so let's go through them all, shall we?  The albums completing the list are British Motown Chartbusters (amusingly featuring absolutely nothing  British), Simon & Garfunkel's Bookends, Tom Jones's Delilah, The Hollies best-of and Otis Redding's Blue - interesting the lowest album on the list may well be the one I like the most.

Looking at the albums I experienced, it was unsurprisingly a male-dominated year (but surprisingly less so than 1973).  Generalising to a very high degree, the albums felt to be either "very much of its time" or "I bet this felt old-fashioned even then" - as a whole, I can't say I found it to be the most enjoyable of years from a musical standpoint, but some of the albums were certainly interesting and you could feel their importance to what came after, particularly when considering the albums from 1973.  

There were also a surprising number of artists who we saw more than once - those we saw twice were Simon & Garfunkel, Fleetwood Mac, Andy Williams, Otis Redding, Bee Gees and The Dubliners (coming from nowhere to take the last two weeks of the year).  Otis gets a special shout-out because if we hadn't already met Blue then we would have seen him three times (and there was a best-of I ignored as well) and Engelbert Humperdinck, Tom Jones and The Seekers get an even specialler shout-out because we did see them three times.  And it was always a pleasure, never a chore.  OK, maybe it was a bit of a cheesy chore at times.

Let's consider the ladies first - looking at the solo artists Aretha was way ahead of the pack, with the pack being Dionne and Cilla.  And groups featuring female artists were The Seekers (who were fine but mystifyingly popular), The Incredible String Band, Julie Driscoll & Brian Auger Trinity and Esther and Abi Ofarim (all of whom were extremely odd in their own way).  And that was it for ladies we saw, although this was actually a better year for women in the charts than '73 was - but it still wasn't exactly stellar give that there were 11 women named and another 8 that featured on albums all year (but these numbers are higher than '73 and the chart was only a top 40 this year, compared to a top 50 five years later).

The male solo artists fall into two distinct categories "easy listening shite" and "other" - with the former having contributions from Engelbert, Andy Williams, James Last, Val Doonican and José Feliciano, which only leaves Tom Jones (pretty easy listening, but not shite), Otis Redding (neither album was as good as Blue, which we'd already met), Donovan (slight, but not easy to listen to) and Scott Walker (it didn't always work, but when it did - it really did).

Looking at the male groups, it's hard to specifically call out any genre as being overly represented - there really was all sorts in there.  The studio albums that interested me the most were Cream (variable, but much better than I was expecting), Traffic (generally pretty good), The Small Faces (a game of two halves), The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown (bonkers but obviously influential), The Incredible String Band (even more bonkers!), The Byrds (surprisingly enjoyable and I suspect it would be a grower given a chance) and The Dubliners (particularly their debut album).  We also had a crop of decent live albums this year with Tom Jones, The Supremes and (particularly) The Four Tops all delivering interesting and impressive sets.  Albums that were slightly less impressive (OK, terrible) offerings were Fleetwood Mac, The Rolling Stones, Amen Corner and The Moody Blues - the rest were generally fine, but often a bit odd.

Given I had to relax the rules somewhat, we've got a new album category to consider this year, soundtracks - and we started the year off with three in a row!  Most of them fall into slightly different categories - The Sound Of Music is a pure musical soundtrack with all original songs, so it would probably sneak through even in a normal year and a similar argument can be made for The Good, The Bad & The Ugly and Dr Zhivago - instrumental soundtracks aren't really my thing, but that doesn't mean I can just reject them all.  But The Jungle Book and (particularly) The Graduate would be far less likely to be viewed upon with generosity given they have very minimal content, although admittedly they are at least original songs.

Looking at the #1 albums for the year, we saw thirteen different #1 albums (which is, unsurprisingly, an all time low), although we only listened to eight of them during the year due to earlier visits and best-ofs.  Bob took the honours with thirteen weeks at the top, The Hollies and Simon & Garfunkel each had seven and The Small Faces had six - there are some big numbers there!  And there was only one album that debuted at #1 - unsurprisingly, it was The Beatles.

The generally accepted (by only the internet, because I've got no idea!) best albums from the year that I didn't come across were The Zombies' Odessey And Oracle (never charted), The Band's Music From Big Pink (again, no chart position), Van Morrison's Astral Weeks (again, never charted - seriously?), The Doors' Waiting For The Sun (peaked at #16, but was unlucky, I guess!), Pink Floyd's A Saucerful Of Secrets (peaked at #9 - very unlucky not to get a listen), Stevie Wonder's For Once In My Life (never charted), Deep Purple's Shades Of Deep Purple (never charted here, but got to #24 in the US), Iron Butterfly's In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (never charted here, but got to #4 in the US), Dr John Gris-Gris (spent one week at #65 in '19, but it really is a DREADFUL album) and Laura Nylo's Eli And The Thirteenth Confession (never charted but this isn't bad at all).

And the most and least read posts of the year?  Before looking, it doesn't feel like anyone really cared about 1968 - it was a long time ago, after all.  The most popular post was The Small Faces which, to be fair, was probably one of the most interesting albums of the year and the least popular were Bee Gees and Canned Heat (and Canned Heat is a lot more interesting than a lot of albums this year, so check it out!).

So, 1968 - late 60s.  Great year, right?!?  Well - tbh, no.  On the whole this year was a game of two halves - those that tried something new and those that very much didn't.  The new stuff didn't always work but at least they tried - the other stuff never felt like it tried, but sometimes it worked (but tbh rarely).  Of the albums we met this year, my favourites were probably Aretha, Traffic, The Byrds and The Four Tops and I'm going to call out all the cheesy albums for ruining the year for me and also specifically mention Amen Corner for providing the worst of the rest.  There were about five albums that I'd previously met which would, in most cases, have pushed up the quality level, but tbh that doesn't make a big difference - there was a load of cheese around in 1968 so let's just accept that and move on.

So, that's all the birth years done for the family so, as the lovely Mrs Reed suggested, the year of our marriage seems like a logical next step - so we're off to party like it's 1999!

07/01/68 - A swift repeat visit
26/12/99 - A very successful album