Gardens full of roses, friends all striking poses

Continuing my trip back through the 1999 album charts.

12/09/99 : You Me And Us - Martine McCutcheon

Well, this is an interesting one - Martine always seemed nice enough (she's actually lovely in Love Actually) but never really seemed to be massively talented, although that never bothered a lot of her contemporaries.  I can't say I'm expecting to like it though and we certainly never owned it (7/16).

Well, lordy - that was a surprise!  I REALLY wasn't expecting this to be quite as dreadful as it was - they've really put the effort in for this one.   It's all that annoying piano sound and terrible strings with her suspiciously auto-tuned voice quite low in the mix with some horrible production throughout.  At 50 minutes, it's also far longer than I felt the need for - I think they do deserve some credit for it being mostly original songs (I didn't recognise any covers, but I'm sure they are there) but maybe they just shouldn't have bothered? 

We're at - go on, guess.  Yup, #2 with a new entry on the start of a 24 week run (which is approximately 24 weeks more than it deserved).  The rest of the top five were Shania (of course), Travis, Stereophonics and a Boyzone best-of (which I can assure you we'll be avoiding) and there are no more new entries in the top ten with the next one being Air (#12 - Premiers Symptomes, which I've never heard).

Wikipedia has very little on the album - the most interesting fact is "unlike the album title and sleeve lettering, its title track is correctly punctuated with a comma".  Rock and roll, gentlemen!  The other, slightly surprising, fact is that NME gave this 6/10 - I suspect they've got a different view on that retrospectively.  It also tells me that the covers are "Perfect Moment" (first recorded by Edyta Górniak, apparently), "Talking In Your Sleep" (first done by Marmalade), "Love Me" (Bee Gees) and "Maybe This Time" (from Cabaret).

"Customers also listened to" an amusing collection of lost names from the 90s - Delta Goodrem, Michelle McManus, Dina Carroll and Gareth Gates.  All of whom (yes, even Gareth) I suspect I'd enjoy more than this surprisingly dreadful album - I'll stick with my Love Actually (or even Eastenders) memories of the lass.

05/09/99 - Perfectly fine
19/09/99 - An odd one

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