Good looking, bad tasting
Continuing my trip back through the 1999 album charts.
13/06/99 : Schizö-phonic - Geri Halliwell
Ooooh - I was REALLY hoping I was going to get to listen to this! I'm expecting it to be surprisingly bearable but utterly inessential - and, for some strange reason, I never got round to buying it but I find out after posting that the lovely Mrs Reed did (12/29).
Yes - I think "surprisingly bearable" pretty much covers it. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's bang average and if anyone else had recorded it, it would have sunk without trace, which from what (thankfully little) I remember is true for all the other Spice Girl solo efforts, with the exception of Melanie C who I won't hear a word against. To be fair, "Look At Me" and "Bag It Up" are almost decent efforts, but they're not nearly as good as Geri thinks they are. Most of the rest is bearable by itself - her voice sounds OK as long as she stays in her lane (which wisely she mostly does). However, taken as a whole album there is an awful lot of dodgy cultural appropriation going on with the whole thing having a "throw it all at the wall and see what sticks" kinda feel to it. I also have to say that "Let Me Love You" and "You're In A Bubble" are most definitely just bad - the latter is something that Rudebox-era Robbie would have come out with.
We're at #4 with a new entry in the charts this week on the start of a - go on, guess. Yes, a 50 week run. Obvious really, although this was as high as it got. The rest of the top five were Boyzone, ABBA (ah - Mamma Mia premiered in this year! Fun fact, this week this album is enjoying its 1,111th week in the charts), Shania and Red Hot Chili Peppers (a new entry for Californication and this was as high as it ever got in 169 weeks on the chart. Yes, one place behind Geri) and the next highest new entry is the somewhat dubiously named Gay Dad (#14).
Wikipedia has more on the album than I was expecting but I totally couldn't be bothered reading it. The critics views were somewhat mixed with some being surprisingly nice about it - NME however, weren't, saying "Schizo-phonic, breaking every seduction rule of women's magazines, is an act of pure desperation". It did well enough commercially though, achieving moderate success in a lot of countries - all of which contributed to global sales of 2 million (and I'm very pleased to see that Mel C's Northern Star has sold more copies!).
Customers also listened to Emma Bunton, Victoria Beckham, Billie Piper and Rachel Stevens - I'm hard pushed to say which one I'd want to avoid most out of that lot (probably Posh - but I'm really trying not to think about it). Geri's effort both was and wasn't dreadful - I can't help but feel that NME got it spot on with "an act of pure desperation".
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