And that's 1999 done and dusted!

1999 was the year of our wedding - have all the albums aged as well as we have?  The answer is most definitely a resounding "No!", but there were still quite a fine albums across the year.

Once again, we didn't start the year off with a Take That album (they were on a break!) with Travis taking the honours - but don't worry, we still got to see a load of boy bands and an ex-Take Thatter (twice!) during the year.  The music was, as always, a bit of a mixed bag but there were quite a few albums that I've forgotten about which it was very nice to be reminded about.  The ownership ratio was also pretty high this year - 40% which is easily the highest we've seen so far and we'd have got close to 50% if I'd included albums we'd previously met which included (but probably isn't limited to) Shania Twain, ABBA, Madonna and Lauryn Hill

Looking at the year-end list, the best selling album of the year was Shania Twain's Come On Over, which I don't think will surprise anyone - it had a slow start to the year (it spent most of January at either #99 or #100!) but once it hit the top five in May, it never left it.  The rest of the top five were the Boyzone best-of By Request, Travis' The Man Who, ABBA Gold (entirely down to the release of Mamma Mia - The Musical) and Stereophonics (I was surprised this was quite so high).

There's not an awful lot of surprises in the rest of the chart except maybe some albums being higher than I expected - Macy Gray (#10), Texas (#11), Vengaboys (#20!), Martine McCutcheon (#25) and TLC (#28) and one being lower - Westlife (#9 - but it wasn't released until November) .  There are also quite a few artists with two appearances - Boyzone, Robbie Williams (sigh), Steps, George Michael and Cher, and (quite astonishingly) The Corrs have three!

Looking at the albums I experienced, it was a very mixed bag with some great albums in there (some of which I was surprised I'd not already written about) but there were also some absolutely appalling albums in there as well.  At least there was a reasonably strong female representation - although I'm not sure a lot of the female solo artists particularly deserved the attention.

Artists we met more than once were Steps, The Corrs, Robbie Williams, Savage Garden and Five - and it's a very strange list where I find myself thinking "yup, I'd take Robbie out of that lot".  George Michael also gets an honourable mention because he very nearly got a write-up for his best-of (which is a very fine collection of tracks) which would have given him two as well.  Boyzone would also have got two if I'd included their best-of, but that was quite simply never going to happen.

Looking at the albums in slightly more detail, let's start with the poor under-represented men - the solo artists were actually surprisingly thin on the ground in this year with Robbie Williams probably delivering the pick of the bunch and George Michael, Tom Jones (although he's not really solo here) and Ricky Martin providing reasonable, if not stellar efforts and Will Smith bringing up the rear.  I can't quite decide whether Fatboy Slim should count as a solo artist or not - if so, then this was easily the pick of the bunch.

Looking at the male groups, The Chemical Brothers, Orbital and Underworld won the dance category (along with Fatboy if he's not a solo artist!) leaving Leftfield and Basement Jaxx eating their dust.  Travis and Stereophonics took the indie category, with The Charlatans and James getting honourable mentions ahead of a load of very average albums, with Blur and Manic Street Preachers getting namechecks for just not quite getting it right.  I also feel the need to have a boy-band category this year - Backstreet Boys and (surprisingly) Boyzone take this, with Five getting the wooden spoon for dreadfulness for both their albums and 911 getting a special award for "wtf was that?".  And, despite not really fitting into any category, Simply Red also deserve a mention for their Simply dRedful album.

Looking at the ladies, the solo artists were, at best, quite average - Macy Grey is the only one there's any chance of me revisiting, with Mary J. Blige and Britney being at least listenable in places.  Whitney Houston was surprisingly average, Geri Halliwell and Cher are both pretty bad but Martine McCutcheon leaves them in her wake in the bad album stakes - it's really no contest.

Looking at groups featuring one or more ladies, B*witched get a name check for being the only all female group we saw this year (the album isn't great, but it's not dreadful either) although The Corrs only have the one pesky man and I'm not sure he can take too much credit for their phenomenal success.  S Club 7 and Steps both had a very successful year with bearable albums and Texas and Catatonia were also not terrible - unlike Vengaboys and Blondie who showed everyone else (male, female, group or solo) how to make truly appalling albums.

Looking at the #1 albums for the year, we saw 17 different #1 albums which is surprisingly lower than the 19 we saw in 1996 - the general trend has been for that number to go up as the years advance.  We had some big albums this year though with Shania and Boyzone both managing 10 weeks at the top, ABBA took five and Fatboy Slim and The Corrs both managed four weeks.  Of those big albums, only Boyzone debuted at the top - the rest of them climbed their way up through the chart which was still a thing back them.  Throughout the whole year only nine albums came in at #1, compared with 16 in '96, which is quite a big difference - it will be interesting to see whether this year is somewhat of an aberration regarding #1 albums.

The generally accepted (by me or the internet) best albums from the year that I didn't come across were Red Hot Chili Peppers' Californication (#5 - it lost out to Geri Halliwell), Sigur Rós's Ágætis byrjun (#52 in '00), The Roots' Things Fall Apart (#84), Beck's Midnite Vultures (#19), Moby's Play (5 weeks at #1 but not until next year), Rage Against The Machine's Battle Of Los Angeles (#23), Dr Dre's 2001 (#48 this year, #4 next), Eminem's The Slim Shady LP (#12 this year, #10 next), MF Doom's Operation Doomsday (#37 in '21, after his death), Fiona Apple's When The Pawn... (#46 in '00), Foo Fighters' There Is Nothing Left To Lose (#10), TLC's Fanmail (#7 - they were unlucky not to get a write-up), Muse's Showbiz (#29), Blink 182's Enema Of The State (#15 in '00), Santana's Supernatural (#33 in this year, 2 weeks at #1 next), The Flaming Lips' The Soft Bulletin (#39), The Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs (never charted), Mos Def's Black On Both Sides (never charted), Destiny's Child's The Writing's On The Wall (#12 this year, #10 in '01 - and what a load of apostrophes!) and the eponymous debuts from Christina Aguilera (#21 this year, #14 next) and Slipknot (#37). 

And the most and least read posts of the year?  Before looking, audience engagement felt higher this year than it was for 1968 - nobody expected that!  And the numbers confirm it, with the most popular post being a somewhat surprising Britney (which really doesn't feel like it would have been a fan favourite amongst my core readership) and the least popular (including the post I published ten minutes ago) was, also surprisingly, Texas - it's not their best known album but it's way better than a lot of other albums we've seen this year!

There really were some absolutely dreadful offerings this year but there were some nice memory joggers and some albums which turned out to be not nearly as bad as I was expecting.  My favourites from the year are the dance triptych of Fatboy Slim, Chemical Brothers and Orbital - away from them there were a lot of fine indie tracks, but maybe not an entire great indie album out there (unsurprisingly I recall listening to a lot of indie compilations around this time).

So where to next?  Well, I'm going to do something that I suspect I'm going to regret and which might well go a bit wrong - I'm going back to the very beginning which, as everyone knows, is 1956.  The 50s is the only decade I've not visited yet so it will be interesting to see what it throws up, but the chart back then was only five albums so I suspect we might run out of albums pretty quickly and then I've no idea what I'm going to do - but I'm sure I'll think of something!

30/12/56 - Very much of its time
03/01/99 - Another dreadful effort