I wanna stand with you on a mountain, I wanna bathe with you in the sea

Continuing my trip back through the 1999 album charts.

17/01/99 : Savage Garden - Savage Garden

Our last visit with the Antipodean duo was earlier this year and it was a dreadfully wishy-washy affair despite featuring the single that everyone liked - strangely the disappointment of that album has pushed my hopes for this one up because I feel that they must have done something decent at some point for people to have been interested in that one.  At times, my mind works in very strange ways - but its never worked in a strange enough way to buy this album (21/50).

I didn't mind the opener "To The Moon And Back" - it's very 80s (and I am most definitely an 80s music child) and I actually recognised "I Want You" the next track as well, so I guess it was a single.   And then we have "Truly Madly Deeply" which I'd completely forgotten about, but has a claim to actually be the track that everyone liked - all of which is a relatively strong opening.  The rest of it does somewhat tail off and it is a bit wet in places, but overall I'd say it's got a decent 80s sound to it and it's toe-tappy enough.  It's not a great album, but it's a distinct improvement on their follow-up.

We're all the way down at #16 in the charts this week (I think that's the furthest down we've been this year) on their 46th week of a 63 week run, with it having peaked at #2 (it spent five consecutive weeks in the top three) - that all feels much more successful than I remember it being.  The top five this week were Fatboy Slim (starting a four week run at the top), Robbie Williams, Boyzone, George Michael and Steps and the highest new entry is a Lloyd Cole best-of (#24 - and a fine best-of it is too).

Wikipedia has loads on the album but it's nearly all on how successful it was and how many singles they released from it - eight from a twelve track album is weirdly impressive.  Weirdly, the most interesting fact is merely a rumour - "It was thought by many that an arrangement of "A Thousand Words" was later used as the installation music for Microsoft's Windows XP" (but it wasn't!).  There's no word on what the critics thought (I imagine they could have been quite sniffy about it) but the public loved it - #1 in Australia (selling nearly a million copies over there, and very few albums manage that), New Zealand and Sweden and it got as high as #3 in the US, shifting over ten million copies globally.  Which certainly feels more than it deserved, but that's not the first time I've said that this year.

"Customers also listened to" Sixpence None The Richer, Seal, Natalie Imbruglia and Wilson Phillips - a more female line-up than I was expecting.  I won't be rushing back to this, but it was a pleasant enough diversion and does at least go some way to explain their huge popularity (but only some way).

10/01/99 - Some fun nonsense
24//01/99 - Surprisingly average

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