You're not going to end up like your mum and dad

Continuing my trip back through the 1999 album charts.

21/02/99 : Life Thru A Lens - Robbie Williams

One I suspect I've heard because "we" own it (21/45) - I can't say I remember too much about it, but I'm sure it'll come back to me.  I'm also, after my last experience with Robbie, not totally dreading it - in fact, after my previous experience with Blondie, I'm almost looking forward to it.

Well, it's got "Angels" and "Let Me Entertain You" on it, so I can't be totally rude about it - but actually I don't really feel the need to be rude about it at all.  I would say that I don't think it took anyone very long to write "One Of God's Better People" but to balance that I'd forgotten about "Old Before I Die" which I quite like.  A lot of it is surprisingly Lightning Seeds-ish and there's obvious Oasis influences as well, both of which I'd have accepted without a second glance at the time - I rejected it back then because it was Robbie, but I can't work up the effort now.  Am I getting old and sensible?  Nooooo...

We're at #8 in the chart again this week on his 68th week of a 108 week run - which is impressive, but it was actually its second run, with its first run being a mere four weeks with it seeming to run the risk of sinking without a trace, but it rose from the dead strongly.  It's spent a mere two weeks at #1 (in its 23rd & 24th weeks), but it did manage a 42 week run in the top ten.  The top five this week were The Corrs, Robbie Williams (who he?), Blondie (a new entry), Lauryn Hill and Fatboy Slim and the next highest new entry was The Creatures (really?!?) all the way down at #80.

Wikipedia has less than I was expecting on such a successful album, but some of it is quite interesting.  The working title was The Show-off Must Go On, his first solo single was a cover of George Michael's "Freedom" (not on this album) and it was "Angels" that saved the album from obscurity - which was the fourth single off the album, although the first to be released after the album.  The critics were a bit mixed at the time and Melody Maker's comment that it "feels more like a press release than an album" does seem fair enough to me, but of course they all agree it's great now.  It did best over here (selling 2.4 million copies) but also did well in Ireland (#6), Finland (#2) and Argentina (#9) - a random selection of countries if ever I saw one.

"Customers also listened to" Aerosmith, Wet Wet Wet, The Calling and Natalie Imbruglia - which is a particularly bizarre mix for anyone, let alone Robbie.  I have to say though, the lad has done OK this year - I didn't like him then and I don't like him now, but nostalgia's a wonderful thing and I'm prepared to say I actually enjoyed some of this and the rest of it was, as before, perfectly bearable.

14/02/99 - Not my thing, but not hateful
28/02/99 - A really poor album

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I saw your mum - she forgot that I existed

Image
Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts 22/12/23 :  Stick Season - Noah Kahan Well, this week surprises us on a couple of fronts.  Firstly, and probably the least expected, this is possibly the album I've heard most this year - because obviously I'm a massive Noah fan. Well, it might not surprise you to hear it's not me but my delightful daughter - but you might be surprised to hear just how much my youngest absolutely LOVES Noah, particularly given his folkiness.  She's got tickets to see him next year and (excluding festivals) they're the most expensive gig tickets I've ever bought.  But despite having heard the album loads, I've never actually listened to it, so I'm interested to see what I make of it on a one-on-one basis. You know what - the headline is that, having actually listened to it I can report that, at least in places, I liked this way more than I previously did.  I listened to it over headphones for the first time and t
Read more

She's got a wicked way of acting like St. Anthony

Image
I've done The Guardian's list of the top 50 albums of the year for the last three years and (mostly) enjoyed it, so here we go again with this year's list .  Last year I'd previously met ten of the list - it will be interesting to see whether that is repeated this year.   #50 : Crazymad, For Me - CMAT Coming off halfway between Jenny Lewis and Self Esteem, Dublin’s CMAT sets life’s greatest embarrassments to ritzy country showstoppers – the musical equivalent of piling your beehive high to distract from your tear-reddened eyes. On her second album, she tots up the price she has paid for her bad boyfriends, self-subjugation and knowing avoidance of less-than-romantic realities, always with mordant humour rather than self-pity: “I’m just some stewardess who feeds your pets / And does your dishes and pays your rent,” she sings on the delicate, harmony-heavy Such a Miranda. For all that she has lost in these songs – pride, love, literal cash – her perspective remains a firm
Read more

Croopied in the reames, shepherd gurrel weaves

Image
Continuing my trip down The Guardian's   top 50 albums of 2023 #30 : The Age Of Pleasure - Janelle Monáe Monáe’s last album, 2018’s Dirty Computer, saw the high-concept pop star returning to earth after several albums of space-age fantasia, showing a softer, fallible side for the rest time. Its songs were still divided into three categories – Reckoning, Celebration and Reclamation – indicating an artist who hadn’t quite let go of the structural safety rails. But on The Age of Pleasure, Monáe is resolutely grounded in pursuit of a new kind of body high. To the decadently rendered diasporic sounds of reggae, dancehall and Afrobeats, she hymns pleasure and desire, connecting (as did Jessie Ware also did this year) sex as self-empowerment and celebrating the kaleidoscopic nature of identity. Or, as she puts it on Phenomenal: “I’m lookin’ at a thousand versions of myself / And we’re all fine as fuck.” I have experienced a couple of Janelle albums and I found them somewhat inaccessible -
Read more