All the way back to the dawn of time itself!
And that was 1956 - the beginning of music as far as the UK album charts are concerned.
No Take That album to start the year (I suspect some of their parents weren't even born) but instead it was The King And I, the first of many soundtracks we saw this year, that took the honours. Well, I say "many" but given that we only actually saw fifteen albums in total this year (one of which, Elvis, we'd already written about), it wasn't really all that many now, was it? We had seven soundtracks, two live albums, two compilation albums and four "proper" albums - and it probably doesn't surprise you to hear we've never owned any of them (although I do own a Frank Sinatra best-of which includes several of the tracks from his album).
For the year-end list, we have to go back to bestsellingalbums.org which I don't really trust but it does at least give us the believable story that the three best selling albums of the year were soundtracks with them being Carousel (#1), The King And I and Oklahoma! - which certainly isn't the order I'd rank them in. Bill Haley's compilation is at #4 which means we have to wait until Frank's album at #5 before we get to what I consider to be a worthy offering.
Looking across all the albums in the year, I wouldn't say I hated any of them but some of them were extremely peculiar. "Various artists" was easily the most popular artist of the year - but ignoring them, Mel Tormé and Bill Haley were the only artists we met more than once.
Considering the soundtracks first, Oklahoma! was far and away the best offering in my opinion, with High Society also having some fine tunes on it. When I listened to The King And I as the first album of the year, I said I thought it was old-fashioned but with hindsight I was being totally unfair - it's a perfectly acceptable contemporary offering in comparison with Carousel and Salad Days, both of which also had terrible sound quality. Which leaves only The Eddie Duchin Story and The Student Prince, which I don't think I have words to describe - they were both decidedly odd.
Looking at the other albums, Frank Sinatra's offering was well ahead of the pack but Lonnie Donegan and Mel Tormé/Marty Paich (and his Dek-Tette!) were both interesting historical listens. Interestingly, of Bill Haley's two offerings I much preferred the compilation with the other one just feeling a bit strange. And finally, both live albums (Mel Tormé and Louis Armstrong) were a lot of fun recorded at The Crescendo and they managed to take you back in time nicely. And that's your lot!
I wasn't expecting this to be a great year for the ladies and so it turned out but there were a few tucked away in there - The King And I featured Marni Nixon, Terry Saunders and Rita Moreno (and how cool is it she's still with us!), High Society has Grace Kelly (on one track), Carousel had Barbara Ruick, Shirley Jones (also still with us) and a few others, Oklahoma! had Shirley Jones, Gloria Grahame (who the film Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool is about) and a few others, Salad Days had Eleanor Drew and Dorothy Reynolds (one of the writers) and The Student Prince featured Norma Giusti (who in terms of album covers gets the most recognition - for one of the sparsest contributions).
Looking at the #1 albums for the year, we saw six different chart-toppers which is likely to be one of the all-time lowest (I suspect TSOM is going to be responsible for a lower total at some point) but these are somewhat special circumstances. TKAI held it for the most weeks with eleven (which makes it surprising it wasn't the biggest seller of the year) with Carousel also having it for a tidy six weeks - and Frank was the only album that debuted at #1, but again the circumstances were somewhat unique given it happened in the first week the charts existed.
The generally accepted (by the internet (because I have absolutely no idea) best albums from the year that I didn't come across (and hence they didn't chart at all) are Charlie Mingus's Pithecanthropus Erectus (crazy name!), Fitzgerald & Armstrong's Ella & Louis (I imagine this is a pretty cool album), Duke Ellington's Ellington at Newport, Billie Holliday's Lady Sings The Blues (I'm still surprised that Rolling Stone didn't point me at this), Glenn Gould's Bach:The Goldberg Variations (for some reason I've actually heard of this) and Fats Domino's This Is Fats Domino! There are actually a surprising number of albums on the list - I assume that most of them just didn't make it over here because I imagine distributing albums was a lot of work back in the day.
The most and least read posts of the year have to be taken with even more of a pinch of salt than usual because readership figures across the site were unusually high - peak figures were 30x normal levels on some days! I assume something weird happened with bots or something, but if we assume that all pages were equally affected, the most popular page was TKAI (which feels like a plausible option) and the least popular was Mel Tormé's live offering, which certainly wasn't the worst album of the year (but something things just ain't fair).
Overall, the year was interesting rather than enjoyable - Frank and Oklahoma! are, for me, easily the most listenable and they both feature a load of decent tunes. Most of the rest are interesting or at least educational, but I did struggle with Salad Days (as much for the sound quality as anything else), The Eddie Duchin Story (plinky-plinky-plonk) and The Student Prince (just very very odd).
So, where to next? Well, having said I'd regret 1956, it really didn't turn out that way and I feel the 50s didn't really get a fair crack of the whip so I'm going to get 1957 out of the way as well. From what I've seen from a sneak peak I'm going to be listening to a fair amount of Elvis and Frank and I'm also going to be missing out quite a few weeks again because the chart is still only five albums for the year - but I'm actually not approaching it with too much trepidation.
Comments
Post a Comment