Remember MacNamara? Used to make a hullabaloo?

Continuing my trip back through the 1957 album charts.

10/11/57 : The Tommy Steele Story OST - Tommy Steele 

Having to skip over weeks has started early this year - I've had to miss out FOUR of them here and you can probably guess what was #1 for ALL of them!  I've also (somewhat surprisingly) skipped over an album which was a best-of from a little known artist called Elvis Presley - I would have included it (even though that would have been three out of for four for the lad) but I couldn't actually find it anywhere (there are a LOT of Elvis best-ofs out there!).  All of which brings us to this album which I'm intrigued by, because, as far as I know, Tommy Steele was a reasonably new singer around this time, so why is he already singing the soundtrack to his own story?  I'm sure Wikipedia will explain it all to me after I've listened to the album.

Well, this is an odd one - some of the songs are definitely rock and roll (although definitely "safer" than the sort Elvis was producing), but some of them are more of the music hall variety - I guess he was just trying to keep everyone happy.  It's not terrible, but it's really not great either.  I'm struggling to think what else I can say about it - it's just a bit odd really.  And that's quite some album cover, isn't it?

We're at #5 in the charts this week on the second week of a two week run, never getting any higher than that.  That's seems about right, doesn't it?  Ah no - that was its second run.  Its first run was slightly more successful - unbelievably, it was eighteen weeks and included four weeks at #1.  SERIOUSLY?!?  The rest of the top five were TKAI, Elvis, Frank and the Elvis best-of - all the usual names!

Wikipedia doesn't have an entry for the album, but it has quite the entry for the film which does include a section on the soundtrack.  Apparently the film was one of the first to feature rock and roll - I was somewhat surprised to see that it was also released in the US (it doesn't feel like a very US kinda film) and it came out three (THREE!) months after Tommy's first single was released.  It's also interesting for the fact that this is the first album by a British artist to reach #1 - I never noticed that until Wikipedia pointed it out to me.

Tommy was only 20 at the time and it seems like no-one really though the film would do anything, despite the songs being written by Lionel Bart (who I've heard of) and Mike Pratt (who I haven't).  But, to everyone's surprise, it did well and was the 13th most popular film in the UK that year.  And, if that wasn't bizarre enough, it was one of the few British films of the time to be shown in the USSR.  How strange the world was back then!

"Customers also listened to" Michael Holliday, Doris Day, Johnnie Ray and Jimmy Young.   Yes, obviously everyone still listens to Jimmy Young albums these days.  Although, to be honest, probably as many do as listen to Tommy Steele albums - this just feels very dated.

25/08/57 - Not his finest offering
22/12/57 - A bit of a lazy album

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