What a peculiar year!

And that was 1957 - which was not massively different from 1956, but with surprisingly less variety.

Once again we started the year with The King And I - and boy did we see a lot of that album in this year!  I was somewhat surprised that we only saw fifteen albums in 1956 (but we did only have half of it to consider), but 1957 impressively undertook it with only ten albums in a whole year.  And woah - check out that variety!  Three Elvis Presley, three Frank Sinatra, two Tommy Steele, one Bill Haley and one Nat King Cole - check out the black dude bringing the diversity!  No women though (except for those on TKAI and one more I found hiding in the string quartet on one of Frank's albums).  I did skip over a couple of albums, but given they were compilations from Elvis and Frank, I don't feel that anyone was going to complain too much about that.

For the year-end list, we have to go back to bestsellingalbums.org and I'm going to be amazed if TKAI isn't #1!   And yeah, there it is followed by FOUR other soundtracks - Oklahoma!, High Society, The Tommy Steele Story and Elvis Presley's Loving You.  It's somewhat surprising we have to wait until #6 before we see Frank, but he slots in with A Swingin' Affair and This Is Frank Sinatra (his best-of) before Lonnie Donegan's Showcase, Nat King Cole's Love Is The Thing and Frank's Close To You finish off the top ten which is all we have for the year.

So did I actually like any of the albums this year?  Hmmm..

Given how few albums there were, I guess I might as well break the albums down by artist this year. Elvis actually did OK for himself with three distinctly different offerings - Rock N' Roll Number 2 (some rock and roll), Loving You (a slightly croonier offering) and Elvis' Christmas Album (some fine Xmas cheese).  And all of which were perfectly listenable, which was a pleasant surprise.

Frank's offerings were less different but still showed progression as he moved from Frankie (croon), through Close To You (croony swing) to A Swingin' Affair (swing), but Frankie (which was released in '55) definitely sounded old fashioned and the sound quality wasn't great either.

Tommy Steele was the only other artist with multiple offerings - The Tommy Steele Story soundtrack and The Tommy Steele Stage Show, both of which felt like cheap cash-ins on his sudden popularity.  And Bill Haley's Rock The Joint and Nat King Cole's Love Is The Thing were both perfectly listenable but very inessential, which was a shame for me considering Nat's album (Bill's - not so much).  And that's your lot for the year, folks!

Looking at the #1 albums for the year, we had six different chart-toppers which is the same as last year, but covering a full year this time.  TKAI held it for an astonishing 33 weeks with Frank's Swingin' Affair being the next most successful with 7 weeks and we had no debuts at the top all year.  It's also worth pointing out that Tommy Steele became the first British artist ever to have a UK #1 with the quite frankly ridiculous soundtrack to the film of his life story (all 20 years of them at the time) - I don't think I've previously mentioned that he's still with us at the ripe old age of 86.

The generally accepted best albums from the year that I didn't come across (and none of them charted) are Miles Davis's Round About Midnight, Thelonius Monk's Brilliant Corners, Sonny Rollins's Saxophone Colossus, John Coltrane's Blue Train, Little Richard's Here's Little Richard, The Crickets' The "Chirping" Crickets and a shedload of other jazz albums - jazz fans really like US jazz from around this time (my reactions have tended to be a little less appreciative).

The most read posts of the year were Elvis's Loving You and Nat King Cole's Love Is The Thing and the least read post of the year at the minute is this morning's Bill Haley offering but maybe everyone's just waiting to read it at bedtime to help them drop off to sleep.

Overall, the year's been a bit of a non-event - if it hadn't been for Elvis and Frank we wouldn't have had anything to listen to at all!  I can't say any of the albums really stood out for me - if I had to pick a favourite I'd go for Elvis's Rock N' Roll Number 2 or Frank's Close To You.  At the other end of the scale, I remain absolutely mystified as to the appeal of Tommy Steele - despite him having two opportunities to convince me.

So - where to next?  Well, certainly not '58 - a swift look suggests I'd only have the one Elvis album but FOUR Frank albums and we won't be needing any more of him for the time being thank you very much.  The biggest stretch of unreviewed years I currently have runs from '83-'96 so how about we go for '90 which was the year I left the safety of university and started earning money, so the ownership ratio may be reasonably high (and then again, it may not be!).  I am expecting there to be a few more women involved than this year (but I suspect it will still be depressingly low).

30/12/56 - Very much of its time (chart timeline)
10/02/57 - A strange album to end a strange year
30/12/90 - Breaking the rules! (blog timeline)