You need a little room for your big head, don't you, don't you?

Continuing my trip back through the 1990 album charts.

02/12/90 : Choke - The Beautiful South 

I've got a couple of other The Beautiful South albums, but they're one of those bands that you're probably fine just having their best-of (which is a fine compilation indeed) - I think I listened to this once and thought it was fine, but nothing more than that.  So no, we never owned it (3/5).

Bizarrely, it's not available on Amazon - I assume the reason is something to do with "What You See Is What You Get" because that's not available on Spotify (but the rest of the album is there).  "My Book", "Let Love Speak Up Itself" (which is a lovely song) and "A Little Time" (which is a clever song) are the ones I know from the best-of, but most of the rest are perfectly fine - if not quite as good.  Having said that, I know that you don't listen to TBS for the quality of Paul Heaton's singing, but it really feels that on a couple of the songs here they just pick the wrong key for him and you just think "why?". I'd also have to say it's an interesting choice to open the album with a song about the joys of masturbation.

We're all the way down at #13 in the charts this week on their fifth week of a 22 week run with it having peaked at #2 in its debut week.  The top five this week are Madonna, Elton John, Phil Collins, The Three Tenors and Jimmy Somerville (we've still not seen a studio album in the top five this year) and the highest new entries are Kim Appleby (#23) and Jive Bunny (#24).  Ah - good old Jive Bunny...

Wikipedia tells me this is their second album and "A Little Time" was a hit (their only UK #1) but the other singles were not.  It also deepens the mystery around "What You See Is What You Get" - it was only available on the German version of the album, but the cassette version of the album had a massive amount of blank space at one end which suggests it was going to be there but was pulled for some reason.  Weird.  The critics were a bit mixed on it, but The New York Times had a nice comment saying the album "reads like an 11-chapter novella from a criminally sane mind".  Unsurprisingly, it didn't do anything commercially anywhere else.

"Customers also listened to" - well, we'll never know because it's not on Amazon but I imagine it would be quirky, wry English bands.  This was an interesting listen, but a bit variable in terms of quality - enjoyable enough but there's nothing here I'd swap from their best-of.

25/11/90 - Baby Kylie!
09/12/90 - Fine, but still disappointing

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