If he asks you, I was running
Continuing my trip back through the 1990 album charts.
08/04/90 : Missing...Presumed Having A Good Time - The Notting Hillbillies
The name rings a bell, but I'm drawing a blank otherwise - I'm assuming something country-ish and it probably won't surprise you to hear I've never owned it (7/39).
Yeah, it's slow country/blues - pretty well done, but completely not the sort of thing we'd be expecting to visit in the '90 charts. Except that I recognised Mark Knopfler's voice in there, so I suspect that might have helped it on its way a bit. It's not my sort of thing, but it's a pleasant enough listen with some decent musicianship, but really just a bit smooth to hold my interest. I'd also have to say that, somewhat ironically, it really doesn't sound like they're having a particularly good time.
We're all the way down at #14 in the charts this week on their fifth week of a fourteen week run with it having debuted at an astonishingly high #2 - wow! The top five this week were The Carpenters (back at the top!), a Bowie best-of, Heart (a new entry), a Van Morrison best-of and Phil Collins and we have one more new entry in the top ten which is Iron Maiden (#9).
What?!? Their third new entry in three weeks?!? And if it's at #9, shouldn't it have been picked? Well - looking into things a bit further, then we can see that between 24th February and 28th April they had a new entry every week at somewhere between #3 and #11. What?!? I actually had to do way more Googling than I expected to find out what was going on - to celebrate their ten year anniversary, they released ten CDs as a boxset called The First Ten Years. Each CD had two singles on it, along with b-sides and various other related tracks and also a "Listen With Nicko" for each track where Nicko McBrain would explain its history - a "drummers commentary" if you will. Also included with each "album" was a voucher and if you collected them all you could send them off for a limited edition storage box - and there's one on eBay now for #500, if you're tempted! It's an interesting bit of marketing but they certainly wouldn't get away with such nonsense these days and I'm also not going to reward them by forcing myself to repeatedly endure them.
Wikipedia has one sentence on the album and about five sentences on one review of the album, which feels like they got it the wrong way round. It was amazingly successful commercially though - as well as nearly making the top here, it got to #2 in Norway, #3 in Austria & Switzerland, #4 in New Zealand and #6 in Germany. You've heard of the Doppler effect - well, that was the Knopfler effect!
"Customers also listened to" Mark Knopfler, Dire Straits, David Knopfler and John Illsley - no prizes for spotting the theme running through that list. I didn't hate this, but I did find it all a bit bland and I'm very intrigued as to how it was quite so successful.
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