I'm coming face to face with my conscience

Continuing my trip back through the 1990 album charts.

10/06/90 : Home : The Hothouse Flowers

My 1500th post!  Which has taken me 1,107 days - so I'm averaging 1.36 posts per day or, possibly easier to comprehend, 500 posts a year.  I've covered Rolling Stones 500 Greatest Albums ever, work's AlbumOfTheDay channel, twelve years of the album charts, two years of The Guardians 50 best albums, films and TV, Empire's 50 best films of this century, some ridiculous "how to make your life better" lists, most of R.E.M.'s albums, a large proportion of the most streamed tracks from each year, numerous gig, festival and theatre trips and various other random points.  It's kept me out of trouble, I guess...

Anyways, enough with the nostalgia - back to 1990!  I really liked People, their debut album but I haven't listened to it in years and I don't think I've ever listened to this album, so it will be interesting to see what I think of it.  And the ownership ratio continues to decline - 7/30.

Yeah, I didn't mind this at all - it's like a load of decent Van Morrison tracks.  Yes, it's more than possible that they're taking things all a bit too seriously, but there's some decent musicianship across all the tracks.  They also don't murder "I Can See Clearly Now" which I imagine can quite easily be done and I also particularly liked "Give It Up", but it's all pretty listenable.  If I had one complaint I'd say the album is a couple of tracks too long - it was starting to drag by the end of it.  But not dreadfully, so they got away with it.

We're at #5 in the chart with a new entry this week on their start of 21 week run and this was as high as it got.  The rest of the top five were Soul II Soul, Jason Donovan, Talk Talk and Paul Young (another new entry) - I think this is the first time this year we've met all of the top five and the next highest new entry is James's Gold Mother (#16 - a fine album indeed).

Wikipedia has very little on the album - it's their second album and that's pretty much it!  The critics made some very bizarre comments - The Los Angeles Times said "the gospel-influenced rave-ups that punctuate the band's second album call into question how much soul it can squeeze from the boogie" and I've no idea what that means.  It didn't do a lot commercially anywhere except for here and Australia, where it got to #1.

"Customers also listened to" The Stunning (what a rubbish name!), The Waterboys, Del Amitri and The 4 Of Us - quite a Celtic sound there, from the groups I know of at least.  And The Hothouse Flowers most definitely bring the Celtic to the party as well - it's not a "great" album but I really quite enjoyed this (certainly when compared to many of the albums we've had this year).

03/06/90 - Doubly enjoyable
17/06/90 - A very dull album

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