There are no exit signs and all the doors are locked
Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts
24/11/23 : Theatre Of The Absurd Presents C'est La Vie - Madness
Well, I wasn't expecting this lot to knock Taylor off the top! I've no real idea what to expect from it - I'm kinda expecting it to be like the Madness I know from back in the day, but just less so.
Yeah, it is "less so" in terms of being less frenetic and less amusing (at first listen anyway) but it's also a lot stranger than I was expecting - it's presented along the lines of a cabaret evening with spoken word sections introducing some of the tracks. It's quite ambitious (much more so than I was expecting) - I'm not sure it entirely works, but I'm also not sure it doesn't. I didn't particularly like it, but a big part of that was the uncertainty as to what exactly I was supposed to do with it - all in all, I think we can safely say I'm not sure about any of it. Does that help? I think Ian Dury is probably the closest touchpoint I can quickly think of, but it's not really all that much him very much either. I can see this must all be very useful in helping people imagine what we've got here..
As I've already given away, we're at #1 with a new entry this week - quite the surprise for me. The rest of the top five are Taylor, Drake (back up from #24 last week - who is listening to this?!?), The Rolling Stones and Dolly Parton (another new entry). And we're going to spend a few sentences on Dolly's offering - it's an album of mostly "rock" covers and boy are there a lot of them. 30 tracks, covering 140 minutes! I've listened to some of them and they're certainly, well, different - some work better than others. And there are also a lot of pretty well known guest artists on it - Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Sting, John Fogerty, Stevie Nicks, Joan Jett, Debbie Harry, Elton John, P!nk, Lizzo and Pat Benatar only really scratches the surface!
The next highest new entry is Andre Rieu (#12) who I mentioned loads when I visited 2010 but his debut album actually came out in 1984 and I'm also going to mention the album at #16 - it's Bublé's Christmas album. It's coming, baby!! Last week, I randomly guessed that Chase & Status would drop to #34 and I was surprisingly close because it's at #27 - I don't feel I can take any credit for one random number being close to another one though. I'm a bit intrigued as to what Madness might do because I'd never have guessed they'd get to #1, so part of me thinks I should go for something like #15. But, because of its oddness, I really don't see this having too many repeat listens so I'm reversing the numbers to go for #51 - let's see which is closer! And this week's Taylor stats are two in the top ten, five in the top twenty and ten in the entire chart.
Wikipedia tells me this is their thirteenth studio album, their first in seven years and their FIRST EVER #1! It also suggests The Kinks as a creative input and I can certainly see similarities with some of their stuff - The Small Faces Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake also isn't a million miles away. The critics were pretty nice about it - Mojo said it was "floridly titled, slow burning" and "on record alone, there's plenty to intrigue" which I agree with in an "I'm intrigued what this is" kinda way. It also scraped into the chart in Ireland, which didn't massively surprise me and Germany and The Netherlands, which did.
"Customers also listened to" The Selecter, Bad Manners, The Specials and The Beat - not that this album sounds like any of that lot. As I might previously have hinted, I didn't really know what to think of this - it doesn't feel like it would really appeal to anyone but its chart position would very much suggest I'm wrong on that front.
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