Well I'm standing by a river but the water doesn't flow

Continuing my trip back through the 1990 album charts.

01/04/90 : The Road To Hell - Chris Rea

Chris Rea's an odd one - he's very well known but (for most people) for just for the two songs and I've got no real idea what I'm going to get here.  Slightly bluesy-pop-rock?!?  Whatever it is, I've certainly never owned it (7/40).

It starts off with the title track, but "Part 1" and hence not the one that everyone knows and that starts with three minutes of random snippets from traffic reports, which wasn't really what I was expecting and isn't a great album opener, if I'm being honest.  But then we get the one that everyone knows and it's a way better track than I remembered - it went straight on my general playlist.  And yeah, slightly bluesy-pop-rock is pretty accurate - it's not going to set the world alight but it's well done, all very listenable without getting too samey and there's some very decent guitar work on there.  It's not a million miles away from The Notting Hillbillies but, for me, this is streets ahead in terms of a well put together album - as well as the title track, I also particularly liked "Looking For A Rainbow".

We're all the way down at #11 in the charts this week on his 22nd week of a 44 week run, with it having spent its first three weeks at #1 - wow, that was a lot more successful than I remember!  The top five this week were The Carpenters, Bowie, Sinead O'Connor, a Van Morrison best-of and Depeche Mode and we have one more new entry in the top ten which is Iron Maiden (#9 - and I'm not explaining all that again!)

Wikipedia has quite a lot on the album - it's his tenth album and Warner Brothers were absolutely convinced it was going to bomb.  So much so that they made him record Auberge, the follow-up, before they'd release it with the agreement that "if Road To Hell didn’t work – and they said it won't – we would jump straight away to Auberge and forget about it".  All of which shows exactly how much they know because this is easily his most critically well regarded and commercially successful album.  Wikipedia also tells me that "The Road To Hell (Part 2)" is his only top ten single - which was true at the time I guess, but "Driving Home For Christmas" also snuck in there in 2021.  The album did very well in Europe getting to #2 in Austria and Sweden and #3 in Germany and Norway, but it really smashed it in the UK, selling 1.8 million copies here alone - so it really was waaaay more successful than I remembered.

"Customers also listened to" Dire Straits, The Notting Hillbillies (see - I told you), Chris de Burgh and, errr, Pink Floyd.  OK.  Well, whatever - I really liked this album and I'm not entirely sure how it completely passed me by at the time but I was glad I was forced to check it out after all those years.  Chris hasn't been in the best of health for quite a few years, but he's still hanging in there and turned up in one of Paul & Bob's charming Xmas specials a few years ago.

25/03/90 - Nope, I don't get it
08/04/90 - Not the Doppler effect, but...