She won't linger in the valley of despair

Continuing my trip back through the 1990 album charts.

28/01/90 : Colour - The Christians

We've gone from The Quireboys to The Christians, but their names are the only thing these acts have in common - I remember The Christians had a smooth sound, but couldn't name a single one of his tracks (and no, I never owned it - 8/49).

Well, this is an odd one.  Taken one track at a time, there's absolutely nothing wrong with any of them.  He's got a nice voice and the backing is all perfectly polished - you might not love it, but you'd be hard pushed to actively dislike it.  However, when the album serves up the same thing over and over again then it all gets a bit too much.  It's fine for dinner parties I guess, but being made to listen to it was a chore and I gave up well before the 75 minutes of the deluxe release version, I can assure you.

We're at #2 in the charts this week on their second week of a seventeen week run, with it having debuted at #1.  The rest of the top five were Phil Collins, New Kids On The Block (I'm going to be made to suffer this as well, aren't I?), a Cat Stevens best-of (another new entry) and Eric Clapton and the next highest new entry is Loop (all the way down at #29).

Wikipedia has three sentences on the album - it's by The Christians, it was released and it did well.  And that's your lot.  It's got some quite heavyweight session dudes on it though - Steve Ferrone (Heartbreakers & AWB), Manu Katche (Sting & Peter Gabriel) and Pino Pallodino (just about everyone) are all involved to some degree.  There's no word on critical opinion (I'm sure they hated it) and the only place it dented the chart other than here was Australia where it got to #111.

"Customers also listened to" Curiosity Killed The Cat, Then Jerico, China Crisis and Hue And Cry - none of those have gone down as the coolest bands ever.  As is also the case for The Christians, but a lot of people obviously liked them for this to do pretty well - but it all got a bit too much for me.

21/01/90 - Aaaargh, make it stop
04/02/90 - No, no, no

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