Life keeps afloat and my love grows

Continuing my trip back through the 1977 album charts.

27/11/77 : Moonflower - Santana

Our third visit with Santana and so far my general take-away has been appreciation of the skill rather than enjoyment of the music - I've absolutely no reason to expect that run will not continue here, although I'm a bit concerned at the 87 minute running time.

Well, this is an odd one because it's a mix of studio and live tracks, randomly interspersed for no obvious reason.  There's definitely some impressive skill on there, but most of the tracks just go on for far too long - "Soul Sacrifice/Head, Hands & Feet" drags on for 14 minutes!  I was surprised though to hear the cover of The Zombies' "She's Not There" (they're from St Albans, don't you know?) - it's pretty well done.  I didn't hate this and found most of it to be acceptable background sounds (if more 60s than 70s), but it's also not great.

We're at #10 in the chart this week on their fifth week of a surprisingly decent 25 week run, with it having peaked at #5 in its fourth week.  The top five were the Bread best-of (this had three weeks at the top in a TWELVE week run in the top two!), the Disco Fever compilation, The Sex Pistols, Rod Stewart and Status Quo and the highest new entry is Rick Wakeman's amusingly titled Criminal Record (#25).

Wikipedia has a couple of paragraphs which tell us absolutely nothing I haven't already commented on.  It did well commercially - #10 in the US (shifting two million copies) and it did surprisingly well in Europe as well hitting #6 in France, #3 in Italy and #2 in The Netherlands, 

"Customers also listened to" Los Lonely Boys, Malo, Touch Of Power and Jesse Colin Young - none of whom I can tell you anything about.  And the only thing I can tell you about Santana is that we're yet to reach their one album I know I enjoy - but it's out there somewhere...

20/11/77 - An interesting listen
04/12/77 - Not great

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