Whatever happened to Leon Trotsky?

Continuing my trip back through the 1977 album charts.

20/11/77 : No More Heroes - The Stranglers

Well, this is a cool choice!  I'm not sure I'm going to like it, but I'm pleased to see it and I'm looking forward to listening to it - The Stranglers are a bit of a gap in my musical knowledge.

I wouldn't exactly say I liked it, but I enjoyed listening to it - and certainly more so than I enjoyed The Sex Pistols (which I met coming up to three years ago now!).  Whereas the Pistols tracks are all just the same shouty anger, there's more variety and meaning in this - and it's more a case of menace then anger.  The title track is a fine song and I'd have to say "School Mam" also stood out for me as a most peculiar song indeed - it goes places you really don't expect.  I was also somewhat surprised by the opening track title "I Feel Like A Wog" (there's a word you'd have heard a lot more in the late 70s than you do now).  The message is anti-racist, but I'm still somewhat uncomfortable with it being sung by white guys - I'm sure it's been discussed a bit over the past 46 years though!

We're all the way down at #18 in the chart this week on their eighth week of a fourteen week run with it having peaked at a surprisingly high #2 in its second week.  The top five this week were the Bread best-of, The Sex Pistols, Rod Stewart, Electric Light Orchestra and Queen - that's looking more like a proper top five, isn't it?  The highest new entry is Status Quo (#6) and I"m also going to mention a very dated entry at #15 - The George Mitchell Minstrels' 30 Golden Greats, which will mean nothing to young people but please let me watch your face when you search for The Black and White Minstrel Show on YouTube.

Wikipedia tells us some weirdly specific details about the album cover ("The brass plaque was engraved by Steven Stapleton of Nurse with Wound") but very little else.  Critical reception was favourable and it's generally viewed to be their fines hour, but it did very little away from these shores apart from getting to #20 in The Netherlands.

"Customers also listened to" Sham 69, Iggy Pop, Ian Dury and The Clash - another fine selection of 70s/80s sounds.  This isn't really my sort of thing, but it was an interesting listen and I can definitely see its place in the musical timeline.

13/11/77 - A well done not my kinda thang
27/11/77 - Acceptable background sounds

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I saw your mum - she forgot that I existed

Image
Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts 22/12/23 :  Stick Season - Noah Kahan Well, this week surprises us on a couple of fronts.  Firstly, and probably the least expected, this is possibly the album I've heard most this year - because obviously I'm a massive Noah fan. Well, it might not surprise you to hear it's not me but my delightful daughter - but you might be surprised to hear just how much my youngest absolutely LOVES Noah, particularly given his folkiness.  She's got tickets to see him next year and (excluding festivals) they're the most expensive gig tickets I've ever bought.  But despite having heard the album loads, I've never actually listened to it, so I'm interested to see what I make of it on a one-on-one basis. You know what - the headline is that, having actually listened to it I can report that, at least in places, I liked this way more than I previously did.  I listened to it over headphones for the first time and t
Read more

She's got a wicked way of acting like St. Anthony

Image
I've done The Guardian's list of the top 50 albums of the year for the last three years and (mostly) enjoyed it, so here we go again with this year's list .  Last year I'd previously met ten of the list - it will be interesting to see whether that is repeated this year.   #50 : Crazymad, For Me - CMAT Coming off halfway between Jenny Lewis and Self Esteem, Dublin’s CMAT sets life’s greatest embarrassments to ritzy country showstoppers – the musical equivalent of piling your beehive high to distract from your tear-reddened eyes. On her second album, she tots up the price she has paid for her bad boyfriends, self-subjugation and knowing avoidance of less-than-romantic realities, always with mordant humour rather than self-pity: “I’m just some stewardess who feeds your pets / And does your dishes and pays your rent,” she sings on the delicate, harmony-heavy Such a Miranda. For all that she has lost in these songs – pride, love, literal cash – her perspective remains a firm
Read more

Croopied in the reames, shepherd gurrel weaves

Image
Continuing my trip down The Guardian's   top 50 albums of 2023 #30 : The Age Of Pleasure - Janelle Monáe Monáe’s last album, 2018’s Dirty Computer, saw the high-concept pop star returning to earth after several albums of space-age fantasia, showing a softer, fallible side for the rest time. Its songs were still divided into three categories – Reckoning, Celebration and Reclamation – indicating an artist who hadn’t quite let go of the structural safety rails. But on The Age of Pleasure, Monáe is resolutely grounded in pursuit of a new kind of body high. To the decadently rendered diasporic sounds of reggae, dancehall and Afrobeats, she hymns pleasure and desire, connecting (as did Jessie Ware also did this year) sex as self-empowerment and celebrating the kaleidoscopic nature of identity. Or, as she puts it on Phenomenal: “I’m lookin’ at a thousand versions of myself / And we’re all fine as fuck.” I have experienced a couple of Janelle albums and I found them somewhat inaccessible -
Read more