You got mud on your face, you big disgrace

Continuing my trip back through the 1977 album charts.

18/12/77 : News Of The World - Queen

I've not heard many Queen albums and I've absolutely never heard this one - it's obviously got some great singles on it, but I can't say my expectations are massively high for it.

Hmmm.  Definitely hmmm.  It's not great, but it's an interesting listen - they've certainly chucked quite a lot in there.  It's got a strong opening with "We Will Rock You" (one of their better known songs, but never released as a single) and "We Are The Champions", so it's no surprise that the quality level does dip after that (and some of them are really pretty dodgy) but the variety is surprising with funk, calypso and cabaret blues all popping up unexpectedly.  The version I listened to also had a particularly bizarre live version of "We Will Rock You", played to a completely different tune - why would they do that?  I do like the pleasingly odd cover though.

We're at #9 in the charts this week on their eighth week of a eighteen week run, with it having peaked at #4 in its second week - one of their least successful albums chartwise.  The top five this week were Disco Fever (a compilation), best-ofs from Bread, Paul Simon and Gladys Knight and Feelings (another compilation), amusingly followed by the odd couple of The Sex Pistols and Fleetwood Mac.  We have a very Christmassy new entry down at #18 - Derek & Clive Come Again (reviewing that would have been interesting!) and the only other two new entries are The Salvation Army (#43) and The Ramones (#60 - which is the last position on the chart at this time and as high as this album ever got to).

Wikipedia has quite a lot on the album (254 milliPeppers) which tells me that it's their sixth album and a reaction to punk which caused them to move away from prog to a rockier sound (for some of the album anyway).  Apparently, the album was recorded in two separate studios and each time they spent two days setting up the drum kit - amusingly, "Andy Turner, a tea boy at Wessex, recalls thinking "You're being charged £200 an hour for this!"".  One of the studios also hosted The Sex Pistols at the same time which resulted in the famous interaction between Sid and Freddie - "Have you succeeded in bringing ballet to the masses yet?" "We're doing our best, dear!".

We then have a lengthy breakdown of each song on the album (which I totally ignored) and that's followed by quite an interesting section on that weird album cover.  It's based on the cover to a 1953 edition of Astounding Science Fiction drawn by Frank Kelly Freas (showing a giant robot holding a dead man) and the band (OK - I bet it was Brian) contacted Freas to ask him to redo it with a dead band instead.  He agreed despite being a classical music fan (I bet he got a nice payday out of it) and was worried about listening to the album in case it ruined his ideas - but fortunately he liked it (eventually).

The critics were pretty mixed on it at the time, with Robert Christgau really not liking it, saying it was devoted to "the futile rebelliousness of the doomed-to-life losers (those saps!) (you saps!) who buy and listen".  Retrospective reviews have been kinder, with NME later declaring it to be Queen's best album and it did well commercially, #3 in the US (four million copies sold) and #1 in The Netherlands and France.

"Customers also listened to" Freddie Mercury, Roger Taylor, Brian May and John Deacon - the full set (and I do worry what some of them will sound like solo).  I cant say I particularly liked this album as a whole, but it does feel like a gap in my musical knowledge has been plugged.

11/12/77 - Also surprisingly enjoyable
25/12/77 - Surprisingly enjoyable