Each morning I get up I die a little - can barely stand on my feet

Continuing my trip back through the 1977 album charts.

13/02/77 : A Day At The Races - Queen

Queen have had quite a few write-ups here over the years and it's been quite the mixed bag - one "proper" album, one greatest hits, one live album, one posthumous album and three singles!  So I'm pleased to give them another proper go and quite looking forward to it, whilst at the same time suspecting I'm going to be disappointed.

OK - let's start, as one often does with Queen albums, with the well known singles - "Somebody To Love" is undoubtedly a fine track , whilst "Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy" and "Tie Your Mother Down" are both listenable, although a lot of the latter is surprisingly Status Quo-ish which I didn't remember.  The rest of the album is the usual mixed bag which didn't quite grab me on first listen but I'm sure the fans loved.  I did feel a lot of it was quite under-produced, which is quite a surprise - some more polishing certainly wouldn't have hurt matters.  Overall, I found it a bit of a disappointment compared to A Night At The Opera but that could well be down to relative lack of familiarity.

We're at #22 in the charts this week on their ninth week of a twenty week run, with it having peaked at #1 in its third week.  The top five this week were The Shadows best-of (just starting a six week run at the top, which just seems mad with hindsight), Pink Floyd (a rare high new entry), Slim Whitman (what?), Evita and Leo Sayer (this album really was mystifyingly successful) and the next highest new entry was the Dance To The Music compilation (#19, but it rose to #5 next week).

Wikipedia has quite a bit on the album (211 milliPeppers) and I think we can safely say that most of it goes into quite a bit more detail than anyone needs - "On 19 July, May's 29th birthday, (...), the band were mailed items related to penguins. A giant penguin ice maker was also shipped to the band. These items were mailed to the band because of May's interest in penguins".  Errr - OK.  The critics were pretty mixed on the album at the time but have retrospectively been kinder to it (I can imagine that my opinion would also improve with repeated listens) - commercially, as is generally the case with Queen, no-one cared what the critics thought and it did well also getting to #1 in The Netherlands and Japan (and very few people do that) and #5 in the US, shifting 1 million copies over there.

"Customers also listened to" Freddie Mercury, Roger Taylor, Brian May and David Bowie - one of these things is not the same!  As I said though, for me this was all a bit of a disappointment which might be reduced with further listens, but there's absolutely no chance of that happening.

04/02/77 - Not my cup of tea
20/02/77 - In which I fail to form an opinion

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