In all terrain, they had guns and dogs and everything

Continuing my trip back through the 1977 album charts.

27/03/77 : Burnin' Sky - Bad Company

I don't think I know anything about Bad Company - they're rock-ish, aren't they?

It opens with a peal of thunder, which seems like a nicely stereotypically 70s rawk move.  And it doesn't really stray too far from such things - it's all done well enough in a soft Led Zep kinda style, but it's pretty unremarkable.  Having said that, compared with the atrocities I've endured recently, this was super enjoyable and I least understood a) what they were trying to do and b) why people bought it, so it deserves praise for that.  Having said THAT, I've absolutely no idea why they thought it was a good idea to record a version of "The Happy Wanderer" ("fal-da-ree, with my knapsack on my back") - it's just a bizarre outlier.  It is, undoubtedly, a cool album cover though.

This week we're at #21 in the album charts on their third week of an eight week run, with it having peaked at #17 in the previous week - we're really investigating some less successful albums this year, aren't we?  Which I'm enjoying, if not always the music!  The top five this week were best-ofs from Frank Sinatra and The Shadows, ABBA, the Heartbreakers compilation and another best-of from The Hollies with the highest new entry being The Wurzels (#32 - and we were only a couple of album away from getting this!).

Wikipedia tells me this is their fourth album - it didn't do quite as well as their previous three (which were surprisingly successful) but did OK nonetheless, getting to #15 in the US.  The only other fact of interest is that in Almost Famous, the band's first teeshirt looks suspiciously like the album cover.  And that's all the entry has on it - their entry tells me they were a supergroup headed up by Paul Rodgers (who we've seen a few times already), made up of ex-members of Free, Mott The Hoople and King Crimson.  They also split up in 1982, but got back together repeatedly until 2019, when Paul's health prevented any further get-togethers.

"Customers also listened to" LA Thunder, Free, The Firm and Foghat - what a great name Foghat is!  Bad Company aren't really my kind of thing at all, but I can't fault it for doing exactly what it sets out to do and it was certainly a lot more listenable than some other albums I might have written about recently.

20/03/77 - Perfectly bearable background noise
03/04/77 - Check out the album cover, but no more than that

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