There are nine million bicycles in Beijing - that's a fact

Continuing my trip back through the 2005 album charts.

13/11/05 : Piece By Piece - Katie Melua

I didn't mind Katie Melua, but I seem to recall this second album didn't have the hooks that her first one did - let's see whether I remember that correctly, shall we?  The women are doing very this year so far - they've taken five of the seven weeks we've had.

Yup - all perfectly fine, but completely inessential.  I'm sure this got played a few times at many dinner parties and then everyone just went back to listening to her first album.  And that's pretty much all I've got to say about it other than I wasn't expecting to find a Cure cover ("Just Like Heaven") on there (it's perfectly fine though).

We're at #10 in the charts this week on her seventh week of an impressive 36 week run and it peaked at #1 in its debut week - and it managed another 14 week run later in '06.  The top five this week were Il Divo (a new entry - they really were very popular for a bit, weren't they?), Westlife, Kate Bush (another new entry), Robbie Williams and a Eurythmics best-of (another new entry with some fine tracks on it) and we've got another new entry at #6 for an Anastacia best-of - and I listened to all of this before I read the Wikipedia entry that told me it was a best-of, so it had to be rejected.

Wikipedia tells me that Mike Batt (The Wombles) was heavily involved in the album, including writing "Nine Million Bicycles" which apparently "caused controversy" when it was released.  I was wondering whether the Chinese Communist Party objected to the under-representation of bicycles in Beijing but apparently Simon Singh, the science writer pointed out jokingly that it wasn't scientifically accurate - so he wrote a more accurate version and she recorded it, and they both agreed it was rubbish.  

The critics didn't really pay the album any attention but Europe most definitely did, with it making the top ten in most countries and getting to #1 in Denmark, Norway, Poland and The Netherlands, with it being the best selling album of the year in The Netherlands and the second best selling album of '06 in Germany.  How peculiar!

"Customers also listened to" Eva Cassidy, Rumer, Norah Jones and Jamie Cullen - all very much in the same ballpark.  There's nothing wrong with this album - it's the very definition of "perfectly fine", but that doesn't make it very interesting.

06/11/05 - Offensively inoffensive
20/11/05 - Somehow unsatisfactory

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