A thousand shadows can never look back

Continuing my trip back through the 1961 album charts.

03/12/61 : The Shadows - The Shadows

The Shadows are somewhat of a musical blind spot for me - in my head they just do stuff like "Albatross" but I've no idea whether that's actually the case.  Obviously there's only one way to find out.

Well, I wasn't expecting "mostly competent" to be my overriding impression - there's nothing wrong with any of the songs, but there doesn't appear to be a huge level of skill involved at any point (and some of the guitar playing sounds surprisingly ropey in places).  And the lack of words on most of the songs does also make you often think "where is this going?" and the answer is often "absolutely nowhere".  I can't think of any reason to slag this off, but the fact that it was popular at all speaks volumes about the competition at the time - I'm also very unconvinced by the amount of effort they put in to the album cover.

We're at #5 in the charts this week on their thirteenth week of a 57 week run, with it having peaked at #1 for five weeks of its first seven - the mind boggles!  The rest of the top five were George Mitchell Minstrels, South Pacific, Elvis Presley and yet more George and there's one new entry this week for - guess who - yes, it's Elvis (#9).

Wikipedia has a surprising amount on the album but very little content - the only thing I took away from it is that some of the tracks have odd titles - "Shadoogie", "Nivram", "Find Me A Golden Street" and "Theme From A Filleted Place" are the top picks for me.  And that's it for anything of interest.

"Customers also listened to" many, many Shadows and Cliff albums and The Spotnicks, whoever they are.  I can see the argument for a best of The Shadows (as long as they keep it short) but I struggle to see why anyone would want to listen to this.

26/11/61 - Surprisingly improved by the addition of Cliff
10/12/61 - Fine, but forgettable