She's broad where a broad should be broad

Continuing my trip back through the 1961 album charts.

17/12/61 : South Pacific - OST

I'm sure I must know several of the songs on this, but the only one I know I know off the top of my head is "Happy Talk" which I obviously know from Captain Sensible's cover (and I'm very intrigued as to how that came into being).  I'm expecting this album though to be decent example of "that sort of thing", whilst being a bit more warbly/operatic than is generally my cup of tea.

Well there were a lot more tracks I recognised than I was expecting with me knowing "Some Enchanted Evening", "There Is Nuthin' Like A Dame" and "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair", with the last two being much more upbeat than I was expecting from a musical of this period.  Overall, I didn't mind the album at all - it has dated, but it's 66 years old now so I think we should probably expect that to be the case (having said that, the accent used for "Happy Talk" is really quite something!).  I would say, however, that having listened to the album I've got absolutely no idea what the plot to it all is - but it's a decent enough selection of songs overall, with some definite high points.

We're at #4 in the chart this week and if you think we've seen some wildly successful albums so far, then you ain't seen nothing yet!  This was its tenth week of a 102 week run, which sounds impressive right?  Well, that was its second run - its first one was 180 weeks (starting in May '58) and featured 115 weeks at #1 and a two year run in which it spent all but seven weeks at #1 (and they were obviously at #2).  They did things differently back then, didn't they?  The rest of the top five was George Mitchell at #1 and #3 and Elvis Presley at #2 and #5 and for a change we have a couple of new entries - Cliff Richard (#10) and Karl Denver (#19).

Wikipedia has remarkably little on the album other than how successful it was and that most of the people on the album are not the actors in the film, except for Mitzi Gaynor and Ray Walston (who was one creepy looking dude!).  And it feels somewhat weird that "creepy looking dude" is my main take away from the entry for an album that sold eight million copies!

"Customers also listened to" "no similar recommendations" which seems odd - maybe people don't listen to it any more?  I'd be quite interested to watch the film now - apparently there's also a remake from 2001 featuring Glenn Close and Harry Connick Jr, but since this is the first I've heard of it, I'm assuming it didn't overly trouble any audience.

10/12/61 - Fine, but forgettable
24/12/61 - Really something else

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I saw your mum - she forgot that I existed

Image
Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts 22/12/23 :  Stick Season - Noah Kahan Well, this week surprises us on a couple of fronts.  Firstly, and probably the least expected, this is possibly the album I've heard most this year - because obviously I'm a massive Noah fan. Well, it might not surprise you to hear it's not me but my delightful daughter - but you might be surprised to hear just how much my youngest absolutely LOVES Noah, particularly given his folkiness.  She's got tickets to see him next year and (excluding festivals) they're the most expensive gig tickets I've ever bought.  But despite having heard the album loads, I've never actually listened to it, so I'm interested to see what I make of it on a one-on-one basis. You know what - the headline is that, having actually listened to it I can report that, at least in places, I liked this way more than I previously did.  I listened to it over headphones for the first time and t
Read more

She's got a wicked way of acting like St. Anthony

Image
I've done The Guardian's list of the top 50 albums of the year for the last three years and (mostly) enjoyed it, so here we go again with this year's list .  Last year I'd previously met ten of the list - it will be interesting to see whether that is repeated this year.   #50 : Crazymad, For Me - CMAT Coming off halfway between Jenny Lewis and Self Esteem, Dublin’s CMAT sets life’s greatest embarrassments to ritzy country showstoppers – the musical equivalent of piling your beehive high to distract from your tear-reddened eyes. On her second album, she tots up the price she has paid for her bad boyfriends, self-subjugation and knowing avoidance of less-than-romantic realities, always with mordant humour rather than self-pity: “I’m just some stewardess who feeds your pets / And does your dishes and pays your rent,” she sings on the delicate, harmony-heavy Such a Miranda. For all that she has lost in these songs – pride, love, literal cash – her perspective remains a firm
Read more

Croopied in the reames, shepherd gurrel weaves

Image
Continuing my trip down The Guardian's   top 50 albums of 2023 #30 : The Age Of Pleasure - Janelle Monáe Monáe’s last album, 2018’s Dirty Computer, saw the high-concept pop star returning to earth after several albums of space-age fantasia, showing a softer, fallible side for the rest time. Its songs were still divided into three categories – Reckoning, Celebration and Reclamation – indicating an artist who hadn’t quite let go of the structural safety rails. But on The Age of Pleasure, Monáe is resolutely grounded in pursuit of a new kind of body high. To the decadently rendered diasporic sounds of reggae, dancehall and Afrobeats, she hymns pleasure and desire, connecting (as did Jessie Ware also did this year) sex as self-empowerment and celebrating the kaleidoscopic nature of identity. Or, as she puts it on Phenomenal: “I’m lookin’ at a thousand versions of myself / And we’re all fine as fuck.” I have experienced a couple of Janelle albums and I found them somewhat inaccessible -
Read more