I looked over Jordan and what did I see?

Continuing my trip back through the 1961 album charts.

23/04/61 : A Golden Treasury Of Bilk - Mr Acker Bilk And His Paramount Jazz Band 

I only know Acker from "Stranger On The Shore" so I'm expecting this to be all like that, but there's absolutely no reason why it would be, I guess.  And there's only one way to find out.

Hmm - it's the same ballpark, but mostly a bit faster. It all feels very 20s/30s jazz, so I'm a bit surprised it was quite so popular in '61 but I guess if there's one thing we've learned from this year it's that people listened to all sorts! This was all done skilfully enough but I can't say I particularly enjoyed it and will certainly not be making any effort to revisit it.  That's quite the album cover though, isn't it?

We're at #11 in the charts this week on their fifth week of a six week run, with this being as high as it got and the top five this week were Elvis, South Pacific, Cliff, George and The Everly Brothers. There was also one new entry for Seven Brides For Seven Brothers at #18 - and it seems bizarre that this never got any higher than #6 whilst everyone went absolutely nuts for South Pacific.

Wikipedia doesn't have an entry for the album (or any of his seventeen albums listed) but his entry is quite interesting around "Stranger On The Shore" - it was the biggest selling single of 1962 over here and also got to #1 in the US, making him the second British artist to get to the top over there (after Vera Lynn, ten years earlier). He also, quite obviously, was part of a consortium which took over the Oxford Cheetahs speedway team in 1972.

"Customers also listened to" a load of other Acker albums and let me tell you he looks pretty damn sinister on some of the covers - I can imagine a generation of kids grew up terrified of him ("eat up your greens or the Acker will get you"). However, whilst I'm not convinced by the sartorial elegance, I can appreciate the musical skill involved - but I've absolutely no desire to listen to it again.

16/04/61 - Enjoyable different
30/04/61 - Interesting, but no more than that

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