I'm acting like a crazy love sick clown

Continuing my trip back through the 1961 album charts.

14/05/61 : Me And My Shadows - Cliff Richard And The Shadows 

Our third visit with Cliff this year and our fourth visit with The Shadows, even if they've only been named on two of them - I have at least heard of this album, so I'm expecting it to be bearable.

And yeah, it is indeed bearable. Like our last visit with Cliff, it does somewhat suffer with him being unable to decide who he wants to be - Elvis or an Everly Brother are closest here but he even throws in a bit of country as well. It does, however, feature a load of original tracks which is certainly a plus and also, unusually for me, I actually thought he had quite a nice voice on this - what is happening to me?!? Having said that, I've got absolutely no idea what he was doing on "Left Out Again" because it's waaaay too low for him, but most of it is perfectly pleasant and nicely of its time.

We're at #13 again in the charts this week on their 32nd week of a 33 week run, with it having peaked at #2, spending six weeks there (South Pacific being unassailable at the time).  The top five this week were Elvis (there's only two weeks left this year that he isn't #1), Cliff, South Pacific, George and Duane Eddy and we have THREE new entries this week - Elvis (#7), Peggy Lee (#18) and Ray Conniff (#19).  Peggy is unlucky because that's her third album we've seen this year and we've still not caught up with her - and she's not going to be the first named woman we meet because at #17 this week we have Nina & Frederik and they'll be coming your way very soon...

Wikipedia tells us this is Cliff's second album and that's pretty much it.  Somewhat bizarrely, give that Cliff was on a run of fifteen consecutive top three singles, no UK singles were released from the album. However, "Gee Whizz It's You" and "I Cannot Find a True Love" were paired together for a single in Europe and people were so mad for Cliff that they bought it on import - and it got to #4, breaking his run.

"Customers also listened to" thirteen other Cliff albums - it's astonishing what some people will put themselves through. However, I do have to admit that this particular album is not dreadful, which is as much as I can hope for under such circumstances.

07/05/61 - Really quite something
21/05/61 - An interesting historical listen

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