My boss says, no dice, son, you gotta work late

Continuing my trip back through the 1961 album charts.

22/01/61 : The Eddie Cochran Memorial Album - Eddie Cochran

I obviously recognise Eddie's name and I know he did early rock and roll, but I'm struggling to remember anything he actually did - I'm assuming this is going to have his best known tracks on it, so let's see how many I recognise. 

A few actually - "C'mon Everybody", "Three Steps To Heaven" and "Summertime Blues" (and it's interesting that he wrote them all, which is not something we've generally seen this year). The rest of it is all perfectly listenable in an early Elvis stylee - it's interesting to thinking what Eddie might have gone on to do if he'd lived longer. This isn't really my sort of thing but I didn't mind it at all - it was an interesting historical listen.

We're at #15 in the charts this week on his final week of a nine week run with it having peaked at #9 - somewhat strangely it had further runs of thirteen and five weeks in '63. The top five this week were Elvis, South Pacific, George, Cliff and Adam and we have two new entries in the chart for Shirley Bassey (#13) and Glenn Miller (#14).

Wikipedia tells us this was originally released as his second album, somewhat subtly titled Twelve Of His Biggest Hits, but a couple of weeks later he died aged 21 after a car crash in Chippenham, (along with Gene Vincent, who survived). Apparently, he died in a hospital in Bath and there's a plaque in the grounds - I never knew anything about that! So the album was retitled and reissued and did OK over here, but somewhat bizarrely neither it nor any other of his albums have ever charted in the US.

"Customers also listened to" "no similar recommendations" which feels a bit strange - if you like early Elvis I can't see you won't like this, but maybe they were sworn enemies or something. I thought this was OK though - yeah, it's dated but in an interesting way.

15/01/61 - A nice voice, but some odd tracks
29/01/61 - A very welcome revisit