Mother doesn't know where love has gone

Continuing my trip back through the 1986 album charts

23/11/86 : Through The Barricades - Spandau Ballet

I like and own True, but that's pretty much all of my experience with them Spandau boys - I remember the title track, but know absolutely nothing about anything else on here. It's fair to say expectations aren't high though. 

Hmm - this is all very bland. It also feels like it's been designed by committee to give all the band members (who I suspect at this point were already not getting on) a fair go at things - there's far too many guitar and sax solos on there andTony's voice is also not the thing of beauty it was a few years beforehand. None of it is horrible but, with the notable exception of the title track, it's just not very good - it's also not a great album cover.

We're at #7 in the chart this week with a new entry on the start of a pretty decent nineteen week run - but it's not quite the 90 weeks that True managed. The top five this week were Hits 5, best ofs from Kate Bush and The Police, Top Gun and Madonna and the highest new entry was The The's Infected (#14 - it never got any higher than this, but had 30 weeks in the chart), closely followed Pet Shop Boys' Disco (#15 - which again never got any higher, but managed 72 weeks).

Wikipedia has a surprising amount on the album (226 milliPeppers) and it basically tells us they wanted everyone to know they were really a rock band and this was their attempt to make it clear.  Apparently they did this by spending the time before this album suing their record label for not promoting their music properly and hanging out in Dublin partying with (quite obviously) Def Leppard. The critics were generally pretty negative about the whole thing and commercially it was a mixed bag, getting to #1 in Italy and making the top ten in The Netherlands, Germany, Iceland and Norway but not really cutting through anywhere else.

"Customers also listened to" Paul Young, The Human League, Wham! and ABC - some fine 80s names there. As are Spandau Ballet, but there's a strong argument that they didn't exactly have an extended period of quality output and this is unfortunately just dull and not very good.

16/11/86 - Not exactly blessed with variety
30/11/86 - Subtle and understated