Shot through the heart and you're to blame

Continuing my trip back through the 1986 album charts

30/11/86 : Slippery When Wet - Bon Jovi

This is our FIFTH album visit with Bon Jovi (the group and the man) and they've varied from surprisingly enjoyable to surprisingly terrible, but I've got to enjoy this one (which I've never actually heard before), haven't I?

Well, it doesn't exactly start with a low profile opener with "Let It Rock" and then swiftly breezes through "You Give Love A Bad Name", "Living On A Prayer" and "Wanted Dead Or Alive". It's fair to say the second half doesn't quite maintain the quality level but it's all still perfectly listenable whilst being utterly bombastic, complete with ridiculous guitar solos. I imagine it brings back great memories for plenty around my age and slightly younger - it feels like a perfect album for early teenagers at the time. But, even at my advanced age, I didn't mind it at all.

We're at #8 in the charts this week on its twelfth week of an impressive sixty week run, although somewhat surprisingly it peaked at #6 in its eleventh and eighteenth weeks. It's had legs though and was back in the charts quite a few times throughout the 90s, clocking up 144 weeks in total and last being seen in '14. The top five this week were Now 8 (a new entry), Hits 5, best-ofs from Kate Bush and The Police and Top Gun and the highest new entry was Duran Duran (#16) with Notorious, and I was amazed to see that was as high as it ever got.

Wikipedia tells us this is their third album and, unsurprisingly, their most successful one. The band weren't very impressed with the album cover (which I quite like) but that was mostly because their record company wouldn't let them use the busty woman they originally wanted - how rude of them! The critics were nice enough about it, but commercially it absolutely blew up getting to #1 in Australia, Canada, Finland, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland and the US, where it spent eight weeks at the top and was the best selling album of '87.

"Customers also listened to" Def Leppard, Poison, Guns N Roses and Whitesnake - all bands I'm quite happy to avoid thank you very much. As is generally true for Bon Jovi, but I have to admit there are some decent tracks on this - I struggle to imagine anyone needs it in their life, but I bet there have been many happy teenage hours spent rocking out to it.

23/11/86 - Mostly very bland
07/12/86 - VERY 80s!

Comments

  1. Anonymous23 October 2024 at 19:13

    Ho ho. Recently selected Bon Jovi to listen to on a car trip to the top of the Coromandel. Was surprisingly fun and it did prompt me to add some of their canon of worl to my general play list.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous23 October 2024 at 19:14

    Work even

    ReplyDelete

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