There's a crystal view from my window and I can see the years to come

Continuing my trip back through the 1986 album charts

16/11/86 : Gods Own Medicine - The Mission

Well, I wasn't expecting to bump into this lot! I own a 12" of "Wasteland" which is a fine track but, off the top of my head, that's all I can think of from them - I'm expecting to recognise a few more when I hear them though. 

So, first up we have "Wasteland", which is still a fine track. And, whilst there is a dip in quality, it probably won't surprise you to hear that things don't exactly change stylistically in the remaining tracks. There aren't any terrible tracks though (which was actually a surprise) but I think you'd really have to be in the mood for it to listen to it all in one go and separate the tracks from each other - and 57 minutes is possibly more than anyone really needs.

We're at #14 with a new entry in the chart this week on the start of a four week run, which sounds pretty poor but it looks like Xmas was mostly responsible because it came back in the middle of January for a sixteen week run - but #14 was still as high as it got. The top five this week were Hits 5, best-ofs from The Police and Kate Bush (a new entry), a live album from Bruce Springsteen and Now Dance '86 and the next highest new entry was Michael McDonald (#22). It's a particularly compilation-heavy end-of-the-year week because we've also got The Greatest Hits of 1986 (#11) and Hits Mix '86 (#13) in there.

Wikipedia tells us this is their debut album and manages to give us a load of text that tells us absolutely nothing - the only thing of interest to me is that Julianne Regan (All About Eve) provides backing vocals. The critics were pretty mixed on it but commercially it did more away from these shores than I was expecting, but not a lot more - #30 in Sweden, #59 in Germany and #108 in the US.

"Customers also listened to" The Sisters Of Mercy, Fields Of The Nephilim, The Cult and All About Eve - all of which probably bring back fond memories for people who liked to wear black in the 80s. I didn't fall into that category but I enjoyed the best output from such groups and I certainly include "Wasteland" in there, but I didn't need a whole album of it - although I admit it had a more consistent quality level than I was expecting.

09/11/86 - A very enjoyable revisit
23/11/86 - Mostly very bland