All the doors I closed one time will open up again
Continuing my trip back through the 1986 album charts
20/07/86 : Back In The High Life - Steve Winwood
Like Robert Palmer, this is another album that I remember enjoying the singles I heard but being somewhat mystified as to who was buying it - I'm expecting this to sound very similar.
The album opens with "Higher Love" which was a track I'd completely forgotten about, but it's got a lovely clean sound to it (even if it does go on far too long). I also particularly like the title track - the rest of it is OK, but kinda fades together somewhat. It all has quite a Genesis-y feel to it (which has lead me to wonder why I never consider who was buying their albums) - I didn't mind it, but he could have done with some guidance on the length of his tracks because the shortest one is 5:21.
We're at #8 in the charts on his third week of a fifteen week run, with this being as high as it got. Which sounds like a pretty decent run for the lad, but somehow he managed another six runs across '87 giving him another 27 weeks in the chart - which just seems very odd indeed. The top five in the chart this week were Madonna, Wham!, Queen, Eurythmics and Chris de Burgh and the highest new entry was Samantha Fox (#17 - about to start a ten week run in the charts!).
Wikipedia has an unexpectedly huge amount on the album (269 milliPeppers) and having looked at it, I'm not entirely sure what it's all about. There are quite a few noteworthy people involved in the album - Nile Rodgers, Chaka Khan, James Taylor, James Ingram and Jocelyn Brown all jumped out at me, but I didn't know John "JR" Robinson who is a session drummer who has played on a load of things over the years - he's got an impressive CV! Back to the album, it was well received by the critics and was nominated for seven Grammy awards, with the album winning Best Engineered Non-classical (it does sound very good) and "Higher Love" winning Record Of The Year and Best Pop Vocal Performance.
Commercially, it did pretty well - somewhat surprisingly (given he's English, which I always forget) it did better in the US than it did here, getting to #3, but I guess it is a pretty US kinda sound. His entry is pretty interesting - the man has done a LOT in his time, having had fourteen top twenty album either solo or as part of The Spencer Davis Group, Traffic or Blind Faith and he's also been a session musician on some interesting albums for artists including Jimi Hendrix, Lou Reed, Vivian Stanshall, Toots & The Maytals, John Martyn, George Harrison, Talk Talk, Phil Collins, Paul Weller, Slash and Miranda Lambert - which suggests quite the versatility!
"Customers also listened to" Bruce Hornsby, Don Henley, Mr Mister and Peter Gabriel - I can see the similarities there. Steve feels like a "musician's musician" and there's a lot of skill on display here and some decent enough tunes, but it does feel like he could have done with someone to tell him when enough was enough.
.jpeg)
Comments
Post a Comment