Long ago I heard a tale I never will forget

Continuing my trip back through the 1986 album charts

06/07/86 : The Seer - Big Country


Well this is a very pleasant surprise and the third one we've owned this year - I loved this album at the time, but I've certainly not revisited it as often as The Crossing or Steeltown, so I'll be interested to see what memories it brings back.

Yeah, this was a nice trip back down memory lane! I don't think it's as good an album as either of the other two, but nothing wrong with it and it's got some decent tracks on it - "Look Away" and "One Great Thing" were decent singles and I also liked "The Seer" (with quite a clever vocal arrangement from Kate Bush), "Hold The Heart" (nicely yearning) and "Eiledon" and "Remembrance Day" (with backing vocals by June Miles-Kingston, whose voice also works well with Stuart's).

We're at #2 in the charts this week on the start of a decent sixteen week run, with this being as high as it got. The rest of the top five were Madonna (another new entry), Eurythmics (another one!), Genesis and Queen and the next highest new entry was Steve Winwood (#10) - that's a pretty decent clutch of new entries there!

Wikipedia tells us that it's their third album and it contains Scottish references - thanks for that, Captain Obvious. The critics were pretty middling on it, but it did better commercially in Europe than you might imagine, making the top twenty in quite a few countries and hitting the top spot in, quite obviously, Finland - it also got to #59 in the US which isn't a huge amount to write home about, but it's still better than I imagined it would.

"Customers also listened to" Simple Minds, The Alarm, The Waterboys and Andi Sex Gang - one of these things is not the same! I've always been a Big Country fan and they're the band I've paid to see live most - unfortunately I never saw them in the Stuart Adamson era, but this was a very pleasant trip down memory lane back to when I used to listen to this on repeat in my bedroom.

29/06/86 - Yeah, I liked this
13/07/86 - Mystifyingly popular

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