Too many Florence Nightingales, not enough Robin Hoods

Continuing my trip back through the 1986 album charts

29/06/86 : London 0 Hull 4 - The Housemartins

I've certainly heard this album a few times, but I never owned it and I don't remember huge swathes of it, so I'm looking forward to revisiting it.

Yeah - I liked that, with it either being enjoyably bouncy or surprisingly sedate, with a nice bite to the lyrics. "Happy Hour" is obviously a fine track and I also particularly liked "Flag Day", "Over There" (still sadly very relevant) and "We're Not Deep" but they're all decent enough tracks - and certainly not over-produced. I actually really like the rough-and-ready nature of it because it's much closer to the stuff I was listening to around the time than most of the albums we've met so far this year. I could possibly listen to an argument that the bouncy numbers are all a little too similar, but I think the album just about gets away with it.

We're at #3 with a new entry in the chart this week (which MUST have been down to "Happy Hour") on the start of an impressive 37 week run, with this being as high as it got. The rest of the top five were Genesis, Queen, Simply Red and Peter Gabriel with the next highest new entry being Rod Stewart (#7).

WIkipedia tells us it's their debut album and it "reflects singer Paul Heaton's interest at that time in Christianity and Marxism" - quite the pairing for popular music! The title is also down to Paul and his assertion that The Housemartins were "the fourth best band in Hull" - ten points if you can name the three better bands. As an aside, as part of his promotion for his latest album (which is pretty decent), Paul did this interview and also appeared on RHLSTP (it's what the cool kids call it) and he came across really well. Back to this album, the critics were very nice about it (our old mate Robert Christgau gave it an A-) but, unsurprisingly, it didn't set the world alight commercially, although it did get to #35 in Australia.

"Customers also listened to" Paul Heaton, The Beautiful South, Deacon Blue and The Lightning Seeds - some nice lyrics amongst that lot. As we have here too - I really liked this and, along with the previous album, it's somewhat restored my faith in 1986.

And you get ten points if you came up with Everything But The Girl, Red Guitars and The Gargoyles as the three best bands in Hull at the time - I've never heard of The Gargoyles, but I did see Red Guitars live last year.

22/06/86 - An enjoyable first listen
06/07/86 - A pleasant trip down memory lane