When you open your mouth you don't talk, you shout

Continuing my trip back through the 1986 album charts

03/08/86 : Rat In The Kitchen - UB40

I don't mind earlier UB40 stuff, but I believe I've got absolutely no time for any the nonsense they chucked out around this time - let's find out if I'm right!

To be fair, it's not as bad as I was expecting - it is at least all original tracks and, taken singly, they're all decent enough reggae-ish stuff (I'm not going to be bold enough to claim they're really reggae because it's not a genre I know anything about). However, a whole album of it is really very dull indeed - no, thank you.

We're at #8 in the charts with a new entry this week on the start of a decent enough thirteen week run, with this being as high as it got. The top five this week were Madonna, Chris de Burgh, Wham!, Queen and Eurythmics and the next highest new entry was Sigue Sigue Sputnik (#10) - oh yes, very 80s indeed! I took a trip down a SSS Wikipedia rabbit hole and learned that despite only really being everywhere in the papers for a month or so they actually produced six albums between now and '03 and, taking capitalism to the next level, this album features adverts between tracks!

Back to UB40, Wikipedia has one of the smallest entries we've seen so far this year which tells us very little until right at the end where it sneakily tells us that Herb Alpert plays trumpet on "Rat In Mi Kitchen" - Jaki Graham and Ruby Turner also provided backing vocals on the album. The critics were actually pretty nice about it and commercially it did much better than I expected, getting to #3 in The Netherlands, #4 in New Zealand and even #53 in the US - quite what they made of it is very unclear.

"Customers also listened to" Aswad, Maxi Priest, Eddy Grant and Musical Youth. There are some fine British reggae-ish names there - Eddy in particular doesn't get nearly as much credit as he deserves, particularly when compared to the amount of fame and fortune UB40 received. I didn't hate this, but there's absolutely nothing here that warrants a repeat listen for me.

27/07/86 - Not for me
10/08/86 - Surprisingly enjoyable

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