No one on earth could feel like this - I'm thrown and overblown with bliss

Continuing my trip back through the 1986 album charts

09/03/86 : Be Yourself Tonight - Eurythmics 


Our second visit with Annie & Dave this year (and our third overall) and I don't think I've ever listened to it, so I'm quite looking forward to it.

Given the strength of the (snappily titled) singles - "Would I Like To You?". "There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart)" (which is a great track), "Sisters Are Doin' It For Themselves" and "It's Alright (Baby's Coming Back)", I've absolutely no idea why I never checked this out. The rest of it maybe doesn't stand out from the crowd in quite the same way, but it's all perfectly listenable and well put together. There's nothing wrong with this album - it's just a shame it took me 38 years to listen to it!

We're at #7 in the charts this week on their 45th week of an impressive 76 week run, with #3 being as high as it got in its 2nd, 13th, 14th, 15th and 42nd weeks on the chart. The top five this week were Dire Straits, Whitney Houston, Hits For Lovers, Phil Collins and the Rocky IV soundtrack (which amusingly features a track called "Training Montage") and the highest new entry was Electric Light Orchestra (#12).

Wikipedia tells us it's their fourth album and features a "move away from their previous more experimental, synthesizer-based songs, to a more commercial pop/rock sound" - which feels a bit true, but not exactly the whole story. It features some pretty heavyweight guest artists - Stevie Wonder (with some heavenly harmonica playing), Aretha Franklin and Elvis Costello, but I think we can agree that the most important contributors are Olle Romo and Dean Garcia (credited with "wood stomping") and Sadie ("gravel stomping"). The critics were nice enough about it without going overboard but commercially it did better than I remembered getting to the top five in quite a few countries including #1 in Australia and a very decent #9 in the US (selling a million copies over there).

"Customers also listened to" Kajagoogoo, Nik Kershaw, Aretha Franklin and Dead Or Alive, which is quite a strange mix, to say the least. I enjoyed this though - a very pleasant, if somewhat belated, first-time listen.

02/03/86 - Doesn't quite work for me
16/03/86 - A fun revisit

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