But I will go down with this ship
Starting my trip back through the 2003 album charts.
28/12/03 : Life For Rent - Dido
Dido ruled the charts for a bit - I believe she still does the odd thing these days, but spends most of her time just sitting round on a massive pile of cash. I remember quite liking bits of this album but seem to recall it didn't quite deliver something different enough from No Angel to make it completely worthwhile. It was certainly one we owned though - I'm expecting the ownership ratio to be relatively high this year.
Yeah, this is all very nice with her warbling away over some non-challenging but not quite boring noises. I can't say too much of it came flooding back to me - although it did make me realise I'd completely forgotten about "White Flag". Throughout the whole album, my suspicion was that her voice just wasn't quite as strong as it should be to be quite so popular - but I guess there's no arguing it was what the people wanted. None of it's hateful, but I didn't need 51 minutes of it and I really can't imagine me ever listening to it again.
We're at #1 in the charts this week on her thirteenth week of a 57 week run, of which she spent ten weeks at #1. The rest of the top five were Will Young, a Michael Jackson best-of, The Black Eyed Peas and a Red Hot Chilli Peppers best-of and, somewhat unusually for the last week of the year, we have a new entry for Tony Henry (#96). I'd never heard of Tony but a quick Google tells me he's from St Albans and is regarded with fondness by Croatian football fans for making a mistake singing their national anthem before a match against England which resulted in him declaring to Wembley Stadium "my dear, my penis is a mountain".
Wikipedia has remarkably little on the album considering how massive it was. The critics were much nicer about it than I was expecting - I suspect they realised it wouldn't make any difference so they mostly just mentioned it wasn't really displaying any progression from No Angel. Commercially, it was a monster, getting to #1 or #2 across most of Europe and even #4 in the US, shifting twelve million copies globally. Three million of these were in the UK, making it the best selling album of the year here and the seventh best selling album of the decade.
"Customers also listened to" James Blunt, KT Tunstall, Katie Melua and Sarah McLachlan - I've never listened to an album from Sarah but the others are definitely in the same "popular with the masses" category. And Dido ruled them all around this time, but while this album is perfectly pleasant, it doesn't really go any way to explaining her massive popularity.
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