Seven hours since you went away - eleven coffees, Ricki Lake on play

Continuing my trip back through the 2003 album charts.

02/11/03 : Three - Sugababes

This is gonna be OK, isn't it? I'm not sure I'm going to need 56 minutes of it, but I'm hoping it will be mostly tolerable and actually good in places.

Well, it starts with "Hole In The Head" and there were certainly worse tracks out there (Kylie would have killed for this). I was also reminded that "Too Lost In You" was a fine single and I also liked "Million Different Ways", but it was all decent enough and there was a reasonable amount of variety across the album to stop me getting bored. I'd go as far as saying this is a pretty decent album - it's not going to set the world alight, but it was never supposed to.

We're at #3 in the charts with a new entry this week on the start of a decent 29 week run, with further runs of seven and five weeks coming in '04 and '05. The rest of the top five were an R.E.M. best-of (a new entry), Dido, a Sheryl Crow best-of and Jamie Cullum and the next highest new entry was Bryn Terfel (#12).

Wikipedia doesn't have a load on the album other than telling us they went to the US to work with Linda Perry, who was also heavily involved in P!nk's album. In fact, they worked with a LOT of people - there are 26 songwriters across 14 tracks, with eight listed on "Hold In The Head" and ten on "In The Middle"! The critics were nice enough about the album, without going mad about it and it did well enough commercially across Europe, getting to #4 in The Netherlands and #9 in Ireland, amongst other places - it also tells us that "Hole In The Head" got to #1 in the UK singles chart.

"Customers also listened to" Girls Aloud, Atomic Kitten, The Saturdays and All Saints - I think we can all probably spot the theme there. It's not really my kind of thing, but I have to admit that when Sugababes do it well, they're up there with the best of them and this isn't a bad album at all.

26/10/03 - Bang average
09/11/03 - A pretty dreadful album