Ooh, I need your love, babe - guess you know it's true

Continuing my trip back through the 1965 album charts.

03/10/65 : Beatles For Sale - The Beatles


Well, this was unexpected - I just assumed I'd listened to all The Beatles albums! But no, this is only our tenth visit which means there are still two more to go (assuming we avoid all the compilations which we're also going to meet over the years). Looking at the track list, there's not many I know, so it will be interesting to see what I think about it - I suspect there must be a reason it wasn't on Rolling Stone's list.

Well, a lot of it was new to me - I only recognised "Eight Days A Week" and "Words Of Love" (from the Buddy Holly original). The rest is all perfectly pleasant if maybe not exactly thrilling - I liked "I'll Follow The Sun" (it's short and sweet at 1:49) and "I Don't Want To Spoil The Party", but nothing else really stuck in there for me. It's an interesting album because it doesn't have the franticness of their earlier stuff or the weirdness of their later stuff - from what I remember it's very similar to Help! (it's follow up) but without the stand-out tracks that album has. It's certainly not a terrible album but it has a high quality bar to live up to and I'm afraid it doesn't manage that for me.

We're at #12 in the charts this week on their 44th week of an impressive 46 week run with it having spent eleven weeks at #1 - interestingly, it never re-entered the chart until it was re-released in '87 when it spent another two weeks, and then another two weeks for another re-release in '09. The top five this week were The Beatles, TSOM, Mary Poppins, The Rolling Stones and Andy Williams and we have a couple of new entries for Bob Dylan (#18) and The Bachelors (#19). I also have to mention Flaming Star and Summer Kisses, an Elvis album that we skipped over at #11 because it was a compilation of tracks from the Flaming Star film which came out in '60 and other completely random stuff - he really could release anything and people would buy it. 

Wikipedia (of course) has a massive amount on the album (475 milliPeppers) and it tells us is was their fourth album and "marked a departure from the upbeat tone that had characterised the Beatles' previous work" with "only three out of the fourteen tracks mentioning love in a positive light". The downbeat mood was also reflected in the album title and artwork, with no smiles on display. It also features more covers than I realised with six of the fourteen tracks written by someone else including two by Carl Perkins and one by Chuck Berry. The critics' views reflected mine with a general "it's not their best but hey, it's still The Beatles" feel to them and it obviously did well commercially, except in the US because it wasn't released there until '87 - but don't worry, they had their own randomly thrown together album to satisfy their insatiable appetite for all things Beatles.

"Customers also listened" loads of Beatles solo albums - most of which there would be no danger of me checking out. And whilst I didn't mind this, I think it's unlikely I'll be back - it doesn't hang together like some of their other albums and it certainly doesn't have the absolute bangers that most of their other offerings do. 

And with that, we only have Please Please Me and Yellow Submarine of their studio albums left to visit - don't worry, there's no way we'll manage to avoid them!

26/09/65 - A decent enough first visit
10/10/65 - Impressively dull

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