The wild mountain thyme that grows around my door has grown there for two score years or more

Continuing my trip back through the 1965 album charts.

11/07/65 : Come My Way - Marianne Faithfull


This is only our third mention of Marianne - obviously the previous two were because she provided backing vocals on "Yellow Submarine" and a harp-based version of her tracks was used in a random film. I really don't know much about her at all - I have the impression she's famous for being famous more than anything to do with actual talent, but maybe this album will prove me wrong. 

OK, for the most part, it's not far off Joan Baez, with a decent enough voice over some guitar picking - she invites comparisons by giving us another version of "House Of The Rising Sun" which was on Joan's debut album. But her voice isn't as strong as Joan's and she uses even more vibrato, so the comparison doesn't do her any favours for me, I'm afraid - I did like "Four Strong Winds" though (and Google tells me that Joan Baez often sang this too). We also have to talk about "Jabberwock" and "Full Fathom Five" because they're certainly something different being spoken renditions over some weird discordant and arrhythmic sounds - they're both very peculiar (and very hippy-ish, man). But apart from those two tracks, it's all pretty listenable - although my suspicion is you could have gone to any folk club at the time and heard stuff at least as good.

We're at #17 in the chart this week on her last week of a seven week run, with #12 being as high as it got in its second week. The top five this week were TSOM, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Burt Bacharach and Mary Poppins with a new entry for The Shadows (#19). 

Wikipedia tells us it's her second album whilst also telling us it was released simultaneously with her first album - which I guess means it was her joint first album. Apparently the label wanted her to do jaunty pop but she wanted to do folk so they compromised by her doing one album of each - which sounds very reasonable on everyone's part. The only other fact of interest is that the cover photo was taken in The Salisbury in Covent Garden, which is still there. Marianne's entry is much longer - it's fair to say she lived a full life and she also released a load more albums than I was aware of, giving us 22 of them over a 56 year period.

"Customers also listened to" Barry McGuire, Michael Mantler, Them and Zager & Evans and it's rare we get a full list that I've never heard of, but there you are - Google tells me that Barry McGuire is best known for "Eve Of Destruction", which I have at least heard of and Them featured a young Van Morrison amongst their ranks. I can't say I loved this album, but it was an interesting listen and she was a gap in my knowledge which has been at least partially filled (I know her name has 2 l's in it now, at least!) - it will be interesting to see if we get to hear her jaunty pop album as well.

04/07/65 - One too many for me this year...
18/07/65 - A big thing at the time

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