Duch of the terrace never grew up - I hope she never will

Continuing my trip back through the 1979 album charts.

07/10/79 : The Raven - The Stranglers

Another mini week of three days to allow them to change over accounting processes, but at least this one gives us an album there's a chance I'll like - this is our third visit with The Stranglers and they've been surprisingly bearable so far.

Yeah, it's bearable - but it's also certainly peculiar. It feels like it should be given the dreaded "post punk" label, but more in a literal "what they did after punk" meaning. There's very much a rebellious spirit to it, but it pushes musical boundaries in ways I certainly wasn't expecting and there's also a decent amount of skill involved. I was also surprised to recognise "Duchess", but only from My Life Story's cover version - even though The Stranglers' version was released as a single that got to #14 at the time (apparently the video was banned because they dressed up as choirboys). I also have to say "Meninblack" is a most peculiar track indeed (and makes me worry about their next album, The Gospel According To The Meninblack - which I may get to listen to), but overall this was quite an interesting listen - The Stranglers were rarely boring and this certainly isn't!

We're at a surprisingly high #4 in the charts this on their second week of an eight week run, with this being as high as it got. The rest of the top five were Blondie (a new entry), Gary Numan, Boney M and Electric Light Orchestra with the next highest new entry being Eagles (#7).

Wikipedia tells us it's their fourth album (they're still going and up to eighteen now) and the songs cover a wide range of subjects including Norse mythology, Japanese ritual suicide, heroin use, the Iranian Revolution, genetic engineering and Joh Bjelke-Petersen. I'd never heard of Joh, but he was the premier of Queensland from '68-'87 and his entry is fascinating - his picture was included in the gatefold of the limited edition version of the album, but they had to remove it and then produced a second limited edition version, so we might be looking at some expensive versions when we get there. Critically, the album was well received by those publications that like this sort of thing, but even Smash Hits gave it 6.5/10 - commercially, there's (unusually) no word on how it did, which probably means it did nothing elsewhere, which really doesn't surprise me.

discogs.com tells us you're going to need to shell out eight quid or so to get a decent version of this but if you want the second limited edition (with the lenticular cover), it's going to set you back £180 - interestingly the first limited edition (with the 3D cover) will "only" cost you £40. This is definitely an odd album, but it's the kind of thing I was hoping for from '79 - an educational experience that's very much of its time.

30/09/79 - The best Cliff yet!
07/10/79 - Not good

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