Everyday I get so confused - now I'm just shouting for the rhythm and blues

Continuing my trip back through the 1979 album charts.

23/12/79 : Crepes & Drapes - Showaddywaddy

Well, I wasn't expecting to be going here in Xmas week. We had to skip over an awful lot of compilation (including a "childrens favourites" abomination and a KTel special) and best-of (Rod Stewart, ABBA, Elvis, Diana Ross, Hot Chocolate, ELO and Kenny Rogers) albums to get here as well - I also feel I have to apologise to Mary O'Hara who gave us an album of folky covers which might have stood a chance if they hadn't all been desperately twee Irish versions. I have a suspicion this is going to feature a load of cheesy covers as well, but it does at least feature four original tracks written by the band - so here goes...

Yeah, it's pretty cheesy, but it mostly gets away with it because they don't pick covers that everyone knows - the only ones I recognised were The Beatles' "Twist And Shout" and Richie Valens's "Come On Let's Go" which they don't murder (but they don't exactly improve either). And the original tracks blend in nicely with the covers because there's no obvious difference in quality. No, it's not something I'm ever going to revisit but the whole thing is pretty well put-together, there's a reasonable amount of skill involved, you get the impression it's coming from a place of love and they're not doing anyone any harm, so I'm happy to let them have their fun.

So we're all the way down at #17 in the charts this week on their eighth week of a fourteen week run, with #8 being as high as it got in its fifth and sixth weeks. The top five this week were best-ofs from Rod Stewart and ABBA, Pink Floyd, The Police and a random selection of Elvis love songs. There was the traditional no new entries in the entire chart for Xmas week, with the chart numbering 75 albums at this point in time.

Wikipedia doesn't have an entry for the album, but their entry tells us they were formed in '73 by combining two bands, which resulted in them being an eight-piece with two vocalists, guitarists, bassists and drummers - which seems like a very nice way of going about things. It's fair to say they've got through quite a few more band members over the years, but they're still going out there, with Romeo Challenger still on drums from the very beginning. And they're certainly not taking things easy either, playing eight gigs this month alone, taking them from Redruth to Doncaster and in some pretty decent sized venues as well - their calendar currently runs through to February '27!

I've missed the "customers also listened to" bit in this closing paragraph and have felt I need something else to go in here, but have struggled to find something - but stumbled across the perfect thing when checking out discogs.com to see how many original tracks there were on here. They list all sorts of random information about albums, including how much will you might expect to pay in their online shop for a copy - and this will set you back an average price of £1.68! I can assure you I wouldn't shell out that much for it, but I imagine that it's an absolute bargain for someone looking for these particular memories.

16/12/79 - Much more enjoyable than expected
30/12/79 - A fine start to the year