Hey you - don't watch that, watch this!

Continuing my trip back through the 1979 album charts.

25/11/79 : One Step Beyond... - Madness

I'm not sure I've ever heard a Madness album apart from their best-of (which is, of course, excellent) and their last one (which is quite odd) - and here we're going back to where it all started.

And yeah, it really is. It's nice because I know where they went from here, but this really feels like an origin album - it doesn't always work, but I'm happy for them to give it a go and see what happens. Obviously, when it works it really does work, particularly on the first three tracks "One Step Beyond" (which is mad, but enjoyably so), "My Girl" (later covered by Tracey Ullman) and "Night Boat To Cairo" but I also really liked "In The Middle Of The Night" which is an amusing song about someone stealing knickers off washing lines! Slightly more "interesting" are "Swan Lake" (yes, the Tchaikovsky version), "Tarzan's Nuts" and "Chipmunks Are Go" (which is an army marching chant, for no obvious reason) - it's fair to say none of them are great, but they're certainly not for want of trying. It's quite interesting because there's an obvious link back to The Kinks here which is also true for The Jam, but they're very different albums - I also really like this album cover.

We're at #15 in the chart this week on their fifth week of an impressive 50 week run with it peaking at #2 in its fourteenth week - it's actually been back for ten further runs in '80, '81, '82, '05 and '09 for 79 weeks in total. The top five this week were ABBA, Rob Stewart and Diana Ross best-ofs, The Police and an Elvis best-of and the highest new entry was an ELO best-of!

Wikipedia tells us it was recorded and mixed in three weeks (and it certainly sounds like it in places) but it's interesting that all seven members of the band (despite only six of them appearing on the album cover) take a turn on song-writing duties (and six of them are still in the group now). Critically, it was well received and it's interesting that it was released on the same day as The Specials debut album, both of which turned out to be a lot more influential than I suspect anyone was expecting. Commercially, it did surprisingly well for what feels like a very UK kinda album making the top thirty in Germany, The Netherlands and Scandinavia and even #137 in the US (quite what they made of it all over there is very unclear). 

Looking at discogs.com, you can pick up a decent enough version for a fiver but £100 will pick you up "CD, Album, RE, RM + CD, Comp" version - and I've no idea what most of that means. No-one's gonna spend that much on a Madness album (surely?), but I imagine there's a lot of people that would be tempted because of the memories it gives them - it's not peak Madness for me, but it's still a load of fun and I really enjoyed it.

18/11/79 - A fine slice of musical history
02/12/79 - An interesting album that didn't quite work for me

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