Who am I to doubt or question the inevitable being?

Continuing my trip back through the 1979 album charts.

11/11/79 : Journey Through "The Secret Life Of Plants" - Stevie Wonder

I'm pretty certain I've never heard of this one, so I'm intrigued as to what we've got. Whatever it is, we've got 90 minutes of it...

Hmmm - it's an odd one. Half the tracks are decent enough standard Stevie Wonder style tracks, not exactly standing out in his canon of work but given this came after his three-peat of Album Of The Year Grammy award-winning albums, you've gotta let the man take a breather. And the rest of the tracks are very noodly, synth-based hippy-prog-jazz - they sound beautifully clean because they've got lovely production on them, but I'm not sure I really felt the need to hear them. I can imagine it was met with plenty of head-scratching at the time, with people desperate to like it because it was Stevie but not quite being able to get there (but I bet they never admitted it). It's not unpleasant, but it is all very odd and not particularly enjoyable.

We're at a relatively high #8 in the charts this week on his second week of a fifteen week run, with this being as high as it got. The top five this week were ABBA and Rod Stewart best-ofs, Fleetwood Mac, The Police and a compendium called Rock'n'Roller Disco, which features QUITE the collection of artists including Dollar, Sparks, BA Robertson, The Ruts, Public Image Limited and Racey - I'm quite intrigued as to the thinking there. And the highest new entry this week was the Diana Ross best-of (#7).

Wikipedia tells us it's his nineteenth album and is a soundtrack to the documentary The Secret Life Of Plants, which wasn't widely released. It's quite the groundbreaking album, being the first to use a digital sampling synthesiser and the second to be recorded digitally (the first obviously being Ry Cooder's Bop Till You Drop). Also, apparentlly, initial pressings of the album were also scented with a floral perfume - I can't think of anything worse! The critical reviews found a wide selection of adjectives to use, with Wikipedia saying people described it as vague, overambitious, goofy, nerdy, odd, pointless and foolish - all of which I understand, but put together they feel harsh. There have been some retrospective attempts to be nice about it but even Stevie in '04 seemed to be saying "yeah, sorry guys - I was just trying stuff out". Commercially, it was marketed hard but struggled and "label head Berry Gordy reportedly complained that the one million copies he pressed turned out to be 900,000 too many".

discogs.com tells us that £3.50 will pick you up a decent copy and I'm afraid you can't waste any more that £75 on it, which will get you an unopened Japanese CD version. As a soundtrack to an obscure plant-based documentary, this is a perfectly acceptable, if slightly weird, album - but as a hotly anticipated Stevie Wonder album I can understand that people were somewhat underwhelmed/disappointed.

04/11/79 - More enjoyable than I was expecting
18/11/79 - A fine slice of musical history

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