You'll be surrounded by angel-like creatures who tend to your dreams

Continuing my trip back through the 1979 album charts.

10/10/79 : Oceans Of Fantasy - Boney M

A peculiar "week" this week because it's only four days before the previous week - this was because we've got a one-off special week with two charts in it because they used to count sales a week after they happened but they updated it to "real time", so they had to add an extra chart in to switch between the two methods. And we celebrate this milestone with an album I'm pretty certain I'm going to hate - it's also not available on Amazon for some reason so we have to resort to YouTube.

Hmmm - hate is probably a bit too much, but I'd struggle to say I enjoyed it. It's actually got a surprisingly clear sound on it and it's mostly a very classic disco sound, but there's just way too much repetition within each song, let alone within the album - so it all just gets very tiresome and I certainly didn't need 55 minutes of it. I was, however, surprised to recognise "Gotta Go Home" eve though I was sure I'd never heard it before - whosampled.com came to my rescue by explaining that Duck Sauce's "Barbra Streisand" borrows the "woo-oo-oo-hoo" bit from it. I also recognised that "Two Of Us" was a Beatles cover and it's fair to say they murder it - it's also a dreadful album cover.

We're at a fully undeserved #5 in the charts this week on their fourth week of a fully undeserved eighteen week run, with it having peaked at a fully undeserved #1 in its debut week - what were people thinking? The rest of the top five were The Police (a new entry), Blondie, Gary Numan and Eagles with the next highest new entry being Bob Marley & The Wailers (#34).

Wikipedia tells us this is their fourth album and it's not going to be our last visit with them - sigh. The entry also goes into a ridiculous amount of detail about the various different edits of tracks that appear on different pressings of the albums - I can assure you that you're not interested in most of it. It is however interesting that two members of the group, Maizie Williams and Bobby Farrell, didn't do anything on this album (Maizie actually didn't do anything on any of their albums!) - but they did sing live at gigs though. Critically, it tells us that Smash Hits deemed it to be "unfavourable" which seems fair enough, but commercially it stormed Europe getting to #1 in Austria, Germany, Finland and Norway as well as here - it sold 500,000 copies in Germany!

discogs.com tells us that you can pick up a decent copy for £1.50 - feels a bit steep to me, but you can spend £52.46 if you really want to, for what looks suspiciously like the same quality and version as the £1.50 copy. I actually enjoyed recognising the "Barbra Streisand" "woo-oo-oo-hoos" and I appreciated some of the classic disco sounds but, apart from that, I 100% agree with Smash Hits on this one.

07/10/79 - Most peculiar
14/10/79 - A fine slice of historical futurism

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