But "used to be's" don't count anymore

Continuing my trip back through the 1979 album charts.

21/01/79 : You Don't Bring Me Flowers - Neil Diamond




Our second visit with Neil and the last one was a "take songs you know and see if you can ruin them with an orchestra" effort - not the worst we've seen, but also not great. The big question is "Who's gonna win the cheese-off - Neil or Barry?"...

Somewhat to my surprise, it's an easy win for Barry because there's some decent tunes and variety on this. Obviously the title track is a classic but this album also has "Together In Blue Jeans" on it, which makes it worth the money alone. The rest of it isn't quite such obviously quality fare, but it feels like the fans would still love it and I really didn't mind it at all. 

We're all the way down at #19 in the charts this week on his fourth week of a 22 week run, with #15 being as high as it got in his third week .The top five this week were Don't Walk - Boogie, Elvis Costello, Blondie and best-ofs from Showaddywaddy and The Carpenters, with the highest new entry being The Village People (#35). 

Wikipedia doesn't have an awful lot on the album - it's his twelfth and was basically pushed out to capitalise on the success of the title track, which has a considerably larger entry than the album does. It was a solo track on his previous album and was swiftly covered (again as a solo track) by Barbra - and that might well have been that, except that Gary Guthrie who worked for WAKY (FM) in Louisville, was getting divorced and spliced the two records together as a "present" for his soon-to-be-ex wife and he played it on the station. This generated quite a buzz which resulted in a load of other stations doing the same thing - at which the record company thought "now, hold on a minute"! To be fair to them, they did at least get the pair of them back in the studio - and, to no-one's great surprise, it was a hit, getting to #1 in the US. And so, obviouslyto the album, the critics were a bit mixed on it but it did well commercially, getting to #4 in the US and selling two million copies.

It doesn't feel like it's going to be exchanging hands for a fortune though and discogs.com tells us you can easily pick up a version for a quid, but you can drop £35 on a copy which is a Carrollton pressing if you want to (whatever one of those is). With the exception of the two stand-out tracks, I can't say I loved this but it really wasn't aimed at me, so who cares?!? 

14/01/79 - Not bad at all
28/01/79 - Not nearly as bad as it might have been

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