Have you heard about the new dance craze?

Continuing my trip back through the 1979 album charts.

29/04/79 : C'est Chic - Chic

I don't mind the general Chic sound, but I do worry a whole album is going to be a case of too much of the same thing.

Well, this is an odd one because there both is and isn't a problem with lack of variety. Taken individually, a lot of the tracks don't have a great deal of content and go on for (at least) a little bit too long and so feature an awful lot of repetition. "At Last I Am Free" is over seven minutes long and has two verses with the chorus repeated TEN times - and the chorus features a repeated line! . However, across the tracks, there's actually more variety than I was expecting, so the whole album probably just about gets away with it. It obviously doesn't hurt that it's got "Le Freak" and "I Want Your Love" on, both of which we previously met on TBDAITW and they're very well constructed tracks (if still a bit too long) and the production throughout is very clean, which makes it sound fine indeed. 

We're at #11 in the charts this week on their fourteenth week of a 23 week run with it having peaked at an impressive #2 in its tenth week. The top five this week were the Leo Sayer best-of, the Country Life compilation, a Barbra Streisand best-of, Supertramp and Thin Lizzy (a new entry) - a quite peculiar top five indeed with the next highest new entry being Simple Minds (#29) with their debut album which didn't exactly set the world alight, never getting any higher than #30.

Wikipedia tells us it's their second album and was successful - and that's your lot. Going down a Chic rabbit-hole was less interesting than expected, but did underline that Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards were really rather good at what they did - I'd forgotten how influential "Good Times" (which was on their next album, but we won't get to meet it) was, being the basis for Grandmaster Flash's "Adventures on the Wheels of Steel" and The Sugarhill Gang's  "Rapper's Delight" as well as being very "inspirational" for Queen's "Another One Bites The Dust" (apparently John Deacon used to hang around with Nile and Bernard and Chic were often accused of copying Queen, despite "Good Times" coming out first), Blondie's "Rapture" and Daft Punk's "All Around The World". 

Back to this album, a couple of interesting names pop up - Luther Vandross is on vocals (again - he was very busy as a session musician around this time) and Tony Thompson is on drums, whose name I recognised but had to use Wikipedia to remind me he was the drummer for The Power Station. The critical reviews were generally pretty nice about it with The Globe And Mail (whoever they are) getting it right for me by calling it "a sleekly elegant variation of disco" - it is very disco, but also considerably funkier than most. Commercially, it did well making the top twenty in various European countries and #4 in the US (selling a million copies over there) - it surprises me it charted highest over here though.

discogs.com tells us you can pick up a decent version for four quid, but if you want a mint Japanese version it's going to set you back £81.37 - amusingly a copy at £65 justifies the price by saying it hasn't been at one of those parties where Pernod was spilt all over it. This was an odd listening experience because there was no denying the skill involved and the sound was very clean, but all the tracks just were a bit too self-indulgent - without somehow making the whole thing unlistenable. 

22/04/79 - A very decent album
06/05/79 - Surprisingly normal