How can the light that burned so brightly suddenly burn so pale?

Continuing my trip back through the 1979 album charts.

03/06/79 : Fate For Breakfast - Art Garfunkel

We've met a couple of Paul Simon solo albums but this is our first Arty offering - I've actually got no idea if I'm going to like it or not (I think "Bright Eyes" is his solo work I could name). Bizarrely, it's not available on Amazon (although plenty of his other stuff is) but YouTube saved the day. 

Hmmm - it's mostly soulful yacht rock, sounding incredibly white. It's an odd one because I can't actually say what's wrong with it, but I really didn't like it - it's just all so wet, with "Oh How Happy" being particularly dreadful. Somewhat unexpectedly, the only bright spots for me were "Miss You Nights" which is a Cliff Richard cover and the aforementioned "Bright Eyes" - I very much didn't enjoy this.

We're at #12 in the charts this week on his eighth week of a twenty week run, with it having peaked at #2 in its sixth week, all of which feels very undeserved to me. The top five this week were ABBA, Ian Dury & The Blockheads, Blondie, James Last and David Bowie (a new entry) with the next highest new entry being Peter Green all the way down at #52.

Wikipedia doesn't have loads on the album - it's his fourth, the US release didn't include "Bright Eyes" and there were six different album covers, all featuring Art having breakfast. "Bright Eyes" was written and produced by Mike Batt, who's probably best known for being the man behind The Wombles but his Wikipedia entry is surprisingly lengthy because he's done a lot over the years. The Wombles entry is also surprisingly interesting - did you know they always had very decent musicians inside the costumes? (including on one episode of TOTP, members of Steeleye Span). Back to the considerably less interesting Art, the album wasn't well received critically but did surprisingly well commercially, getting to #3 in Australia and #1 in The Netherlands and New Zealand, but only #67 in the US.

On the off chance you're looking for a copy, discogs.com can provide you one for a quid and if you want to pay top whack then you can hand over £30. However, I've absolutely no idea why you'd do such a thing, because this is not a good album at all - quite possibly the least enjoyable of the year.

27/05/79 - Enjoyable but forgettable
08/06/79 - One I'd somehow missed

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