My good friend - don't you look so sad

Continuing my trip back through the 1979 album charts.

08/04/79 : Feel No Fret - Average White Band

AWB are a group I've heard of but I can tell you absolutely nothing about them, so I'm intrigued as to what we've got here - I also can't decide if the title is a pun or not.

This is pretty funky - it's not something I really feel the need for, but I tapped my toes along to it because it's all well put together, they sound pretty damn skilful and the cover of "Walk On By" works a lot better than I feel it should. It also sounds pretty influential in terms of what came after - I feel quite a few people grew up listening to AWB. And that's pretty much all I have to say about it other than I like the album cover because it feels very 70s.

We're at #15 in the charts this week on their sixth week of a fourteen week run, with this being as high as it ever got. The top five this week were best-ofs from Barbra Streisand and Leo Sayer, Chic, Bee Gees and a Barry Manilow best-of, with the highest new entry being Magazine (#43), who were what Howard Devoto set up after he left Buzzcocks.

Wikipedia does not have a lot on the album - it's their seventh and that's about it, apart from telling us that Luther Vandross pops up on one of the tracks which is the third time we've seen him this year. Looking at the band's entry to pad things out, they formed in '71 and only called it a day last year and they were considerably more successful than I realised, having both a US #1 single ("Pick Up The Pieces", which I recognised but wouldn't have been able to tell you it was them) and a US #1 album (AWB, in '74).   Back to this album, it wasn't received that well critically and apparently there are many better ones out there (we're quite likely to meet AWB when we get to '74, so I guess we'll see) - commercially, it did OK getting to #32 in the US but was their last album to do anything significant over there.

discogs.com tells us you'll have to pay the relatively high price of four pounds to secure a decent copy, but the absolute most you can spend is £15. This album isn't my sort of thing at all, but I can appreciate the musicianship involved - it also sounds like they had fun making it, which always helps.

01/04/79 - An album I have a LOT to say about
15/04/79 - Much better than expected

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