Say you don't love him, my salamander

Continuing my trip back through the 1979 album charts.

15/07/79 : Back To The Egg - Wings

This is only our second visit with Wings, but our fifteenth visit with Macca in all his various guises over the years. And both Mr McCartney and Wings are somewhat, shall we say, inconsistent in the quality of their output, so the fact that I don't believe I had any idea this album even existed is not a particularly good sign. 

Hmmm - odd. It's not dreadful, I guess but it's not, but any obvious reckoning, any good. What's interesting is that there's obviously been a lot of work gone into the instrumentation with a load of people contributing and it's often quite complex and intricate - and whilst it often sounds quite good, it also feels like a complete waste of effort. In contrast, what your man obviously spent absolutely no effort on at all is the lyrics which are either trite ("Snow falls in the winter, Spring brings the rain") or absolute nonsense ("radio, play me a danceable ode - cattle beware of snipers"). It feels to me that, since The Beatles, Paul has rarely had enough people around him saying "are you sure this is such a good idea?" - and that's obviously the case here. A good yardstick for me for albums from famous people is to imagine how it would have been received if any other name was attached to it - and in this case I think it's safe to say things would not have gone well. 

We're at #9 in the charts this week on their fifth week of a thoroughly undeserved fifteen week run, with it peaking at #6 in its second week. The top five this week were Tubeway Army, TBDAITW (a new entry), ELO, a Queen live album and Blondie with the next highest new entry being Gerard Kenny (#19) who was a name I didn't know, so was surprised to see I was familiar with one of his tracks - "I Could Be So Good For You", which was used as the theme for Minder. And given that's such an English sounding song, I was very surprised to discover that Gerard is American.

Wikipedia has, expectedly, far more than the album deserves (266 milliPeppers) and it tells us this is their seventh and thankfully their last album (was the world really crying out for seven Wings albums?). I obviously didn't bother reading most of it, but there's an impressive list of names who play on the tracks "Rockestra Theme" and "So Glad to See You Here" including David Gilmour, Hank Marvin, Pete Townsend, John Bonham, Ronnie Laine and John Paul Jones. 

Critically, it was generally mauled, but Rolling Stone went for it big time - "the sorriest grab bag of dreck in recent memory" (which seems a little harsh) and "an irritating display of disjointed images and unfocused musical snapshots" (which doesn't). Amusingly, NME declared the album cover (by Hipgnosis, who did many of the cooler covers around this time) to be "easily the album's strongest point". Commercially, it did much better than it should have done making the top ten in most places, including #2 in Canada and #8 in the US - but not nearly as well as the record company were hoping for. 

To my surprise, discogs.com tells me you're going to have to hand over three quid to get a decent version of this - I wouldn't take it off your hands if you paid me that much, so I'm certainly not going to spent £110.28 on a copy with a "lovely lustre to the vinyl". I find Macca quite annoying but there's no doubting his talent - unless you choose to listen to this album (or, to be fair, plenty of his other solo/Wings stuff) when you find yourself doubting everything. Not good.

08/07/79 - Average songs elevated by the playing
22/07/79 - Not as interesting as I hoped