Yes, I get a little lonely when the sun gets low

Continuing my trip back through the 1979 album charts.

22/07/79 : Night Owl - Gerry Rafferty

I obviously know "Baker Street" but that's about as far as my Gerry knowledge goes - I'm assuming this will be in that vein, but it could be anything!

Yeah, it's not far away from "Baker Street" - and I even recognised "Get It Right Next Time", which surprised me. I was also somewhat surprised to hear a recorder on "Family Tree" - you don't stumble across them very often. It's all in the Leo Sayer/David Essex/Cliff Richard vein, but somehow cooler (whilst still not exactly cool) - I can imagine 70s dads with their huge stereos putting this on for a spin and admiring the production whilst stroking their beards and nodding their heads appreciatively. I won't be revisiting it but it certainly wasn't horrible - and it's certainly got quite the album cover!

We're at #9 in the charts this week on his ninth week of a decent 24 week run, with this being as high as it got. The top five this week were TBDAITW, Tubeway Army, ELO, Blondie and Supertramp with there surprisingly being no new entries in the chart this week.

Wikipedia tells us this is his third solo album (he released ten before his death in 2011) and that's pretty much your lot, other than that the critics liked it and it did well enough commercially (but not as well as his previous album) getting to #8 in The Netherlands, #9 in Germany and #18 in the US. Some interesting names pop up in the the personnel listing though - Richard and Linda Thompson and Barbara Dickson appear on random tracks, as does Raphael Ravenscroft, whose name you probably don't recognise but you'd recognise his saxophone playing on "Baker Street". Looking at Gerry's entry to pad things out, I learned he was in the folk group The Humblebums with Billy Connolly and then in Stealers Wheel - again, another group that I only know one track from ("clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right...").

I'm expecting some bargains on discogs.com and £2.50 is plenty enough to get a decent copy (on vinyl or cassette, if you fancy it). Interestingly, the most expensive copy available is £275 for a Kenyan pressing - which feels like it must be rare, but I'm not sure too many people would massively appreciate its worth. I imagine this brings back happy memories for some people of a certain age and it certainly wasn't dreadful for me - but on first listen at least, it wasn't quite as interesting as I was hoping for.

15/07/79 - Definitely not good
29/07/79 - Interesting but not immediate

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