You don't have to put on the red light

Continuing my trip back through the 1979 album charts.

29/07/79 : Outlandos d'Amour - The Police

Before we get to this, I have to report on an album we should be listening to instead - at #7, we have Bridges by John Williams - not the soundtrack composer John Williams, but the classical guitarist John Williams (it's a very popular name - Wikipedia actually has 14 entries for musicians called John Williams) who I seem to recall was big around this time. He's probably best known for "Cavatina" which was the theme for The Deer Hunter and that's available on several best-ofs online, but there doesn't appear to be a copy of Bridges anywhere, so we have to skip over if - sorry John! And so we come to The Police's debut album, which I'm not sure I've ever heard but I'm expecting to enjoy it.

Hmmm - well. I certainly enjoyed the singles with "So Lonely". "Roxanne" and "Can't Stand Losing You" all still sounding pretty fine. The rest of it mostly has that Police sound, but whether it's a familiarity or quality thing, they just didn't sound quite so fine. And then there's "Be My Girl - Sally" which is a most peculiar track, (badly) combining a fairly standard Police sounding offering with Andy Summers reading a poem about an inflatable doll. If I listened to the album a few more times I might get in to it, but it feels like it was a bit of a rush job and unlikely to take the place of Regatta de Blanc in my affection. 

We're all the way down at #11 in the charts this week on their sixteenth of an impressive 96 week run, but it only peaked at #6 in its 26th week - it also had a peculiar run of six consecutive weeks at #9. The top five this week were TBDAITW, Tubeway Army, Supertramp, ELO and Blondie with the highest new entry being The B52s (#22). 

Wikipedia has a reasonable amount on the album (137 milliPeppers) and it tells us it's their debut album and it was recorded over 6 months on a budget of £1500. "Roxanne" was the lead-out single, but initially failed to chart here but was re-released because it charted in the US after they'd toured over there. Critically, the entry says that "contemporary reviews of the album were largely unfavourable" but then proceeds to list a load of pretty favourable reviews - Smash Hits gave it a very acceptable 7/10. Nowadays, it's generally viewed as a great debut album - I suspect the commercial performance helped to change people's minds with it having got to #2 in The Netherlands and #23 in the US. 

discogs.com tells us you'll need to hand over three quid for a decent copy, but if you want a white label test pressing it's going to set you back £500 - at least that sounds rare, unlike some of the silly numbers we've seen for other albums. I'm left feeling I should have enjoyed this album more than I did - it was an interesting listen, but certainly not one I loved.

22/07/79 - Not as interesting as I hoped
05/08/79 - An interesting first listen

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