You took free speech from the people that spoke

Continuing my trip back through the 1979 album charts.

15/04/79 : Imperial Wizard - David Essex

This is our first full visit with Mr Essex although we have bumped into him on both Evita and The War Of The Worlds. I'm not the hugest fan of him and I also can't, for the life of me, imagine why anyone would want to call their album Imperial Wizard - so my expectations are not high for this.

Hmmm - actually this isn't nearly as bad as I was expecting. It's mostly the sort of sound you'd expect from Mr Essex in the 70s, but there's considerably more variety popping up in there than I was expecting. "Let It Flow" sounds like an 90s indie track, "Are You Still My True Love" is a medieval ballad complete with all them weird instruments, "Oh What A Circus" is his single from Evita and, despite me being rude about the name, the title track (which is a very 70s rock number) is actually pretty decent. All in all, it sounds like someone making the sort of music they fancied making and they didn't really care what anyone else thought - so he gets credit for that, if nothing else.

We're at #12 in the chart this week on his fourth week of a nine week run, with this being as high as it got - it entered the chart very low, rose quite quickly and then just as swiftly sunk. The top five this week were best-ofs from Leo Sayer and Barbra Streisand, Chic, Supertramp and Dire Straits and the highest new entry was the Country Life compilation (#10).

Somewhat peculiarly, Wikipedia doesn't have an entry for the album - his discography has 28 studio albums between '73 and '13, but only the first two have entries. If you look at the main body of his entry, you'd hardly know he was a recording artist at all, with it focussing more on his stage and screen work - the most interesting fact that I noted was that Nigel Planer was his understudy for the initial West End run for Evita, but was never called on (Mandy Patinkin took the role for the initial Broadway run). One more fun Essex fact - he's a one-hit wonder in the US, with "Rock On" getting to #5 in '74 being his only recognised track. Looking at the internet as a whole, only allmusic.com shows any interest in reviewing this album and they generally like it, ending with "the overall sensation is of a performer who was truly aiming for the long haul, fame and fashion be damned" which was very much the impression I got.

discogs.com tells you a couple of quid will pick you up a decent copy and the absolute most you can spend is £8.50 - which feels harsh! I can quite understand that most people aren't exactly crying out for this album, but we've met far worse this year - it's nicely of its time and has decent musicality and variety.

08/04/79 - Impressive, if not loveable
22/04/79 - A very decent album