I've got the roses and I've got the wine

Continuing my trip back through the 1988 album charts.

09/10/88 : Flying Colours - Chris de Burgh

Enya, U2 and now Chris - Ireland are doing well recently, aren't they? I'm expecting to find this perfectly fine and probably a lot more enjoyable than I'd ever have admitted to back in '88 - and it's the third album we've owned (and you can probably guess who "we" is here).

I'd say there's nothing wrong with any of this if you take one track at a time because they're well crafted with (generally) a nice heartfelt message, but it's a bit lacking in variety across the whole album for me. Plenty of people loved it though so I guess he'd found the formula that worked for him and I can't really fault him for sticking to it.

We're at #1 with a new entry in the chart on the start of a very decent 28 week run. The rest of the top five are Jean-Michel Jarre, Bon Jovi, Transvision Vamp (a new entry - awww, we're going to miss out on Wendy) and the Moonlighting soundtrack (which features a bizarre collection of tracks) and the next highest new entry is Keith Richards (#37).

Wikipedia tells us this is his ninth album and the only one to make #1 (Into The Light got stuck at #2). Looking at his entry to pad things out, he grew up travelling the world because his dad was a diplomat and when they returned they moved into a 12th century Irish castle owned by his grandparents. He did a lot of hard graft during the 70s building his fanbase (which included my parents), very little of which was appreciated here but he was very big in South America with "Flying" from his first album being #1 in Brazil for 17 weeks! And then "Lady In Red" came along and things took off somewhat, I guess. This album did very well commercially, also getting to #1 in Ireland and Germany (where it sold over a million copies) but there's no word on critical reviews - I can only assume they weren't too complimentary.

discogs.com surprises me by telling me that you'll have to spend four quid to get a decent copy, but if you're in Germany then it's only a couple of euro - they really did buy a lot of copies over there! However, interestingly, the most expensive copy here is £7.50, but in Germany it's 24 euro. I've absolutely no idea what's going on there - maybe most of the German copies have been worn out having just been played too many times? And I'd say there's no danger of that happening here, but I suspect the lovely Mrs Reed may have already proved me wrong there...

02/10/88 - Pushing the buttons it aims for
16/10/88 - Not his finest work