Tell me now - do we bear the sins of each other?

Continuing my trip back through the 1988 album charts.

30/10/88 : Rage - T'Pau


I loved their debut album, Bridge Of Spies, which we're definitely going to listen to at some point (and it may well be earlier in the year) but I don't believe I've ever listened to this - it's weird how you can just totally drop a band for no reason. So I'm looking forward to this...

Yeah, this was perfectly fine - it is sounding a bit dated now, but there's nothing wrong with a bit of late 80s nostalgia. I only recognised "Secret Garden" which was easily the most successful single from the album and the album's definitely lacking a "China In Your Hand" equivalent - I think they've done reasonably well for their "difficult second album" but it definitely suffers from being more of the same, but somehow also less.

We're at #4 in the chart this week with a new entry (our first new entry of the year) on their first week of a thirteen week run with this being as high as it got. The rest of the top five were Dire Straits, U2, Kylie and Enya (a female-majority top five!) and the next highest new entry was a Paul Simon best-of (#19). 

Wikipedia has a reasonable amount on the album but there's not loads of interest in there but I can tell you the album cover has the band standing in front of an upside-down steam engine. Obviously. The most interesting (and probably largest) section is curiously titled "The Canadian Version" - apparently there was a view that "the UK version" wasn't rocky enough for the American market, so they re-recorded four songs (in some cases, quite dramatically). However, after all that, it wasn't released in the US, so it became known as "the Canadian version". Critically, the reviews were surprisingly positive, but they all agreed that the band weren't bringing much to the party and better musicians could have made a spectacular album (I'm not entirely convinced by that argument because surely it's true for nearly all albums?). Commercially, it didn't really set the world alight away from these shores, but it did get to #14 in Sweden.

discogs.com tells us you can pick up a decent copy for a couple of quid, and the absolute top whack you can pay is £7.75 - it's safe to say that people aren't screaming out for this. But I thought it had a nicely nostalgia feel to it, although I'm sure I'll enjoy Bridge Of Spies more when we get to it.

23/10/88 - Neither hateful nor required
06/11/88 - An enjoyable helluva mess

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