All around the world there are people like you and me

Continuing my trip back through the 1988 album charts.

31/07/88 : Small World - Huey Lewis And The News


I never understood the appeal of Huey over here - there's nothing wrong with any of it, but it's dreadfully bland in a "middle America" kinda way. Maybe this will convince me I'm wrong? (spoiler alert - it won't).

Actually, this is quite an interesting one because it's got more variety across the album than I was expecting - but somehow the songs still all sound exactly the same. How did he manage that? Apart from that, there's absolutely nothing of interest about this album - it all seems competently put together, but I can't for the life of me understand why anyone would actually choose to listen to it.

We're at #12 in the charts with a new entry this week on the start of an eight week run with this being as high as it got. The top five this week were Now! 12, Hits 8, Tracy Chapman, Michael Jackson and Kylie with the next highest new entry being Salt'n'Pepa (#21) with the superbly titled A Salt With A Deadly Pepa.

Wikipedia tells us this is their fifth album and didn't do as well as his previous offerings (but still did surprisingly well in my opinion). There a couple of strange San Francisco 49ers connections - "Slammin'" was written to be played for 49er's highlights reels and several 49ers (including Joe Montana) provide backing vocals for "Walking With The Kid". A couple of other interesting names pop up - Stan Getz provides sax on a couple of tracks and Bruce Hornsby provides accordion and backing vocals on "Old Antone's". Critically, the reviews were pretty average but it made the top twenty in quite a few countries including #4 in Belgium, #5 in Finland, #8 in Canada and #11 in the US.

discogs.com tells us you can pick up a decent version for a quid but if you wanted a signed copy you're going to have to shell out £70 - oooh, he's sooo famous. Except in my head, where he's just famous for being bland - and this is blander than most.

24/07/88 - A very decent album
07/08/88 - A lovely album with many happy memories

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