I try to discover a little something to make me sweeter

Continuing my trip back through the 1988 album charts.

01/05/88 : The Innocents - Erasure


This is our first visit with Erasure (but certainly not our last) and my feeling has always been that time has been somewhat unfair to them with their incredible popularity around this time having been pretty much forgotten. So I'm looking forward to this, partly because I'm expecting to enjoy it and partly because maybe things will become clear as to why they've faded into semi-obscurity.

It starts with "A Little Respect" which still sounds very decent and I also remembered "Chains Of Love", which isn't a million miles away in terms of sound - but the rest of the album has more variety than I was expecting. "Ship Of Fools" is very Depeche Mode-ish, "65000" is surprisingly electro hip-hop (thankfully without any rapping) and "Yahoo" has definite hints of gospel - it's all pretty up-tempo musically, but sometimes accompanied by some pretty downbeat lyrics. It feels unlikely I'll listen to it again, but it was all very well done and I imagine for plenty (quite probably of a different sexual orientation to me) there's a lot of happy memories tied into this.

We're at #2 in the charts this week on their second week of an impressive 72 week run, with it having peaked at #1 in its first and 33rd weeks - I told you they were popular! The rest of the top five were Fleetwood Mac, Now! 11 (the third one we've seen this year alone!), Dirty Dancing and the curiously titled compilation Hip Hop And Rapping In The House, with the highest new entry being The Sugarcubes' debut (#14) - this is a very decent album which has stood the test of time well.

Wikipedia tells us this is their third album and the album cover shows a window from Chartres cathedral. Looking at their entry to pad things out tells me they're still going and had top ten albums in '17 and '20, so my comment about semi-obscurity isn't entirely accurate. Critically, it was pretty well received ("a beloved and essential part of the queer club music canon") and it did well commercially in some places I wasn't expecting including #3 in Denmark and Argentina, #2 in Zimbabwe (not a country famously known for its LGBT-friendly views) and #1 in Brazil, It only got to #48 in the US, but still sold over a million copies over there.

discogs.com tells us you can pick up a decent version for a quid, but if you want the remastered CD, bonus CD, DVD and MP3 file collection then it's going to set you back a weighty £189.99! I'm not saying it's worth that much but this was a decent album with a high quality bar and more variety than I was expecting - and I apologise for not knowing they were still active.

24/04/88 - Surprisingly enjoyable
08/05/88 - Pretty decent, but...

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