Life is too short to play silly games - I've promised myself I won't do that again

Continuing my trip back through the 1988 album charts.

04/09/88 : The First Of A Million Kisses - Fairground Attraction


This is one I nearly bought on several occasions, but I'm not sure I ever actually listened to it. I'm expecting to like it (particularly compared with what I had to suffer last time). 

Yeah, it's pretty decent - a lot of it felt pretty familiar, so I suspect I must have heard it at some point. "Perfect" is obviously the track that everyone knows and it's stood the test of time pretty well, but I also particularly liked "Fairground Attraction", "The Wind Knows My Name" and "Allelujah" which are slower tracks.  None of it is exactly challenging (and I can see that some would claim it's a bit twee) but I liked it - it's all perfectly listenable and glides past nicely.

We're at #2 in the charts this week on their sixteenth week of a thirty week run, with it taking Xmas off and coming back for another twenty week run with this being as high as it got - for three weeks, kept off the top by Kylie each week. The rest of the top five were Kylie, Tracy Chapman and the Hot City Nights and Rap Trax compilations with the highest new entry being George Benson (#16). 

Wikipedia tells us this is their debut. and only, album - and that's pretty much your lot, except that the album cover photo was taken in 1955 by Magnum photographer Elliot Erwitt. Looking at the band's entry, we learn that the album entry is wrong because they HAVE released another album - the band split up in '90 but reformed in '24 for, quite obviously, a Japanese tour and put out another album in September (which did absolutely nothing). Back to this album, there's only a three star review from AllMusic but it did win the '89 Brit Award for Best British Album and it did well enough in a random selection of countries, including getting to #9 in Australia and #6 in Sweden.

discogs.com tells us that you can spend anything from one to 25 pounds on a decent copy with no obvious difference between any of them - I think I'd hate to buy albums online if I was fussy about what I was getting for my money. So it's fortunate I'm happy with streaming, which makes this exercise considerably easier, allowing me to spend my time enjoying albums like this.

28/08/88 - Decent voice, average material
11/09/88 - Just boring

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