Said the streets were paved with silver and gold

Continuing my trip back through the 1988 album charts.

15/05/88 : The Christians - The Christians


I seem to recall I liked the general sound of The Christians, but don't think I ever listened to a whole album of it because I suspected it would drag - but now it's time to find out if that really is the case!

Lordy - there was an awful lot here I'd completely forgotten about, with "Forgotten Town", "When The Finger Points", "Ideal World" and "Hooverville" all being very decent quality singles. And the rest of the album is also pretty good - the lyrics (which are surprisingly spiky in places) and music are maybe a bit clumsy in places but you get the impression they were doing what they wanted to and their hearts were in the right place. It also all felt pretty familiar so I suspect I must have heard it more than a few times, but I have absolutely no recollection of it.

We're at a surprisingly high #4 in the charts this week on their 30th week of a surprisingly long 69 week run, with it having peaked at a surprisingly high #2 in its first and fifteenth weeks, kept off the top by Fleetwood Mac and Terence Trent d'Arby. The rest of the top five were Prince (a new entry), Fleetwood Mac, Sade and Dirty Dancing, with the highest new entry being The Housemartins' best-of (#8) which is amusingly titled Now That's What I Call Quite Good!.

Wikipedia has two sentences on the album telling us it was their debut album and resulted in five hit singles. And then there are two further sentences on the critical reception with AllMusic declaring it "a solid debut with very few filler tracks" (which seems fair enough) - we also learn elsewhere that Smash Hits gave it 8/10. Looking at their entry, we learn that the band were originally three brothers with the surname Christian and Henry Priestman, whose middle name is - go on, guess. Commercially, it didn't exactly set the world alight away from these shores but it did get to #108 in the US which feels like a decent effort for a debut.

Unusually, discogs.com only has three copies for sale in the UK and it's not because it's rare because they cost £3-£5, so I've got no idea what's going on there. This is a pretty decent album - yes, maybe it's a bit dated but it was a nice reminder of something that was very popular at the time and has been somewhat unfairly forgotten. 

22/05/88 - Too much faffing about
08/05/88 - Pretty decent, but...

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