Save the darkness, let it never fade away

Continuing my trip back through the 1988 album charts.

08/05/88 : Stay On These Roads - A-ha


We met A-ha twice in '86 and both albums were pretty enjoyable, so I'm looking forward to this - I have a sneaking suspicion they were one of those bands that just became less popular without suffering a noticeable dip in quality. But let's see..

Yeah, this is all perfectly listenable. I knew the title track and "The Living Daylights" (one of the better Bond themes imho) and I also particularly liked "You Are The One" but there are no stinkers on there, although "You'll End Up Crying" is a pretty quirky way to end the album. However, I do feel that, with the exception of "The Living Daylights", there's nothing here that anyone needs over the first two albums so I guess I can understand how they somewhat faded from this point.

We're at #2 with a new entry in the charts this week on the start of a mere eleven week run, with this being as high as it got. The rest of the top five were Fleetwood Mac, Sade (a new entry), The Christians and Dirty Dancing with the next highest new entry being More Dirty Dancing (#9), with someone cashing in on a good thing when they saw one.

Wikipedia doesn't have a lot on the album - it's their third album and they used Synclavier, Sequential Circuits Prophet 5, Yamaha DX-7, Roland D-50, and Roland Juno-60 or Roland Juno-106 synthesizers and a Yamaha RX-5 drum machine on it. Critically, the reviews were pretty mixed - NME amused us with "Life is sad and so is Pal Waaktaar. Pal, writer or co-writer of all these songs, seems over-run by melancholy" (they liked it though!). Commercially, it did very well in Europe, getting to #1 in Norway (quelle surprise!) and it also went down a storm in Brazil, selling half a million copies there (and four million globally). It also makes the point that they were very unlucky here with it being their third album to stall at #2 which means they're never reached the top spot in the album charts - however, all eleven of their studio albums have charted here with their last one in '22 getting to #12.

discogs.com tells us you can pick up a CD version for a couple of quid or an LP for a tenner, with the most you can pay being £36.31 for an LP version - which sounds to be suspiciously similar to the cheaper version. I liked this - but unfortunately all it really did was make me think I should listen to Hunting High And Low or Scoundrel Days again.

01/05/88 - Pretty decent
15/05/88 - An enjoyable memory jog

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