The highways and cars were sacrificed for agriculture

Continuing my trip back through the 1988 album charts.

20/03/88 : Naked - Talking Heads

Our fourth visit with Talking Heads and this is one I haven't heard, but I like the singles from it, so I have reasonable hopes for it.

The tracks I previously knew and liked were "Blind", "Mr. Jones" and (particularly) "(Nothing But) Flowers" and it's fair to say the rest of the album doesn't stray too far from this formula, with lots of tricksy world rhythms blending well (imho) with more traditional poppy elements - but there's enough variety across the album to keep me happy. Overall, I liked it and found it more accessible than some of their more highly regarded albums - I'd almost be tempted to listen to it again!

We're at #3 in the charts with a new entry this week on the start of a thirteen week run - somewhat surprisingly this is their highest ever charting position, although several albums have spent longer in the charts. The rest of the top five are Morrissey (a new entry), OMD, Alexander O'Neal and Prefab Sprout (another new entry) with the next highest new entry being Megadeth (#18) with the splendidly titled So Far, So Good...So What!. This week is actually the closest we'll ever get to listening to a Prefab Sprout album in the charts but they're currently favourites to be the next artist I pick for a run-through of all their albums, so there's a strong chance we'll visit it (spoiler alert - this one isn't my favourite).

Wikipedia has quite a long entry (120 milliPeppers) which tells us remarkably little - it's their eighth (and last) studio album and is a return to the world music style of some of their earlier albums, with the music recorded in Paris with many other musicians involved including Kirsty MacColl and Johnny Marr and the vocals added later in New York, which feels like a very complicated way of going about things. After this album, the band went on a hiatus until David Byrne just announced they'd split up, which didn't exactly endear him to the other members of the group - apparently Chris Frantz's autobiography is amusingly transparent with regards to his feelings for Mr Byrne. 

Critically, the album was well received at the time - Wikipedia claims retrospective reviews are less kind without offering too much evidence of that, except for Mr Christgau getting grumpy in his old age ("I once thought [them] overrated. I was wrong. They sucked") but I can understand some people wouldn't have been happy that the band ended with this. Commercially, it was a solid top twenty album in most places but didn't make #1 anywhere, with #2 in Finland being its top placing - it also got to #19 in the US.

discogs.com tells us you'll have to spent three quid to get a decent version (with a surprising number of cassette copies available) and if you want to splash out then you'll have to go for the hybrid DualDisc version which is £60. I'd forgotten what a DualDisc version was - it's a CD on one side and a DVD on the other, which sounds like a neat idea but apparently the CD side often wouldn't be read by cheaper players and the discs were too thick for some machines, so maybe it's not quite so neat after all. I thought this was a neat album though - it's quirky without straying into being annoying.

13/03/88 - Not my sort of thing, but bearable
27/03/88 - Not as engaging as I hoped