There's no greater crime than wasting your life

Continuing my trip back through the 1988 album charts.

28/08/88 : So Good - Mica Paris


Only our second mention ever for Mica, with the only other one being, obviously, because she appeared on David Gilmour's last album. I'm expecting to like this, if not exactly find it to be something I need in my life.

"Like" is probably going a bit overboard, but I'd certainly go for "don't mind". She's got a nice voice, which is particularly shown on "One Temptation" and "Sway" but as a whole the material doesn't strike me (from a position of limited knowledge) as anything more than fine, so I can't say any of it stuck in there. But it's certainly not hateful and there's plenty worse examples of such things out there.

We're at #6 with a new entry in the charts this week at the start of an impressive 32 week run, with this being as high as it got. The top five this week were Kylie, Fairground Attraction, the Now! 12 and Hot City Nights compilations and Tracy Chapman with the next highest new entry being the Robert Cray Band (#13) - surprisingly, a first mention for someone who is highly regarded in certain circles.

Wikipedia tells us this is her debut album and there's a random amount of background info - she started singing when she was 12 and she wasn't a big fan of going in to the studio, but when they got her in there, they were very pleased with the result. There are a couple of interesting names that pop up with Courtney Pine playing sax on one of the tracks and Pete Wingfield providing keyboards on the album - we've not mentioned him before but he produced The Proclaimers album and wrote The Pasadenas biggest hit. Back to Mica, the critical response was nice enough - there's a whiff of "not bad considering she's not American" from across the pond but it did better than you might expect commercially over there getting to #81.

discogs.com tells us you can pick up a decent version for a quid but the double album deluxe version is going to set you back a whole twenty pounds! I basically thought this was fine - if you're in the market for such a thing then it's probably gonna hit the spot, but I can't say I'll be heading back there.

21/08/88 - Tolerable
04/09/88 - Decent enough

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