You had to sneak into my room just to read my diary

Continuing my trip back through the 1988 album charts.

27/03/88 : Viva Hate - Morrissey

Well, doesn't that seem an ironic title with hindsight? At this point, I have to ask the obligatory "can you separate the art from the artist?" question (I think you can, to a certain extent) - so now we've got that out of the way I can just settle down and listen to an album I've got somewhere in the house, bringing us to ten for the year. I seem to recall it's very good in places and generally not bad, but not nearly as great as Steven Patrick thought it was (because nothing ever is).

Yeah - it is indeed very good in places, particularly the singles "Every Day Is Like Sunday" and "Suedehead". And the rest of it is generally not bad, with (obviously) intelligent lyrics and (not so obviously) more musical variety than I was expecting. But taking the album as a whole, it just didn't feel that engaging - I'm sure the die-hard fans listened to it a million times to get every last meaning out of the words but it just didn't click with me either the first time round or on this revisit.

We're at #4 in the charts this week on his second week of a nine week run, with it having peaked at #1 in its debut week - it then took a couple of weeks off before coming back for an eleven week run. The rest of the top five were Now! 11 (a new entry), OMD (finishing up a three week run at #2), Wet Wet Wet and Talking Heads with the next highest new entry being a Clash best-of (#7) - that should be a very short album imho.

Before we head back to Morrissey, let's take a look at the tracks on Now! 11 - it's got some top tracks on it but boy does it run out of steam towards the end of CD 2 which features Morris Minor & The Majors (a Beastie Boys style "joke" record by Tony Hawks), Krush, Jack'n'Chill and Two Men, A Drum Machine & A Trumpet (who were apparently two thirds of Fine Young Cannibals).

The top tracks for me are Pet Shop Boys' "Always On My Mind", Belinda Carlisle's "Heaven Is A Place On Earth", Morrissey's "Suedehead", Sinead O'Connor's "Mandinka" and The Mission's "Tower Of Strength" - all of which appear on CD 1. The album's "huh?" tracks are Eddie Cochran's "Come On Everybody" (first released in '58 - apparently it's been covered by Led Zeppelin and The Sex Pistols over the years) and a live version of Elton John's "Candle In The Wind" (first released in '73) - there must have been some thinking behind their inclusion but I have no idea what it might have been. All in all, this is not one of the classic editions.

Back to Morrissey, Wikipedia tells us this is his debut album, released six months after the last Smiths album, Strangeways Here We Come. It's produced by Stephen Street who also wrote all the music and the guitar playing is by Vini Reilly from The Durutti Column - you kinda forget that all Morrissey does is write and warble the words, which does make me think things could have gone a helluva lot worse here. It also tells us that "Margaret On The Guillotine" (about Mrs Thatch) lead him to being questioned by Special Branch - I'm very interested as to how that went! The critics were actually pretty nice about it with Rolling Stone making the valid point that he doesn't "wallow" nearly as much as you might expect. Commercially, it did OK, getting to the top twenty in various European countries, #8 in New Zealand (it doesn't feel a very NZ kinda sound) and #48 in the US, selling half a million copies over there.

discogs.com tells us you can pick up a decent copy for £2.50 but there's a bizarre Japanese version which includes a bonus one-sided single for £148.07 if you really want it. I didn't mind this, but it wasn't overly engaging - I think my days of listening too closely to anything Morrissey says are long behind me, even if I did like the singles.

20/03/88 - Yeah, I enjoyed this
03/04/88 - Not as heavy as I was expecting