Mother played by Peter Beardsley, Father by John Cleese

Starting my trip back through the 1994 album charts.

25/12/94 : Carry On Up The Charts - The Beautiful South

Woah - starting the year by breaking the rules with a best-of?!? What could possibly cause such wild and reckless behaviour? Well, partially it's because it's a very fine best-of indeed, but it's mostly because I couldn't face starting the year with the album at #2. It's also nice to start the year with one you own, giving us a 100% running total (which ain't gonna last, I can assure you)

I'm not sure what more I need to say other than it's a very fine best-of - it's often the case that you have (hopefully at least) four or five decent singles and the rest is definite padding (or even new non-singles - what's that about?), but imho that's very much not the case here. It's hard to pick a favourite but "Song For Whoever", "You Keep It All In", "A Little Time" (their only #1, although they've have two #2 tracks), "Let Love Speak Up Itself", "Bell Bottomed Tear", "36D" and "The Prettiest Eyes" all work really well for me. I think this album did so well because people had a lot of affection for enough TBS singles without ever feeling the need to buy one of their albums, so a best-of purchase made perfect sense - and, of course, it was Xmas, which never hurts!

Paul Heaton doesn't have a classically great voice, but it's very expressive and he writes great lyrics, with the songs often having a decent character arc paired with some killer lines. He also has a good line in female accompaniment with Briana Corrigan and Jacqui Abbott on very effective duty here. And the rest of the band are definitely a talented, if somewhat anonymous (Dave Hemingway was the only one I could name) bunch that run a tight ship. One last thing before we go - the version I bought had a bonus CD which was mostly pointless but it included a cover of Bill Withers's "You Just Can't Smile It Away" which is an absolutely gorgeous track - and this video has the benefit of some absolutely terrible haircuts as well.

We're at #1 in the charts this week on their seventh week of an impressive 73 week run, with it spending seven weeks at #1 and it's first fifteen weeks in the top five. It's had twelve runs in the charts, spending 137 weeks in total and last being seen in '99 - so yeah, it's done OK for itself. The rest of the top five are, wait for it - Jimmy Nail (which I'm not going to be able to avoid tomorrow), East 17 (eww), a Bon Jovi best-of (I won't be breaking the rules for this) and Eternal (which I'm quite looking forward to) and the highest new entry was a The Carpenters best-of (#99).

Wikipedia doesn't have loads on the album (which is the correct thing for a best-of) but it does helpfully inform us that the "title is a reference to the Carry On film series" (just in case you missed that level of subtlety). Critically, it was well received (even Robert Christgau liked it) but I don't think anyone expected it to do quite so well commercially here with it being #2 in the year-end chart (despite being released in November) and going on to sell 1.8 million copies. Away from these shores, it got to #50 in Canada and #53 in Germany - I think it's safe to say they're quite an English cup of tea.

Unsurprisingly for such a popular album, discogs.com tells us you can pick up a decent copy for 75p and even the bonus CD version only goes for a tenner, which is the most you can splash out on it. And I have to say I think it's well worth at least 75p - high praise indeed for a very fine compilation. 

1988 - Another one down!
18/12/94 - A most peculiar experience