Wine, beer and spirits all the time

Continuing my trip back through the 1994 album charts.

18/12/94 : Crocodile Shoes - Jimmy Nail

This is going to be bad, isn't it? Like REALLY bad. Although, I must admit to having fond memories of the title track - but only because I used to sing it badly in a way that really annoyed one Elaine McCormac (as she was at the time). There was no danger of me buying the album though...

Hmmm - I'm not sure it quite qualifies as REALLY bad, but it certainly doesn't qualify as any good. I'd say Jimmy is able to sing (although I'd struggle to say he has a beautiful voice) and the various musicians involved can certainly play their instruments, so you get the impression that everyone's making the noise they're supposed to - but they make some very odd sounds. It's kinda gritty country, but Jimmy quite likes to sing things high -  "Crocodile Shoes" is almost falsetto in places. The songs themselves are fair enough, but pretty average (although I quite liked "Love Will Find Someone For You") but they're just done in a very odd way. I think I'm mostly mystified by this because I cannot, for the life of me, imagine who was buying it - I will not be revisiting it.

We're at #2 in the charts this week on his fourth week of a 33 week run, with this being as high as it got - I can't help but feel that Xmas purchases were responsible. The rest of the top five were The Beautiful South, The Beatles at The BBC, East 17 and the Bon Jovi best-of with the highest new entry being a Garth Brooks best-of (#63) - he's headlining at BST next year and the tickets have sold really well.

Wikipedia tells us this is his third album and goes part of the way to explaining some of the mystery - it came out of a BBC TV series of the same name in which he played a rough and ready factory worker who becomes a C&W singer (and yes, I now see it says that on the album cover!). There are some interesting names involved both with the album with BJ Cole (who else?) playing pedal steel and Paddy MacAloon writing three of the songs and the series with Brian Capron (who you either know best as Mr Hopwood from Grange Hill or Richard Hillman from Corrie) and Alex Kingston (who apparently had her first role in Grange Hill, but is probably best known for ER or Doctor Who) playing recurring characters. There's no word on critical reviews, but a quick Google suggests that people actually generally liked it - commercially it also got to #148 in Australia but I think it's safe to say it did best over here.

discogs.com tells us you can pick up a decent copy for 60p but the absolute most you can spend is £6 which I think makes this the cheapest most expensive album we've yet seen. And that doesn't overly surprise me - I can see that the songs felt less weird within the context of the TV series, but as a stand-alone experience it was very discombobulating.

11/12/94 - Not as bad as they'd have you believe
25/12/94 - A fine rule breaker