First he crucified every dandelion in the yard

Continuing my trip back through the 1994 album charts.

28/08/94 : Come - Prince


Our seventh visit with Prince, bringing him level with Iron Maiden - I wonder if they ever met? (Google AI says "probably not"). I'm guessing from the title that this isn't going to be an understated asexual offering, but let's face it - they never are from the lad, are they?

Ewwww, the opening title track includes imagery I really didn't need over my morning coffee - and it's over 11 minutes long! The rest of it isn't quite so unnecessarily over the top - until we get to the final track, which is, quite obviously, called "Orgasm". The rest of it is, as far as jazzy, funky noodlings go, not dreadful I guess but there's nothing exceptional about it and you feel like Prince could churn this stuff out in his sleep (and it's more than possible he did). I'd struggle to name you any of his tracks from this era and this album really didn't help him on that front - with the unfortunate exception of the opening and closing tracks, which I'm hoping I'll forget soon enough.

We're at a totally undeserved #3 in the charts this week on the start of a totally undeserved nine week run with it having peaked at a completely and utterly undeserved #1. The rest of the top five were a Wet Wet Wet best-of, a Cyndi Lauper best-of (a new entry), The Brand New Heavies (which I suspect is considerably better than Prince's offering, and we'll get to find out when we get to April) and Eternal, with the next highest new entry being Echobelly (#8).

Wikipedia tells us it's his fifteenth album and he was in a strop with Warner Bros at the time and wanted to be known as that weird unpronounceable symbol - so this is a load of old stuff that he chucked out to fulfil his contract, which neither Prince nor the label showed much interest in promoting. Meh, all round, I guess. Critical reviews were mixed but commercially it still did pretty well, making the top ten in most places but only #15 in the US.

discogs.com tells us you can pick up a decent version for a couple of quid but if you want a promo double album copy then it's going to set you back £237.50. Which feels slightly more than I'd pay for this nonsense - just no, thank you very much.

21/08/94 - A long way off his worst
04/09/94 - Not the happiest album ever

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