I am now a central part of your mind's landscape

Continuing my trip back through the 1994 album charts.

20/03/94 : Vauxhall And I - Morrissey


Our fourth visit with the lad and I've owned a couple of Morrissey albums in my time but this wasn't one of them - I believe it's supposed to be one of his better ones, so am expecting to enjoy it.

Hmmm - I recognised "Hold On To Your Friends" (a surprisingly positive message from young Steven) and "The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get" (which is a pretty catchy tune) but the rest of it just kinda drifted past me. It's all decent enough and I can believe that if I listened to it a few more times and paid more attention to the lyrics then I'd get into it, but it doesn't feel quite as instant as Viva Hate did - although it felt better than I remember it's follow-up, Southpaw Grammar, being. Overall, I'd say it was OK but I was expecting more.

We're at #1 in the charts with a new entry this week at the start of a six week run which featured an amusingly exponential drop out of the chart, so this was definitely as high as it ever got. The rest of the top five were Mariah Carey, Ace Of Base (a re-entry after six months away from the chart), Enigma and M People with the next highest new entry being Level 42 (#8).

Wikipedia tells us this is his fourth solo album and leads with the somewhat curious "fact" that "the album's title may be a reference to the 1987 film Withnail and I". The rest of it is rather lacking in interest other than telling us that "The More You Ignore Me..." was his only charting single in the US (#46) - I imagine he greeted the news with a massive sigh. Critically, he was still their darling at this time and they loved it, particularly Q who gave it five stars and voted it #89 in their list of best albums EVER in '06 - errrr, OK. Commercially, it did surprisingly well in the US, getting to #18 - it doesn't feel like the sort of thing that would go down that well over there, but I'm sure it made him pleasingly miserable.

discogs.com tells us you can pick up a decent copy for a couple of quid but if you want a signed copy of the remastered edition which was made available through a pop-up shop in Battersea Dogs' Home complete with numbered dog-tag then it's going to set you back - go on, guess. Yup, £850 - making this the most expensive album of the year so far. I doubt I'll be splashing out on it but I might be tempted to revisit it because, although I didn't mind it, it just felt like I missed something.

And I'm very proud of the fact that I managed to get through this without asking "can you separate the art from the artist?"...

27/03/94 - Very much not for me!

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