Forget everything and remember

Continuing my trip back through the 2001 album charts.

07/10/01 : Music Of The Spheres - Ian Brown

Our first solo visit with Mr Brown - I own and like his best-of, but don't think I've ever listened to one of his proper albums, so I'm interested to go there.

Well, it starts with "F.E.A.R.", which is one of my favourite Ian Brown songs - there's actually remarkably little to it, but what it does, it does very well. And that's a bit of a theme across the album, with a lot of the tracks being quite minimal in their composition - but it's quite a clever minimalism with the sum generally being more than the parts. If I had any quibbles, it would be about the "fuzziness" he employs at times, which just annoys me - but overall, I thought this was a decent album and nicely different. I'm also going to call out "Forever And A Day" which has some very nice guitar work on it and "El Mundo Pequeno" which is, for no obvious reason, in Spanish. I'm not a fan of the album cover though - no-one ever needs close-up pictures of eyeballs.

We're at a surprisingly high #3 with a new entry in the chart this week on the start of a surprisingly short six week run - it deserved way better than that. The rest of the top five were Kylie (a new entry), Elton John (another new entry), Bob The Builder (and another one) and a Tracy Chapman best-of. And there are three more new entries in the top ten for a Garbage best-of (#6), a David Cassidy redux (#7) and Victoria Beckham (#10) - what a peculiar collection. 

I obviously had to go down a Bob The Builder Wikipedia rabbit hole - that album had a twelve week run in the chart (which is unpleasiingly twice as long as Ian managed, but it did at least pleasingly feature a drop in each week), got to #1 in Australia and includes two #1 singles and, quite obviously, a guest appearance from Elton John. Also, if it had managed to outsell Ian Brown, I might well have been forced to listen to it because it has more original tracks on it than I was expecting - but that disaster was narrowly avoided, so I am now forever in Ian's debt. 

Back to Wikipedia for the album we're supposed to be paying attention to, it has about the same amount of text as Bob does, telling us this is Ian's third solo album and it "employs minimalist song structures" - and that's your lot. Looking at his entry, I'd forgotten he'd spent a couple of months in Strangeways a few years before this for behaviour on a flight that a bandmate described as "just being cheeky" - apparently, he "threatened to cut off the hands of the flight attendant and hammered on the cockpit door, as the plane came in to land". Such japes! Critically, the reviews were decent enough but there's no word on commercial performance other than here and #6 in Ireland - it feels like this would have done well enough in Europe given half a chance.

discogs.com tells us this a pricey album for the year, setting you back £1.50 for a decent version but if you want a vinyl copy then it's really going to set you back with the cheapest one being £150 and the most expensive being £225! I'll not be splashing out on it, but I enjoyed this - that's three decent albums in a row so it's nice to see some evidence that 2001 isn't going to be entirely shit.

30/09/01 - A pleasant revisit
14/10/01 - Harking back to the glory days