I'm sorry for my weary life

Continuing my trip back through the 2001 album charts.

30/09/01 : No Angel - Dido


Our second visit with Dido - I was somewhat unimpressed when we met the follow-up, but I remember quite liking this one and we certainly owned it (taking us to three for the year).

Yeah, I think "quite liking" is a fair reflection of where we are. It's a funny one though, because I feel if this was an album that had only done moderately well commercially, I would be much more positive about it - but I just don't see what it's got that made everyone go quite so mad for it, so I question it more. But, ignoring that, there are a load of decent tracks on here, with "Here With Me", "Thank You" and "I'm No Angel" probably being my favourites. Yes, maybe there could be a bit more variety across the album, but I think I can forgive her because I like the general sound. And let's just take some time out here to consider the life of "Thank You" shall we - there's quite a lot to unpick here.

So who remembers where we first heard it? Nope, it was way before "Stan" - it played over the credits at the end of Sliding Doors in '98. We all remember that, right? And, obviously, someone gave Eminem the soundtrack (also featuring Dodgy, Aqua, Aimee Mann and The Brand New Heavies) who was considering writing a track about toxic fans and the line "your picture on the wall reminds me that it's not so bad" resonated with him - and so "stan" entered into the lexicon and Marshall Bruce Mathers III helped Florian Cloud de Bounvialle Armstrong to super-stardom (unsurprisingly, she ended up suing him for unpaid royalties). The other thing to mention about this track is the video - it's really well done and makes me think "poor housey" whenever I hear the track.

We're at #1 in the charts this week on her FIFTIETH week of an 101 week run with it having also spent its 16th-21st weeks at the top - it also managed another 21 week run in '03 (I assume when Life For Rent came out). The rest of the top five were Macy Gray, a Tracy Chapman best-of (a new entry), Travis and Jamiroquai, with the next highest new entry being Eels (#12) - I'm also going to mention Lou Reed's Transformer which is a most peculiar re-entry at #16.

As expected, Wikipedia has loads on the album (327 milliPeppers) and it tells us this is her debut album and she co-wrote and produced all the tracks. She started work on it in '95 (whilst also working with her brother Rollo's band Faithless during this time) and it was released in the US in June '99, but wasn't released anywhere else until October '00 (due to the sale of the record label). Critically the reviews were mostly positive, but there were some complaints she was trying too hard to push people's buttons - retrospectively, people are still not quite sure what to say about it, with The Independent declaring 25 years later that it was "neither as bland as conventional wisdom suggests it is, nor quite interesting enough to be a secret classic" - which I feel is fair enough. Commercially, it did "pretty well", getting to #1 in Australia, Austria, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, New Zealand and Norway and #4 in the US. It was the best selling album in the UK in the year and the second best selling album in the year globally and in the UK in the 00s, with over 15 million copies having been sold.

Given the number of copies there are out there, it's no surprise that discogs.com has this as a fifty pence album but if you want the 200 gm vinyl reissue from '03 then it's going to set you back a tidy £350! I was pleased to revisit this and enjoyed it - I'm still puzzled as to why it blew up quite so much everywhere, but if you can get past that then I think this is an enjoyably nostalgic visit.

07/10/01 - Nicely minimalist 

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