Lonely hearts are welcome here - take my hand, let's disappear

Continuing my trip back through the 2001 album charts.

20/05/01 : Scream If You Wanna Go Faster - Geri Halliwell


Hmmm. I seem to recall the singles from this weren't as bad as you might have feared, but that doesn't mean I'm exactly looking forward to this. And we have some late breaking news - apparently this is one that "we" owned, giving us a rather unexpected three in a row and taking us to nine for the year.

Well - it's not dreadful, but it's certainly not great. The songs are generally pretty average, but whereas some people would manage to make the best of so-so material, Geri's voice manages to de-elevate them. The most notable example of this is "It's Raining Men" which I'd (thankfully) completely forgotten about - she just absolutely murders it by sucking all the joy out of it. "Lovey Dovey Stuff" and "Heaven And Hell" are pretty awful as well, but at least there are no original versions to compare them with. Overall, I can't help but think this album would probably be improved by any averagely talented pub singer or possibly by anyone - except for Victoria Beckham obviously.

We're at #5 in the charts with a new entry this week on the start of a surprisingly decent 16 week run - not quite the 50 week run her debut managed, but certainly better than the one week run the follow-up managed. The rest of the top five were R.E.M. (a new entry), a Bon Jovi live album (another new entry), Dido and Shaggy, with two more new entries in the top ten for Depeche Mode (#9) and Missy Elliott (#10).

Wikipedia tells us that this is her second album and there's remarkably little information on there, except for a surprisingly large section on the controversy surrounding the album cover. Go on - guess. Yup, ROSPA and the road safety organisation Brake very much objected to her hanging on to the back of a car on rollerskates - particularly since she'd been banned from driving a couple of months earlier. Amusingly, Geri's spokesman was somewhat nonplussed by all the fuss and I'd have to say I feel it was pretty unlikely any kids were going to be copying a 29 year old ex-Spice Girl, particularly when she certainly wasn't the cool one. 

I was surprised to see some of the musicians playing on here - Rusty Anderson (best known for touring with Paul McCartney for years) played guitar and Dave Stewart (the Eurythmics one) and Greg Kurstin (he co-wrote "Hello" with Adele) supplied keyboards. Critically, some people were surprising nice about it, but most people weren't with entertainment.ie winning for "an unmitigated disaster...Her vocals are weak, the songs are formulaic and the album as a whole is a boring, irritating mess". Commercially, it didn't do as well as Geri hoped, but it did get to #5 in Greece for no obvious reason.

I struggle to imagine many people are out there searching for this, so I was somewhat surprised that discogs.com tells me it's a £1.50 album and I was very surprised to see that the promo CDR is going for £500! WHAT?!? Given the quality of CDR from those days, I doubt you could even listen to it now - but maybe that's what makes it so valuable, because this is really not a great album.

13/05/01 - Decent enough
27/05/01 - Unexpectedly undisappointing

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