Dum-di-lum-di-lum-di-lum-dur-durrrr

Continuing my trip back through the 1963 album charts.

03/11/63 : Greatest Hits - The Shadows


It's impossible to say which visit this is with The Shadows because of all the albums we've met which have some combination of Cliff, The Shadows or both on them, but my verdict so far has been a mildly damning "mostly competent". But this is their greatest hits, so it's got to be great, right?

It's another album I couldn't find but didn't have any difficulty recreating from the ten or so other greatest hits albums of theirs lying around on Amazon Music - and I was pleased to see it started with "Apache", a track I actually quite like, and "F.B.I." and "Wonderful Land" are OK as well. I actually didn't mind the album as a whole with there being more variety than I was expecting (within the somewhat narrow confines of guitar-based instrumentals, although "Stars Fell On Stockton" does include some whistling!). However, most of the tracks just didn't quite do enough for me over their lengths - they all start well enough with different riffs, but then they never quite seem to know what to do with them and some of them stop very abruptly indeed when they run out of ideas. All of which is a bit unusual, because my normal complaint is that individual tracks are fine, but the whole album runs out of steam - this worked the other way round, but wasn't dreadful.

We're at #4 in the charts this week on their 21st week of an impressive 49 week run (which is as long as With The Beatles managed) with it having peaked at #2 - which it managed for nine weeks in the year, kept off the top by Please Please Me for all of them. The rest of the top five were The Beatles, The Searchers, Gerry & The Pacemakers and Frank Ifield, with the highest new entry being Freddie & The Dreamers (#10). 

Somewhat to my surprise, the album does have a Wikipedia entry - a whole two sentences which covers who it's by and how it did. Their entry tells us they've only had eleven best-of albums, with the last one coming in '20 and being called "The First 60 Years". They haven't really done much since '10, but a load of them are still alive so don't bet against "The First 70 Years" coming out in '30.

discogs.com tells us that it's another relatively cheap album, with a quid getting you a decent copy and you can't spend any more than £25 on it. Overall, I'd say it wasn't for me, but it wasn't as bad as I was expecting - and was obviously very popular back in the day.

10/11/63 - Some fine cheese

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