Ba-da-be-da-ba-da

Continuing my trip back through the 1963 album charts.

19/05/63 : A Taste Of Honey - Acker Bilk Esquire

Our second visit with Mr Bilk, although he's had a few mentions over the years with surprisingly high charting albums. I'm expecting this to be well done, but not my sort of thing at all.

Last time we met him, I was surprised at how it was all very trad jazz, because I was only aware of him from "Strangers On The Shore" (which was the biggest selling single of '62) - but we catch him here displaying both musical sides of his repertoire. It's all perfectly well done, but sounds incredibly dated these days and you struggle to imagine why anyone would ever have listened to it. It's quite the album cover though, isn't it?

We're at #17 in the charts this week on the last week of a four week run, which pleasingly went #20-#19-#18-#17! The top five this week were The Beatles (only a couple more weeks left!), Cliff, Buddy, Elvis and Frank (Ifield, not Sinatra) with the highest new entry being Joe Brown (#17) with a live album that charted for seven weeks, but no longer seems to be available so we never caught up with it.

Wikipedia doesn't have an entry for the album but his entry tells us it's his seventh album and one of four he had over the years that completely coincidentally peaked at #17. He basically spent all his life playing his clarinet and seemed pretty happy with that - on our informal "good guy" scale, he's one of the best because he met his wife at school and was married to her for sixty years. Amusingly, the "see also" section has two entries - West Country dialects and Django Rheinhardt (obviously because both Acker and Django both suffered finger-related accidents which didn't hinder their success).

discogs.com tells us you can spend £3-£10 on it, although I struggle to imagine too many people are in the market for this these days. I'd say it's of its time, but it sounds more like it's twenty years after its time - not for me, I'm afraid.

09/06/63 - Almostly entirely without merit

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