I was alright for a while, I could smile for a while

Continuing my trip back through the 1963 album charts.

30/06/63 : Crying - Roy Orbison

We've skipped over a week (I think you can guess who was #1) and a couple of albums - a Joe Brown live album which I couldn't find amongst the huge number of Joe Brown live albums out there and yet another posthumous Buddy Holly album. All of which brings us to our second visit with Roy this year and our fourth overall, featuring possibly his best known track.

And you'll never guess what the opening track is, will you? It is a particularly fine offering though, suiting his plaintive voice well. And it's followed up by a few cover versions - "The Great Pretender" (which I didn't know was originally done by The Platters), "Love Hurts" (not the first Everly Brothers cover we've seen this year) and "She Wears My Ring" (which was apparently written in 1862 and first recorded in 1906!), all of which work well. The rest of the album is original tracks, none of which I recognise but they were all pretty listenable - and with twelve tracks in thirty minutes, it really doesn't hang around long. I do feel they could have put a bit more effort into the album cover though.

We're at #19 in the charts this week on his second week of a two week run, with #17 being as high as it got - it deserved better than that, surely? The top five this week were The Beatles, Cliff Richard, Buddy Holly, The Shadows and Elvis Presley with the highest new entry being The Four Seasons (#20 - they were unlucky not to get the call).

Wikipedia tells us this is his third album and gives us remarkably little else of interest. Looking at his entry to pad things out tells us that he toured the UK with The Beatles around this time - there were initial issues whilst they worked out the pecking order because Roy would go on first despite being the better known artist, but then play multiple encores, stopping The Beatles from getting on stage. But they all worked it out in the end and he became firm friends with George Harrison - later forming The Travelling Wilburys with him and some other completely unknown musicians. Critically the album was received well enough with Cashbox going overboard and declaring it a "top-notch listening pleasure album" and commercially it also got to #21 in the US.

discogs.com tells us that you can pick up a decent version of the album for £4 - for some reason, it seems like you can only get repress versions (whatever they are) for which you can spend up to £20 or reissued versions which will set you back £35. I didn't mind this at all, but I still think Roy is more of a best-of artist because his high points comfortably exceed his average quality bar.  

14/07/63 - An interesting visit

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

And all at once I owned the earth and sky

Image
A new year to start the New Year - starting my trip back through the 2001 album charts. 30/12/01 : Swing When You're Winning -   Robbie Williams There's a reasonable argument I should reject this album, but it was such a surprising cultural moment that even I don't feel I can, so it means we're starting the year with one that "we" own. This is our fifth visit with Mr Williams - I'm determined not to enjoy it, but I also have to admit I'm not going to hate it nearly as much as I would like to.  You know what? This is perfectly fine. Completely inessential, but he's not doing anyone any harm. For the most part, it's classic Sinatra-or-thereabouts tracks which Robbie does a decent job with on the vocals (along with some slightly peculiar guests) and they've obviously got some decent musicians in to lay down the backing tracks. He rarely does anything wildly original with them but, most importantly, he doesn't ruin them either - I don't...
Read more

I wanna keep the door from closing, yeah

Image
Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts 26/12/25 : I Barely Know Her - Sombr Christmas week gives us some odd albums - last year we had Lana del Rey's album from '12, which hasn't left the chart all year. I'm pleased to say we're somewhat more up to date this year with an album that came out in August - I met it as a new entry  and was somewhat nonplussed by it, but I have mentioned it a couple of times since because it's just not gone away, which is somewhat unusual. So let's see what I make of it on a second listen (this trick totally failed to convince me of the virtues of Addison Rae earlier today). Well, well, well - Sombr at least intrigues on second listen. I'd struggle to describe it - it's kinda poppy indie with a woozy vibe to it, but it feels like it has depths to it and I reckon the more you listen to it, the more you pick up on. Intriguing indeed - I'd love to tell you more but that's all I got for the time ...
Read more

In your grace, I looked for some meaning - but I found none

Image
Continuing my trip up The Guardian's  50 best albums of 2025 . #3 :  Essex Honey - Blood Orange Dev Hynes’ fifth album as Blood Orange felt uniquely keyed into the fragmented, distracted headspace that comes after someone passes, in his case, his mother. Essex Honey’s restive nature was summed up in its painful opening lines, which you could read as the dying’s acceptance of death starkly contrasting the living’s ability to meet them on those terms: “In your grace, I looked for some meaning,” Hynes sings on Look at You. “But I found none, and I still search for a truth.” That search is wide-reaching: The Field refashions the Durutti Column’s Sing to Me as a racing hymnal made for the stereo of a Ford Escort. There are tough little Robert Rental-style post-punk gems in The Train (Kings Cross) and Countryside that bristle with frustration. Vivid Light is a plainly soulful duet with Zadie Smith; Life, featuring Tirzah’s unmistakable vocals, basks in languid, flute-dappled funk. T...
Read more