Another one done!

Our fourth visit to the swingin' Sixties - how did 1963 do?

It definitely felt like a watershed year - how could it be anything other thanks to four lads from Liverpool? There were certainly some decent albums in there though, although I think it's safe to say the women didn't exactly dominate matters. And to no-one's great surprise, the ownership ratio this year was a big fat zero percent.

Looking at the best selling albums of the year, we're back to relying on the dubious information from bestsellingalbums.org but I don't think anyone will be surprised to see The Beatles taking the top two spots - although I'm quite surprised that With The Beatles takes the top spot, because Please Please Me was #1 for thirty weeks of the year. The other record which spent an age at #1 was Cliff Richard's Summer Holiday, so it's no surprise to see that at #3 but I wasn't expecting to have West Side Story (which was released in '61) at #4 - it's fair to say that album ruled the early 60s because it was #1 in the year end lists for both '62 and '64 (With The Beatles took the #2 spot in '64 as well).

The chart only has ten entries this year, so we can run through the rest of it pretty quickly, with it looking both forward and backward musically. The Shadows take the next two spots with Out Of The Shadows and their best-of and The Searchers are at #7 with Meet The Searchers, which is an album I don't remember in the slightest. The Buddy Holly best-of at #8 is the only one we didn't bother reviewing (because we'd already reviewed a different best-of) and Frank Ifield and Gerry & The Pacemakers close out the chart - meaning the only women in the list were from West Side Story (thankfully they are very well represented there).

Looking at the albums I experienced, we might as well get the women out of the way first because it ain't gonna take long! Brenda Lee was the obvious queen of the year with her two albums - they were of their time, but certainly listenable enough. Which was also true for Shirley Bassey - and that's all the named women we had this year. Women had a reasonably high profile on a few other albums though with West Side Story having strong female roles - unfortunately the same can't really be said for Half A Sixpence but it does feature the odd women only track. All Star Festival surprisingly featured women on 66% of the tracks (even if some of them were very odd indeed) - which leaves us with two "comedy" offerings with high profile ladies from TW3 (which was all very odd) and Vaughn Meader (which was surprisingly amusing). All of which gives us eight albums featuring significant female content, compared with the nine we saw in '61 and the eighteen in '65 (which is a bit of an outlier, being comfortably the most we've seen so far in the '60s and '70s).

So let's start with the men we saw multiple times this year because there were quite a few of them. The Searchers kicked things off for us with two of the first five albums of the year - I enjoyed the first one, but was somewhat Merseybeated out for the second one (although I suspect if I met it later in the year, I'd have been much nicer about it). Frank Ifield also gave us a couple of albums, both of which sounded very dated with a surprising amount of yodelling (ie some). Duane Eddy also gave us two albums and they were a most curious pairing - the first one had very low-key guitar on it and the second one just felt like he really wasn't trying. Roy Orbison did much better, with both his albums being pretty enjoyable and not feeling dated - probably due to his unique style.

In a normal year, that would be it for the multiple visits - but we're only getting started here! We obviously met Elvis a couple of times but both of them were soundtrack albums, which is never a great sign but at least the second one included "Return To Sender" - we would also have met him a third time if we hadn't already met Rock & Roll Number 2 on the Rolling Stone List. We did, however, have the "luck" to meet Frank Sinatra three times - and whilst they were all decent enough, I remember being well and truly Sinatra-ed out by the middle of the first album. I much preferred meeting Bobby Vee three times - he wasn't really someone I knew much about and I enjoyed all of them (and was surprised to see him quite so often).

That's got to be it now, right? Oh no - we still have to consider the almost inseparable and inescapable Cliff Richard and The Shadows who we met in various combinations a total of FIVE times! Summer Holiday was the obvious highlight for me with the rest of them having completely broken my ability to be mean about them, but I going to call out When In Spain because I really wasn't expecting a foreign language album from Cliff. And with that, we've FINALLY finished with the artists with multiple visits.

Most of the rest of the offerings are solo artists, most of whom were pretty mediocre. I liked Ray Conniff way more than I should have, I didn't mind Del Shannon or Chuck Berry (even if his live album was not at all live) and I was pleased to experience Chet Atkins. However, Kenny Ball, Richard Chamberlain, Billy Fury, Acker Bilk and Eddie Cochran were all sounding very dated (even for '63) - although I will admit Richard had a nice voice.

Wrapping up, we have three Merseybeat-ish albums to consider - With The Beatles is obviously the most historically significant (but interestingly left off the Rolling Stone list) but Gerry & The Pacemakers and Freddie & The Dreamers were both perfectly listenable. As was Stan Getz & Charlie Byrd, but it was also very forgettable - and that only leaves us with Pickwick, which wasn't dreadful but also wasn't great, interestingly revealing absolutely nothing about the plot to me.

Looking at the #1 albums of the year, we only saw five different albums (which is the second lowest number we've seen so far) from four different artists. The Beatles ruled the top spot with Please Please Me (thirty weeks) and With The Beatles (five weeks) giving them 67% of the year - poor old Cliff had to make do with a mere fourteen weeks for Summer Holiday, with The Shadows taking two and West Side Story a mere one. There were no debuts at the top in the entire year, although amusingly With The Beatles debuted at #2 - kept off the top by Please Please Me. It's also worth mentioning the nine weeks this year that we had no albums in the chart to listen to - usually this was because we'd already met all the albums that week, but there were also a couple of albums that don't appear to be anywhere on the internet, which is a bit of a surprise (and I also refused to subject myself to yet another Sinatra best-of or Buddy Holly not-even-best-of).

The generally accepted (by the internet) best albums from the year that I didn't come across are Bob Dylan's The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (#44 in '25), Charlie Mingus's The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady (never charted), Johnny Cash's Blood Sweat And Tears (never charted), Peter, Paul & Mary's Moving (never charted), The Four Season's Big Girls Don't Cry (never charted), The Crystals' He's A Rebel (never charted), James Brown's Live At The Apollo (never charted), Sam Cooke's Night Beat (never charted), Phil Spector's Christmas Gift (#19 in '83), The Beach Boys Surfin' USA (#17 in '65) and Little Stevie Wonder's The 12 Year Old Genius (never charted).

The most expensive album of the year contest was over before it began with a copy of Please Please Me being offered up for £17,500 (the most we've ever seen) in the very first week of the year. The most read post of the year was, somewhat to my surprise, Sinatra & Swingin' Brass. a pretty decent but pretty unremarkable Frank Sinatra album - and it was very closely followed by, also to my surprise, All Star Festival and Roy Orbison. Weird. And the least read post was, again surprisingly, West Side Story which is actually quite an interesting post on a very successful album, so shame on you all - go check it out!

'63 was an interesting year because it very much felt like a year of transition, with things started by The Beatles, but accelerating towards the end of the year as other bands jumped onboard. This meant we started with a load of Merseybeat stuff which I got very bored with very quickly - but I soon missed it when we got into the older stuff. It's not like the other stuff was dreadful, but you could quite easily see why people embraced The Beatles so much (and I'll be very interested to see where '64 takes us). Having said that, my albums of the year are coming from the olden days with Bobby Vee (they're all good, but let's pick his best-of), Cliff Richard's Summer Holiday (who saw that coming?) and Brenda Lee's All Alone Am I (mostly for her work in just being a woman) - all the Merseybeat albums were pretty decent, but I guess we should give Please Please Me a shout-out for starting it all off. It's a good comment on the year that it's hard to pick a stinker out, but Pickwick & TW3 both felt very dated - which probably isn't such a surprise, but considering I think they were both supposed to be funny, I really struggled to understand where the humour lay. 

So where to next? Using my self-imposed arbitrary rules, we have the option of '70, '71 or '75 and I'm going for '71 with considerably higher expectations than I would have had for 70s years when I started this exercise - for a decade with a poor reputation it's thrown up some very interesting albums. 

06/01/23 - Inexplicably enjoyable