Blah-di-blah-wah-wah

Continuing my trip back through the 1971 album charts.

05/12/71 : This Is Pourcel - Franck Pourcel

I've never heard of Franck and a quick Google says I could probably ignore this because it sounds like it's going to be an album of musical wallpaper, but I'm intrigued enough about it to take the risk.

Yeah - most peculiar. It's an album of easy-listening instrumentals, some of which I recognised and some of which I didn't (I suspect they're all covers, but don't have any way of verifying that). There's nothing particularly wrong with any of them (and some of them feel like quite a lot of work has gone into them) but I can't, for the life of me, imagine why anyone would want to listen to a whole album of it - it's still way better than the torture Wings put me through recently though.

We're at #10 in the charts this week on his fourth week of a seven week run, with it having peaked at #8 in its second and third weeks - it seems mad that so many people would have bought it! It's interesting to look at #10-20 in the charts this week because, as well as this album, there are two Mantovani albums and two random classical music compilation albums, so easy listening was very much a thing at this time. The top five this week were a higher quality mix of Led Zeppelin, T Rex, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Top Of The Pops Volume TWENTY (another dolly-bird covers album) and John Lennon, with the highest new entry being Hot Hits 8 (#16). 

Wikipedia doesn't have an entry for the album, but his entry tells us he was a French composer, arranger, and conductor of popular and classical music. He was born in 1913, released his first album in '54 and by his death in '00, he'd recorded over 250 albums - so it's probably not such a surprise there's no entry for the album. Obviously, the high point of his career was being the conductor for France at the Eurovision Song Contest between '56 and '72, during which they won the thing four times. Despite this fame/notoriety, he only ever had one record that charted in the UK - and I think you can probably work out what that was.

discogs.com tells us you can spend anywhere between £1-£60 on this with no obvious difference between the two - so you pays your money and you takes your choice. And my choice is to be perplexed that this was quite as popular as it was - I can tell there's musical skill involved but that doesn't mean I feel the need to listen to the results.

12/12/71 - Perfectly dreadful

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