I was five and you were ten, boy

Continuing my trip back through the 1971 album charts.

17/10/71 : Surrender - Diana Ross

Our third solo visit with Diana (along with two Supremes visits) and what you get with Diana is very dependent upon the year in question - and I've absolutely no idea what sort of stuff she was doing at this time. I'm sure it will be done well, but whether I actually like it is very uncertain - it's nice to see an album featuring a named woman on it though (our first of the year).

Hmmm. Double hmmm. This is a curious one. There's no doubting Diana's got skills, but this album very much does not show them off. Both the recording quality and the sound levels of the various instruments are really remarkably poor - I'd have guessed this was a mid 60s album if I didn't know better (particularly when you consider how decent some of the production has been on albums this year). And the songs are also decidedly average, with the exception of "I'm Still Waiting" (which is an obvious highpoint) and "Reach Out (I'll Be There)" - which is a very decent song, but hers is not a great cover. So, all in all, I'm not a huge Diana fan, but I feel she's been very short-changed by this album - she deserved better, even if it's a cool album cover.

We're at #14 in the charts this week on her third week of a seven week run, with it having peaked at #10 in its debut week. The top five this week were Rod Stewart, Motown Chartbusters Vol 6 (a new entry), Hot Hits 7 (another new entry), T Rex and Carole King, with there being no other new entries in the chart.

Wikipedia tells us that this is her third album and only charted here after she had a #1 hit with "I'm Still Waiting" (which was on Everything Is Everything, her previous album), at which point they added that to this album as well and re-titled it as I'm Still Waiting. The only other fact of interest is that four of the tracks had already been recorded by other Motown artists - there was a lot of sharing going on around this time. Critically, people were pretty middle of the road about it and commercially, it didn't really set the world alight, getting to #56 in the US.

discogs.com tells us you can pick up an original copy of this for as little as a couple of quid but, quite bizarrely, if you want to splash out then you need to be looking at a CD reissue, which can go for as much as £70 (and I've absolutely no idea why). There's certainly no danger of me buying this though - it felt like very shoddy workmanship throughout.

24/10/71 - Plenty of skill on display

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