Well it's the only thing that I could do half right - and it's turning out all wrong

Continuing my trip back through the 1971 album charts.

17/01/71 : Candles In The Rain - Melanie

And a second visit from Melanie for the year - last time, I wasn't sure whether I liked it or not, so let's see if I can make up my mind with this one.

Well, she doesn't help herself by opening with the title track which is annoyingly pretentious but she does calm down after that - possibly too much, with a few of the tracks sliding by almost unnoticed. However, she does have an interesting voice and she does very decent versions of James Taylor's "Carolina In My Mind" (better than the original imho) and The Rolling Stones' "Ruby Tuesday". I was surprised to recognise "Look What They've Done To My Song Ma" - I can't say I loved it but I was interested to learn it was done by her. I was also very surprised to hear "Alexander Beatle", which is the AA Milne poem set to music - it's fair to say it's not a thing of beauty. Overall, I'd say it's a very inconsistent album with more misses than hits but the misses are at least interesting misses.

We're at #8 in the charts this week on her last week of a three week run - nothing remarkable about that, eh? Well - this was it's second run of TEN between '70 and '71 giving her 31 weeks in the chart in total, with the first run lasting 14 weeks and peaking at #5 - impressive! The top five this week were Simon & Garfunkel, Andy Williams, Motown Chartbusters Vol 4, Led Zeppelin and Watt, with the highest new entry being Creedence Clearwater Revival (#25). 

Wikipedia tells us this is her third album and "Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)" from it became her first top ten single in the US (but it looks like it wasn't released here). And that's about it, except for noticing that Herbie Flowers played bass on the album, who is probably best known for playing the bassline on "Walk On The Wild Side" but at the time was fresh off the slight less cool accomplishment of composing "Grandad" for Clive Dunn. Critically, the view on the album was that this was her best so far and commercially, it certainly worked out that way, getting to #5 in Canada, #2 in Australia and #17 in the US, selling half a million copies over there.

discogs.com tells us that you can pick up a decent copy of this for a couple of quid, but if you want to splash out then you'd better have £22.50 on hand - oooh, pricey stuff! As I said earlier, this album is all a bit hit and miss, but it's an interesting mess, if nothing else (except for the boring tracks).

24/10/71 - Never heard of 'em 

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