I can tell by the look in your eyes - you've been bored for a long, long time

Continuing my trip back through the 1981 album charts.

08/11/81 : Tonight I'm Yours - Rod Stewart

Our 13th visit with Rod (putting him at fifth in the list on his own, two behind Bob Dylan) and whilst I've generally been surprisingly nice about him when we've met, I have a suspicion that he might be trying too hard to keep up with the times on this one - check out that album cover!

Actually, I reckon he gets away with it because whilst he tries a bit of a new-wave thing on a couple of tracks (and I can grudgingly accept that it works pretty well on "Young Turks"), he balances it with his usual ballads and (soft) rockier numbers. So whilst it's not exactly keeping him down with the kids, it's offering something a bit different without being in danger of scaring off any existing fans. Which, I guess, is how he's still going. 

As an aside, he does a good version of "How Long" which everyone knows, but no-one remembers was originally done by Ace. And when I Googled it to find that out, I learned that in '25, The Horne Section did a "howlongathon" for charity during which they played the song for over 24 hours - I imagine none of them are too keen to play it these days.

We're at #8 in the charts this week with a new entry on the start of a 21 week run, with this being as high as it got. The top five this week were Queen, Adam & The Ants (a new entry), Shakin' Stevens, The Human League, and OMD (another new entry) and there's one more new entry in the top ten for Depeche Mode (#10 - their debut album). 

Wikipedia tells us this is his eleventh album and includes a few random titbits, but very little of actual interest - the only thing that caught my eye was that "Tonight I'm Yours (Don't Hurt Me)" featured Linda Lewis, who we learned (when we met her on Cat Stevens's album ten years previously) was the first black female singer/songwriter to enter the UK charts in '73. Back to Rod, critically the views were decent enough but commercially it did way better than I was expecting, getting to #4 in The Netherlands, #2 in Sweden and #11 in the US.

discogs.com tells us you can pick up a decent version of this for a single pound - you can spend up to £25 on it if you really want to but I suspect most people are probably OK without it. I do have to admit it was better than I expected though, even if that doesn't exactly mean it counts as any good.

15/11/81 - Mystifying popular

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