I don't know anything about you, baby but you're everything I'm dreaming of

Continuing my trip back through the 1981 album charts.

27/09/81 : Dead Ringer - Meat Loaf

Our third visit with Mr Loaf and I don't believe I was aware this even existed, which I'm not taking to be a great sign...

Hmmm. No. The songs are most definitely not at Bat Out Of Hell levels, but it's worse than that because, whether Meat's voice just isn't as strong or the production is just ropey, on a load of them you just can't make out what he's saying (and some of the stuff I did decipher is decidedly dodgy). It's even true on the title(ish) track, which wasn't nearly as decent as I remembered - but it's still easily the best thing on the album. All in all, it feels like someone heard BAOH and thought "I can do that", but then it turns out they just can't - there's many good reasons why no-one remembers this album in the same way.

We're at #3 in the charts this week on his fourth week of an impressive 45 week run, with it having peaked at #1 for its first two weeks. The rest of the top five were Genesis, Super Hits Vol 1 & 2, Cliff Richard and Hooked On Classics (not the best top five ever), with the highest new entry being Saxon (#9).

Wikipedia uses somewhat strange terminology to tell us this is "recognised as his second studio album", but does go on to explain that people consider his '71 album with Shaun Murphy (credited as Stoney and Meatloaf) as a "Motown curio" (whatever that means). Apart from that, there's remarkably little on the album - Jim Steinman wrote a load of songs in '78 which were originally supposed to be recorded as the follow-up to BAOH, but Meat Loaf had lost his voice because of all the touring and drugs, so Jim put that out as himself as Bad For Good, which we might get to see in May of this year. It does however maybe explain why this doesn't sound as good as BAOH because, rather than being produced by Todd Rundgren, it was mostly done by Meat Loaf and Stephen Galfas. Critically, it was not well received and commercially it disappointed, but still did way better than it deserved getting to #5 in Australia, #2 in New Zealand and #1 in Sweden - but it only got to #45 in Sweden.

discogs.com tells us that you can pick up a decent copy of this for two quid but if you want to spend £50 on a mint copy, then you can. But I struggle to imagine it sounding any better because it's just not really any good.

04/10/81 - Done well if you like that sort of thing

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