She should have known better than to give her heart

Continuing my trip back through the 1981 album charts.

22/11/81 : Architecture And Morality - OMD

I think I listened to this a very long time ago and quite enjoyed it - but then never listened to it again, so let's see what a gap of 40+ years has done for me. Interestingly, this is the third acronymical artist of the year (even though the album cover tells us they're really Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, but I'm not going to type that again), giving us a hit rate of 50% so far - they're doing as well as the women!

It starts with "The New Stone Age" which is a very un-OMD sounding track but soon gets into the mellow-ish groove with "She's Leaving" (which I really liked), "Souvenir", "Joan Of Arc" and "Joan Of Arc (Maid Of Orleans)". It's not an immediate grabber but it's got some nice subtle hooks in there and I suspect it would really get into your head given half a chance (which it never got from me).

We're at #4 in the charts this week on their third week of an impressive 34 week run, with it having peaked at #3 in its second and fifteenth weeks - ah, do you remember when albums used to go both up and down the charts?!? The rest of the top five this week were Queen, Adam & The Ants, Chart Hits '81 and a Blondie best-of, with the highest new entry being Julio Iglesias (#10) - we came pretty close to listening to this a couple of weeks ago and there's still a danger I'll have to endure it in '82 (surprisingly it's not an album of covers).

Wikipedia tells us this is their third album and is inspired by religious music, which I guess I can understand but it totally passed me by whilst listening to it. Quite a few interesting facts for you here - the album cover was designed by Peter Saville, who's probably best known for his work with Factory, but if you look at his Wikipedia entry he's done LOADS over the years. And the album title was suggested by his girlfriend at the time, Martha Ladly - who you probably don't recognise by name but she was THE Martha of Martha and the Muffins. Also, the record company wanted to put "She's Leaving" out as a single but the band vetoed it, which was a decision they later regretted.

Critically, the views were mixed with a lot of the "serious" music press thinking it was all a bit too understated but Sounds and Smash Hits leapt to its defence and declared it "a classic in the making" with "wonderful melodies and intelligent lyrics". Retrospectively, everyone's much more impressed with it now being considered a trail-blazer and plenty of musicians citing it as a favourite. Commercially it did well in select European countries, getting to #8 in Germany, #3 in Spain and #1 in The Netherlands, but it only got to #144 in the US.

discogs.com tells us you can get the album with blue, yellow or grey covers, but four quid will be enough to get you a decent copy - unless you want one signed by the band, in which case you can expect to pay £194.03! What with this and Dare, this year has already turned up some proper decent albums which I missed at the time and we're only six albums in - let's hope this run of form continues.

29/11/81 - A good example of "that sort of thing"