She sings songs for the lost and the lonely

Continuing my trip back through the 1981 album charts.

06/12/81 : Pearls - Elkie Brooks

There's a strong argument that this should be ignored because it's both a covers and a best-of album, but I think it was successful enough to be included as culturally significant - I like "Pearl's A Singer" but I'm expecting to find the rest of it a bit "meh".

Well, I still like "Pearl's A Singer" (although it was less energetic than I remembered) and I quite liked her version of Chris Rea's "Fool If You Think It's Over", but the rest of it was very "meh" indeed. I suspect Elkie has some quite interesting stuff in her back catalogue, but it was all very definitely exorcised from this collection - it was firmly located in the middle of the road. 

We're at #5 in the charts this week on her fifth week of a 79 week run, with it peaking at #2 in its fourteenth and fifteenth weeks, kept off the top by Barbra Streisand, which certainly says something about the charts around this time. The rest of the top five this week were Chart Hits '81, Queen, Adam & The Ants and a Simon & Garfunkel best-of (one of seven they've charted over the years) and the highest new entry was a Siouxsie & The Banshees best-of (#36). 

Wikipedia only has a few sentences on the album and it tells us that it's her fifth album and was very much the result of her trying something new on the last album which didn't work - so here we are. Checking her entry out to pad things out, I see she's 81 and still touting - apparently she's playing Watford in February so maybe I'll pop along and see her (spoiler alert - not happening). Back to the album, there's absolutely no word on any critical opinion but it did manage to get to #49 in The Netherlands and #40 in Sweden.

discogs.com tells us that you can pick up a decent version for a mere fifty pence - there is an MPO pressing version (whatever that is) for £99 but I think they're hoping against hope that anyone cares enough about this to buy it at that price. I can see this had its fans (you don't spend 79 weeks in the charts by accident) but I struggle to understand exactly who they might have been.

13/12/81 - Quite frankly, a mess

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