You know, baby, when you're in my arms, I can feel your loving magic charms

Continuing my trip back through the 1981 album charts.

15/11/81 : Shaky - Shakin' Stevens

Well, I spoke too soon about hoping the run of quality would continue, didn't it? I'm being a bit harsh there because I suspect this is going to be fine for what it is, but it'll be intriguing to listen to it and try to understand why he was quite popular - it always makes me laugh that my youngest sister was absolutely crazy about him around this time.

Nope - still got absolutely no idea. It's all old style rock and roll which I've got no problems with but it would certainly be pushing things to say I liked it. I remembered "You Drive Me Crazy" and "Green Door" and the rest of it is very much in the same vein - it's something you can imagine someone in the pub knocking out as a bit of a laugh, but it's quite bizarre how it was just something that people tapped into. And this wasn't a "people quite liked it" thing - "Green Door" spent four weeks at #1 and "You Drive Me Crazy" spent four weeks at #2, only kept off the top by Adam & The Ants "Prince Charming". Say what you like about Adam, but at least he was trying something new - there's absolutely nothing new about this and it's performed adequately at best. Weird!

We're at #4 in the charts this week on his tenth week of a very decent 28 week run, with it having peaked at (quite obviously) #1 in its eighth week. The rest of the top five this week were Queen, Adam & The Ants, OMD and The Human League with the highest new entry being The Stranglers (#14).

Wikipedia tells it's "an" album by Mr Stevens because they can't decide whether the six albums he did with The Sunsets (starting all the way back in '70, where I can at least understand the appeal a bit more) should count towards his total - this is his fifth solo album and he continued to churn them out consistently until '91, after which he's only managed one a decade. There's not a lot else on the album other than telling us the BJ Cole plays on the album - he's popped up on a wide variety of stuff over the years. Looking into his surprisingly lengthy to pad things out a bit, there's a whole load of nonsense in there but I will tell you that he was the youngest of THIRTEEN children! Critically, the only thing I can tell you is that Smash Hits gave it 8/10 (which seems very generous of them) but commercially, this took Europe by storm, getting to #4 in Germany, #2 in Iceland, Norway and Sweden and #1 in Austria - it seems like no-one was immune to old Shaky's charms (except the US!).

discogs.com tells us he's not quite so sought out these days because you only have to shell out fifty pence to get a decent version of this but you can spend £21.21 on it if you REALLY want to. There's nothing wrong with this album but it's certainly pretty average and completely perplexing why it was ever so popular.

22/11/81 - Nicely subtle

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