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Continuing my trip back through the 1981 album charts. 11/10/81 : Abacab - Genesis Our fourth visit with Genesis and this is one I've never heard and for some reason I thought it was much earlier than '81 - I don't think I knew they were quite this popular at this time. Hmmm - this is a peculiar album, whilst also being completely understandable when you know where they came from and here they ended up. It's got both the pop sound and rhythms of Invisible Touch and some weird prog sounds, off-kilter rhythms and far too long tracks of Selling England By The Pound . It's feels a bit "neither fish nor fowl" these days and I can't say I particularly liked it, but maybe (just maybe) it's what people were crying out for in '81. We're at #6 in the charts this week on their fourth week of a decent 22 week run, with it having peaked at a surprising (for me, at least) #1 for its first two weeks. The top five this week were  The Police , Shakin' ...

The third parkrun write-up! 01/08/26 : Roosevelt Island DC  Heading back in time to August we come to an event which it's very unlikely I'll ever do again (but never say never!). But first, some background as to how I came to be there - and where there actually is! As a reward for our youngest doing her GCSEs she was offered a trip to the US to watch a WNBA game (it's fair to say she's a BIG fan) - which sounds like a nice offer on our part but resulted in a whole load of soul searching for her because she couldn't decide who to support and hence what her preferred destination was. EVENTUALLY, the Washington Mystics were settled upon as the team of choice and hence she & I found ourselves heading over there for a few days at the end of July. And one of those days was a Saturday, so obviously the opportunity to experience an American parkrun had to be taken advantage of. There are three parkruns in the greater DC area, but the Roosevelt Island event was easily t...

Continuing my trip back through the 1981 album charts. 18/10/81 : Madness 7 - Madness This is our third visit with Madness and currently we've experienced their first and last albums, which span a 44 year gap - this is going to be more like the former than the latter, I suspect. It opens with "Cardiac Arrest" which was always one of my favourites of their singles (helped by the video where they play the xylophone section on a skeleton) and then it follows that with "Shut Up" which I'd completely forgotten about, so it was nice to reminded about that. "Grey Day" is the only other one I recognised, but the rest of the album is very much in the same vein - they're definitely getting to their "nutty boy" sound here. "Benny Bullfrog" was maybe a bit too nutty for me though, but most of it is some well-crafted fun which doesn't hang around long enough to get tiresome - I liked it. We're at #7 in the charts this week on t...

Continuing my trip back through the 1981 album charts. 25/10/81 : Hedgehog Sandwich - Not The Nine O'Clock News We've not had a comedy album in a while - and I'm pretty certain this is the most recent one we've seen chronologically. I was just a bit too young for it at the time but I'm aware of their best work retrospectively - I'm expecting this to be a mix of chuckles and "huh?"s Yeah - it's got some classics on here which are still pretty funny and you still see quoted from time to time. "Constable Savage" still hits harder than it should ( "Savage, would I be correct in assuming that Mr Kodogo is a coloured gentleman?" ) and "HiFi Shop" has only become more relevant as technology has taken over the world. Some of the sketches have obviously dated eg they do like to have a go at Ronald Reagan (although some of their complaints seem amusingly mild these days) and their accurate send-up of That's Life isn't go...

Continuing my trip back through the 1981 album charts. 01/11/81 : Almost Blue - Elvis Costello & The Attractions Our seventh visit with Elvis C in various guises and I generally like the singles but don't quite get the rest of it - let's see if that continues here. Well, I do like the single because who doesn't like his version of "Good Year For The Roses" - and the rest of the album surprised me by being a similar country-tinged melancholy. However, when I read the Wikipedia entry and learned it was an album of country cover versions (so it could have been ignored) then I guess that makes a bit more sense. I also recognised "I'm Your Toy", but didn't recognise the track name - once again, Wikipedia came to the rescue by telling me that The Flying Burrito Brothers (and later Belly) released it "Hot Burrito #1". Taken one at a time, I didn't mind any of these tracks (although  his voice isn't quite good enough for some of the...

Our third sports review... Philadephia Eagles vs Jacksonville Jaguars : Tottenham Hotspur Stadium I love my London NFL games and this year I'm lucky enough to be going to two of them - next weekend I'm off with the kids to Wembley, but last weekend it was just me heading off to Tottenham. Imho the Tottenham games are better because the stadium is just a bit more compact - but the kids can't go because they're all Arsenal fans (obviously the fact that the tickets are more expensive doesn't enter into my thoughts at all). All the London games have a nominal home team (the Jags in this instance), but generally the crowd rock up wearing the jersey of whichever team they actually follow which leads to a many-flavoured crowd, very few of whom actually care who wins the game. But this weekend was very, very different! Just walking to the stadium, it was clear that at least half of the attendees were wearing Eagles jerseys, which was unexpected because I wasn't aware th...

Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts 09/10/26 : Songs From The Wedding Cake - Blossoms  Our FIFTH visit with Blossoms - the lads have done surprisingly well over the years. And I've generally liked their stuff, although I have found some of them slightly confounding - there's nothing wrong with some slight confoundment though, is there? Yeah, I'm still a bit confounded. I called one of their previous albums indie-folk-disco, but this is more indie-funk-disco - I get the impression them Blossoms lads just like to make nice sounds and they don't really care too much what kinda stuff gets thrown into the mix in order to do so. And I have to agree they are nice sounds and I got a general good mood vibe from it - but I'm also not sure I really remember much more about it or care enough to revisit it to remind myself. We're at #1 in the charts with a new entry this week (their fifth #1) and the rest of the top five are The Beatles (you weren...