Skip to content
Jason Maloney reviews
V o l u m e # 1 8 Week Commencing: 17th June 1985 Online Date: 16th June 2005
of the Blue Turtles
In which The Police’s mainman, freed from the attendant creative shackles of a globe-conquering rock band, sought to express himself through a set of songs covering everything from the Cold War (Russians), the Miner’s Strike (We Work The Black Seam), the 11th Century Crusades (The Children’s Crusade), vampires (Moon Over Bourbon Street) and, er, jazz-flavoured instrumentals about blue turtles.
Plenty of pretentious-sounding guff accompanied the album’s sleevenotes; on all of his first three solo outings Sting felt the need to painstakingly reveal the inspiration behind each track and the genesis of the albums themselves.
Despite some critical flak, The Dream Of The Blue Turtles proved a unqualified success – Top 3 in the UK, Top 10 in the US – and spawned a large handful of modest hit singles, including the expert pop of If You Love Somebody (Set Them Free) and the joyous calypso of Love Is The Seventh Wave. He even found it in himself to poke fun at his Police days with the latter’s coda of “Every Leg You Break, Every Cake You Bake”.
A brief and rather disastrous attempt to patch things up with messrs Copeland and Summers in 1986 aside, Sting the Solo Artist was born.
Misplaced Childhood
With their third album, ridiculed neo-progsters Marillion reached new commercial heights courtesy of romantic ballds Kayleigh and Lavender. The former defied the band’s previous chart form by reaching #2 on the UK Singles Top 40, paving the way for Misplaced Childhood to debut at #1 on a competitive week.
While both 1983’s Script For A Jester’s Tear and 1984’s Fugazi had gone top 10, neither produced a genuine hit single. Lavender’s subsequent Top 5 success in August helped to keep its parent album in the higher regions for the rest of 1985.
Little Creatures
The Heads’ debut studio set for EMI eventually became the biggest of their career, but it got off to a sluggish start. Little Creatures‘ #10 peak only came after The Road To Nowhere became a smash hit at the end of the year, followed by And She Was in early 1986.
Although the band’s reputation was at a high after Jonathan Demme’s groundbreaking Stop Making Sense concert film in 1984, the new album’s introductory single The Lady Don’t Mind flopped badly and Little Creatures originally debuted at #21. Twelve months later, however, it was still on the UK album chart and on course for a 65-week residency in total.
OMD’s sixth record enjoyed contrasting fortunes on each side of the Atlantic, becoming the band’s breakthrough album in America as well as the first to fall short of the UK Top 10 since Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys’ debut reached #27 in March 1980.
Housed in a sleeve that paid homage to the work of iconic American artist Edward Hopper, Crush had a slicker sound than previous OMD albums – first single So In Love cracked the Billboard Top 40 and paved the way for Bratpack film-maker John Hughes’ invitation to write the main song for his next movie Pretty In Pink.
In Britain, the album charted at #13 and the trio of singles lifted from Crush met with indifference; So In Love’s peak of #27 bettering those of Secret (#34) and La Femme Accident (#42).
(DVDfever Dom adds: This CD is now discontinued, so the cover link points to their excellent ‘Best Of’ from the early 90s.)
of the Reconstruction
Between 1983 and 1988, R.E.M. would release an album every year; their 1985 effort saw them still hovering on the fringes, the universal acclaim afforded them by the UK music press and US College Radio alike not yet transferring itself into significant sales.
Fables Of The Reconstruction came after 1984’s Reckoning had put them on the rock map, and would be followed by another near-miss in Life’s Rich Pageant a year later before the big-time came calling with Document in 1987.
Page Content copyright © Jason Maloney, 2005.
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.