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Jason Maloney reviews
V o l u m e # 1 9 Week Commencing: 25th June 1984 Online Date: 23rd June 2005
The follow-up strategy to their career-defining album True was essentially: more of the same, with sugar on top. Gary Kemp’s penchant for sweetly smooth white soul reached its glossy apex on the eight songs which made up Parade; half of them were Top 20 singles (led by the #3 smash Only When You Leave, and backed up by I’ll Fly For You, Highly Strung and Round & Round) but the other half sounded equally polished and hook-laden.
It would be the band’s last album for Chrysalis; when Spandau returned two years later on CBS a post-Live Aid changing of the guard had occcured in the world of pop and, bar the genuine success of October 1986’s Through The Barricades single, it would not be an especially fruitful comeback for the group.
Brilliant Trees
Japan must have been the most untypical, esoterically-inclined act to ever become teen idols with the Smash Hits crowd; a status never really reflected in their record sales. A sole Top 5 single (the eerie minmalism of Ghosts) and an album that eventually hung around for nigh on a year without reaching the Top 10 at any time (1981’s seminal Tin Drum) were the commercial highlights of a career that imploded after the 1982 Live set Oil On Canvas.
Frontman and pin-up David Sylvian carried on where Japan had left off with their exotic, rhythmic ruminations; fanbase devotion secured a #17 placing for the introspective beauty of Red Guitar and the album flew into the Top 5 on its first week. A second single, the poetic Ink In The Well, proved an even more left-field Top 40 hit and Brilliant Trees lasted over 3 months on the UK rundown; considerably more than anything Sylvian has subsequently released in a fitful and low-key 20 years since.
& The Attractions:
Goodbye Cruel World
Another year, another new album for Elvis Costello. The most prolific artist of his generation chalked up his lowest chart entry up to that point with Goodbye Cruel World. Unloved by the critics and, in some ways, by Costello himself (the finished product not matching the quality of the material in his eyes), there were nonetheless a fair few gems among its dozen-or-so tracks: lead single I Wanna Be Loved deserved better than a #35 peak, while The Comedians would later resurface on Roy Orbison’s 1989 album Mystery Girl.
1985 would be the first year since arriving on the scene in 1977 that Costello didn’t offer a new record, but he made up for this comparative drought with a brace of superb, critically-acclaimed albums in 1986.
Having scored a huge Top 5 hit with the Maggie Reilly-sung Moonlight Shadow the year before from the album Crises, Oldfield applied largely the same formula to Discovery, but with distinctly less reward. Once more the main single – in this case the evocative To France – was voiced by Reilly, but it stalled outside the Top 40.
The rest of the album took a similar comemrcial route to Crises, but only grazed the Top 20 and it was clear the Oldfield muse, not to mention his popularity, was in a kind of stasis. It took him until 1990’s Amarok to break out of this comfort zone, and until 1992’s Tubular Bells II to hit paydirt again.
Strange Frontier
The second solo album from Queen’s drummer repeated the Top 30 achievements of his first, 1981’s Fun In Space. Throaty rocker (and introductory single) Man On Fire made inroads on the US Hot 100 but never went beyond #66 in Britain.
Later extra-curricular sojourns met with decent success, be it completely solo (1994’s Happiness) or with his “second” band The Cross (courtesy of their charmingly-titled Shove It in 1988).
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.