Favourite flop follow-up albums?
The Guardian’s Michael Hann invites readers to nominate your favourite flop follow-up albums
So, fellow pop snobs - and don’t lie to me, you’re out there - which are the commercially disastrous follow-ups to smashes that set your pulses racing? And no nominating the Stone Roses’ Second Coming, which was a bigger hit, I am told, than its predecessor. Bonus points for anyone who nominates Quiet Riot’s follow-up to Metal Health. Bonus points, in fact, to anyone who even heard Quiet Riot’s follow-up to Metal Health.
I thought of a few, like Diamond Head’s ‘difficult second album’ “Canterbury”, too off-the-wall and experimental for many fans of their major-label debut, and saw the band dropped and subsequently splitting after it failed to sell. And then there was Marillion’s “Brave”, regarded by many fans as their definitive masterpiece, but which failed to sell in anything like the quantities expected by EMI, and marked the beginning of the end for their major-label career.
But if the theme is attempts to defend albums that mark the point where a previously successful band went down the commercial and critical toilet, Black Sabbath’s 1983 album “Born Again” checks all the requisite boxes.
Three years earlier Black Sabbath had successfully reinvented themselves by replacing the burned-out Ozzy Osborne with Ronnie Dio, and produced two classic albums. But when Dio departed due to a clash of egos (what do you expect from someone who’s stage name is Italian for “God”?), they replaced him with … Ian Gillan.
The tour was rightly dismissed as a bad joke; There was that gigantic fibreglass Stonehenge that provided the inspiration for Spinal Tap. Ian Gillan wore the same stage outfit as he’d worn when fronting his own band a year earlier and looked totally out of place. He butchered Ozzy’s songs to the point of unrecogisability, and didn’t even attempt any of Dio’s stuff. And the new songs, well, at the 1983 Reading Festival I remember a guy next to me sadly shaking his head and muttering “It’s not Sabbath”. The consensus was that special guests Marillion totally blew them off stage.
But… Ignore that awful cover and listen to the album. While it’s no “Sabotage” or “Heaven and Hell”, it still has it’s moments. If it’s ‘not Sabbath’ (and a lot of it isn’t), it’s still a worthwhile member of Ian Gillan’s canon. ‘Trashed’ is quite Purpleesque, and there are echoes of ‘When a Blind Man Cries’ in the title track. And ‘Zero the Hero’ with it’s menacing growling riff is one place where the alchemy finally worked.
March 9th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
Immediately ignoring the main thrust of your text on the grounds that I have no interest in hack scribblings (whether The Guardian or The Mortal NME) and no real knowledge of the “commercially disastrous”, can I just fly off at a tangent?
Blimey, it’s small world time again. I played ‘Born Again’ only yesterday, after leaving it untouched for eons (Ians?) on the grounds that, as has been said, it’s not really Sabbath. But, prompted by the recent flood of repackaged Gillan reissues at not-to-be-missed prices, I’ve been giving other Gillan stuff a spin and this is indeed a worthwhile Gillan outing. I even dared to enjoy it
Perhaps a historical perspective is needed. Back then, if you were a name touring band suddenly in need of a vocalist, then a name vocalist with a proven CV must have been a safe choice when compared to, for argument’s sake, hiring Buggles. Nowadays you can just order an opera-trained Valkyrie online and, providing you’re happy with a standard spec model, have her delivered from mainline Europe within 3 working days
Currently OMS: Carptree’s ‘Man Made Machine’ - still struggling to get into this one, if truth be told.
March 9th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
That next-to-last paragraph cracked me up; you really ought to start your own music blog
Actually, Michael Hann does come over as a decent bloke; he’s not a standard spec mail-order NME hack like Tony Naylor or a professional twunt like Steven Wells.
BTW, NME is sinking fast. Sales are rather less than either Classic Rock or Kerrang!. When it finally ceases publication I’m tempted to open that bottle of champagne I was saving for when Margaret Thatcher dies.
March 9th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
Alas, I can’t find a corner of my life for blogging at the moment. Which is a shame, as I could then ammend ‘mainline Europe’ to read ‘mainland Europe’ as I intended.
You can always tell the trainspotters, can’t you?
March 9th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
Comus’s second album “To Keep From Crying” was a dud compared to the original (and quite searing) “First Utterance”. A shame, really.
March 14th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
“He butchered Ozzy’s songs to the point of unrecogisability, and didn’t even attempt any of Dio’s stuff.”
Whoa! Whereas Dio’s voice wasn’t well-suited to Ozzy’s songs, when I heard my first bootleg from this tour thirteen years ago I was floored by Gillan’s rendition of the Ozzy songs. It was absolutely incredible, though admittedly this particular bootleg is from Worcester, Massachusetts USA rather than the Reading Fest set you saw. I later got that boot too, along with about fifteen others and none of them hold a candle to the Worcester show.
They did add “Heaven and Hell” when they came to North America, but not the end part (?!). Finally, “Neon Knights” was added as the opener for the early 1984 leg of the tour. On both of these Dio songs, Gillan sounds terrible. I’ll defend his ability to sing Ozzy’s songs to the end, but his voice is completely incompatible with Dio’s.
Wait a minute… This is about the third time we’ve covered this subject in the last ten years isn’t it?
Oh well, it’s just like revisiting a great album… Which I’m doing now, actually. Hope all’s well in Manchester!
-T.J.
NP: Dire Straits, Brothers in Arms
March 16th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
You’re right, TJ, we have had this conversation before. But they were pretty rubbish at Reading, and Marillion most defininitely did blow them off stage.