Day 0615 - Idlewild

Everything But the Girl "Idlewild" (1988)

Everything But the Girl named themselves after a department store advertisement that proclaimed it could provide all your bedroom needs "...everything but the girl".   Despite the skeezy origin of their name, they made beautiful, sultry and soulful music.

I was more familiar with EBtG's later more electronic-tinged music, but this was really nice.  Their soulful tunes are given a vaguely jazzy flavour due to the horn section.   Smooth as silk.

Day 0595 - Faith

George Michael "Faith" (1987)

 
Wham! played their last show, then George Michael immediately got to work on his first solo album.  Given that he had been the producer and main songwriter in the band, and had an easily marketable image (i.e. he was a pretty face); the move to a solo career wasn't exactly a shock. 

He probably could have coasted for his first solo outing, producing Wham!-lite; instead he delivers a stonking pop and RnB album that perfectly showcases his strong, clear voice.

Possibly a controversial take but I feel like George Michael would have made a great replacement for Freddie Mercury in Queen.  Obviously nobody can live up to Freddie, but GM has a kind of similar tone to his voice, he can sing it hard or delicate, and his rendition of "Somebody to Love" at the Freddie tribute concert was fantastic.   I kind of feel like his pop and soul vibe would nicely offset the rock of Brian and Roger to produce the variety that Queen always had. 

In case you didn't get the message, this is me giving GM high praise.  Normally, the idea of Queen playing with anyone else on vocals leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Day 0565 - Blood and Chocolate

Elvis Costello & the Attractions "Blood and Chocolate" (1986) - got it

Costello took a break from his usual band 'the Attractions' to make an album with producer T-Bone Burnett... which I'll have to check out, because I love his work on True Detective, O Brother Where Art Thou, and the Rhiannon Gidden's solo album.  Here he brings the Attractions back on board for a wild, relatively straightforward album.
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Elvis took the idea of "recording as live" to new levels.  Instead of everyone wearing headphones to hear the playback so that all the instruments are recorded cleanly and in isolation; he just had stage foldback monitors with the volume set to standard live show levels.  As a result, everything has a pretty rough in-your-face rawness to it; a sound that nicely emphasises the angry and direct lyrics.  There are morose ballads, the epic blues odyssey of "I want you", the almost beat-poetry style of "Tokyo Storm Warning".

Costello credits himself as 'Napoleon Dynamite' in the album liner notes, though Jared Hess states that he did not get the name of his film from this reference.

Day 0523 - She's So Unusual

Cyndi Lauper "She's so Unusual" (1983)

Lauper's band Blue Angel had been signed, flopped, dropped their manager and were then sued by him.  Lauper was forced into bankruptcy.  From there she set about singing in clubs in New York and essentially restarting her career.   She was spotted by a manager who took her on and got her signed to a label as a solo artist.

The resulting 'debut' album is "She's so unusual" which boasted 7 singles including hits like "Time after Time" and "Girls just want to have fun" saw Lauper for a while in close competition with Madonna for the "Queen of Pop" moniker.

Day 0489 - Dare

The Human League "Dare" (19881) - got it

The Human League had lost two of its founding members Maryn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh who were busy getting Heaven 17 up and running.

Lead singer Philip Oakley recruited two teenage girls as dancers/backing vocalists and set about making the 80s-est 80s album to ever 80s.  The band's previous, more experimental sound is given the odd nod, particularly in selected tracks on side B, but mostly this album is stripped-down, catchy synth-pop finery.

Track "Don't you want me" is one of those big 80s hits that most people know.

Day 0446 - At Budokan

Cheap Trick "At Budokan" (1979)

 
Cheap Trick had been working away in the US with 3 albums under their belts, but only moderate success. The band had however, scored success fairly early on in Japan so cashed in on that by recording this live album there to the adoring screams of hundreds of fans.

Whether it was those screams, the culmination of lots of hard work, or just sheer dumb luck, this album stayed in the US charts for around a year, selling over 3 millions copies and well and truly launching the band and their particular brand of power pop.   The success was no doubt aided by upbeat pop hit "I want you to want me".