Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Bryan Adams: Reckless (1984)


By the way, you may be wondering why I put 10cc prior to the 'A' section, rather than in the 'T' section. That's because I am a librarian, and I elected to adhere to the National Information Standards Organization's Guidelines for Alphabetical Arrangement of Letters and Sorting of Numerals and Other Symbols (NISO Technical Report 3 NISO TR03-1999). Numerals precede letters. So there.

Reckless was a gift, given to me at Christmas, 1984. At the time, I liked the album. Now, I will admit to a certain nostalgia, but not much more. One measure of my love for an album is whether I own it in CD. I don't own any or the aforementioned records (including this one) on CD.

So, for strictly nostalgic reasons, I can quite happily sing along with this album, with one exception. And, that exception is It's Only Love, that truly dreadful duet with Tina Turner. It's simply unlistenable. It's appalling. It ranks as one of the worst songs ever recorded. The ability to easily skip a track, or indeed to program a CD player, does have its advantages. Fussing with the stylus is too much work.

The video for Summer of '69 is one of those where someone thought that it was cool to ask the singer to spend some time walking swiftly directly towards a camera that was retreating. Was that borrowed from Orson Welles? Anyway, throw some apples around, fire up an impromptu mini-concert in a field near an abandoned shack, and you have yourselves a video.

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