Deep in the Heart of Nowhere - Half Baked or Half Ar$ed? You decide

ArrGee · Back To Boomtown

Deep in the Heart of Nowhere - Half Baked or Half Ar$ed? You decide

Derek The Dane · In the Long Grass

There are some good songs on that album but all in all it just gets seems to get to messy.The remix of This Is The World Calling is exellant though.

noelindublin · Loudmouth

If Deep In The Heart of Nowhere could be considered a follow up to In The Long Grass then it comes off as a pretty spectacular failure. Somewhere along the line Geldof lost the muse. Having said that maybe he just lost confidence in himself. A lot of the songs of Deep In seem pretty lame- there are however a handful of songs that are pretty ok if not great,

My personal favourite from that album is In The Pouring Rain. One of the B sides called Dig a Ditch is brilliant- very reminisant of The Boomtown Rats - all high energy and great lyrics.

Some of the songs seem a bit awkward and clumsy- trying to said too much politically- Night Turns To Day and August Was A Heavy Month being examples.

I've always liked Good Boys In The Wrong and This heartless Heart. I admit I dont play this album too often and there are loads of songs I just dont get such as Love Like A Rocket Geldofs attempt to update the Waterloo Sunset story.

ps Spellchecker has gone missing!

ArrGee · Back To Boomtown

noelindublin wrote:
...there are loads of songs I just dont get such as Love Like A Rocket Geldofs attempt to update the Waterloo Sunset story.

That is a puzzling song. I know Bowie did it with Ashes to Ashes, but I can't think of any other song continuations like it. Maybe Geldof tried to do something with Billy and Judy and just thought Terry and Julie.

"Judy still meets Billy every Thursday night at the Italian cafe..."

That said, it's probably my favourite song on the album!

Derek The Dane · In the Long Grass

Love Like A Rocket is a continuation of Waterloo Sunset.I have a interview lp where Bobs talks about those 2 people 20 years on.

musicmania · A Hold of Me

noelindublin wrote:

Some of the songs seem a bit awkward and clumsy- trying to said too much politically- Night Turns To Day and August Was A Heavy Month being examples.

I personally love Night Turns To Day! Pouring Rain is in my opinion lyrically brilliant. I like some of the other songs on the album too and find the constant criticism unfair. As it is a Geldof solo album I don't see the need to compare it to albums he made with the Rats!

junkyard_smile · The Elephant's Graveyard

musicmania wrote:

I personally love Night Turns To Day! Pouring Rain is in my opinion lyrically brilliant. I like some of the other songs on the album too and find the constant criticism unfair. As it is a Geldof solo album I don't see the need to compare it to albums he made with the Rats!

It is Robert Frederick Zenon Geldof that is always comparing it to a Rats album. I think what he's saying is that it doesn't sound like a solo album because there is no stylistic jump to distinguish it from the Rats. In my view there are a few good songs, particularly Pouring Rain and When I was Young, but overall is fairly weak, and not helped by all the celebrities playing on it, who Geldof was probably in awe of, and didn't enforce his vision for the lp sufficiently. Given that he went for years not playing any of the tracks at his live gigs he clearly doesn't rate it either.

However, on a positive note the lack of stylistic advancement on DITHON did 'force' him to take some major risks on the sublime Veggies. Could anyone have ever imagined the Rats with fiddles doing Indifference?

ArrGee · Back To Boomtown

junkyard_smile wrote:
However, on a positive note the lack of stylistic advancement on DITHON did 'force' him to take some major risks on the sublime Veggies. Could anyone have ever imagined the Rats with fiddles doing Indifference?

I never imagined them using a piano for Mondays nor bongos on Mondo Bongo but that happened!

DITHON is neither a Rats follow on nor a true solo effort, and the involvement of the likes of Dave Stewart & Eric Clapton didn't help give it any sort of distinctive sound.

My original question was is it half baked, ie did Geldof not make the album he set out to, or half ar$ed, because there seems to be a lack of effort, especially in the song writing.

You know what, I'll put a poll on!

noelindublin · Loudmouth

It must have been a big undertaking for Geldof setting out to record the album, having left behind or ditched or whatever his friends in the Rats. To be fair there must have been a lot of inner turmoil going on behind Geldofs seeming bluster. With all the media scrutiny on him perhaps he was not too focused on writing songs at that time- hence the mixed results.

Yes a lot of the songs sound like very weak Rats leftovers, however it is not a disaster. Night Turns To Day is a fathers song for his daughter to hear when she is old enough to understand and it has a strong emotional impact- the lines about seeing a prisoner in Cambodia "Trying to chew through iron bars.." in his prison cell has always struck me. Think Bob explains the background to this story in his autobiography.

Geldof's ambiguity towards his past shows in the lines from When I Was Young-"There ain't no rear view mirror in my car/ I'm not looking back/ well maybe not that far".

Not sure if we should have been expecing a masterpiece but given the circumstances of his life at that time the boy done ok!

As re ArrGee's voting system I always get confused by double negatives so I think I should vote for it being "Not half a s**t album".

-- Edited by noelindublin on Tuesday 22nd of March 2011 02:35:20 PM

-- Edited by noelindublin on Tuesday 22nd of March 2011 02:40:41 PM

junkyard_smile · The Elephant's Graveyard

ArrGee wrote:

I never imagined them using a piano for Mondays nor bongos on Mondo Bongo but that happened!

Fare point - and that was one of the great things about the Rats that each album brought with it a different sound, even if at times it meant commercial suicide, such as V Deep.

With regard to strange instruments Mr Geldof once said that Gary's motorbike was on one track - anyone know which song it was?

noelindublin · Loudmouth

junkyard_smile wrote:

ArrGee wrote:

I never imagined them using a piano for Mondays nor bongos on Mondo Bongo but that happened!

Fare point - and that was one of the great things about the Rats that each album brought with it a different sound, even if at times it meant commercial suicide, such as V Deep.

With regard to strange instruments Mr Geldof once said that Gary's motorbike was on one track - anyone know which song it was?

Despite the perhaps misleading album title I think only one track on Mondo Bongo actually features Simon playing the bongos- that was track one Mood Mambo.

Did Gary's motorbike feature on Mary Of The Fourth Form just after the lines-" Gives her a smoke and he buys her a drink/ shoots off a frame and the head off into the night" cue rev of bike?

Gary's actual bike or most likely BBC Sounds Affects album volume 7!

ArrGee · Back To Boomtown

noelindublin wrote:
Despite the perhaps misleading album title I think only one track on Mondo Bongo actually features Simon playing the bongos- that was track one Mood Mambo.

Please Don't Go sounds like it has them as well. Andy Duncan did the percussion on it. Don't know who played the typewriter. Someone called Tom Winter played the bouzouki on it.

ArrGee · Back To Boomtown

noelindublin wrote:
If Deep In The Heart of Nowhere could be considered a follow up to In The Long Grass then it comes off as a pretty spectacular failure.

However, it was a commercial success...

BOB GELDOF - DEEP IN THE HEART NOWHERE

Gold Certification (Album) 27 November 1986 PHONOGRAM (MERCURY) Released 01 November 1986

noelindublin · Loudmouth

Gold in Britain is sales of 100,000. He shifted that amount in just one month (November 1986)so the final sales total is undoubtedly higher. A lot of the sales were probably just out of goodwill on account of his work on the Ethiopian famine, rather than any new found musical spark or connection with the masses. Splitting from the Rats must have seemed a good career move, otherwise Geldof would have been saddled with a band which were not 'unit shifters' and most likely the old 'musical differences' and internal wrangling would have finally settled things.

Hardly anything from that album is in his current, or recent, live output. The b side of the single This Is The World Calling a song called Talk Me Up is pretty good and has a sort of Rats feel. It may have been a Rats reject song, but I've always liked it and it is much better than a lot of the wishy washy songs chosen for the final cut.

Weirdest of all, in Tower Records in Wicklow St Dublin a few weeks ago I came across an American import of Geldof's debut album. I would have thought perhaps his current or maybe SAD albums were more likely to find their way on import. Funny as well in that Tower are always badly stocked, but with downloading available the physical product is less important.

I still think the quality of the songs was very much affected by Geldof's preoccupation with other matters- he had a lot of politics to get his head around so songwriting was unlikely to be his main preoccupation around that time. Bringing in Clapton, Lennox and Uncle Tom Cobley, no doubt with the best intentions just added to the overall mixed result, and any longtime Geldof or Rats fans knew that he had done much better off his own bat before this solo foray.

-- Edited by noelindublin on Friday 30th of March 2012 03:03:38 PM

ArrGee · Back To Boomtown

noelindublin wrote:
Gold in Britain is sales of 100,000.

I know. Amazing that so many people bought the record. I suspect the latest album sold in the hundreds rather than the thousands.

Derek The Dane · In the Long Grass

I do not understand how an album can sell 100,000 copies and yet fail to chart.Something does not add up.This Is The World Calling(fantastic song) was a minor hit,apart from that I fail to recall it setting the charts on fire.

ArrGee · Back To Boomtown

Derek The Dane wrote:
I do not understand how an album can sell 100,000 copies and yet fail to chart.Something does not add up.This Is The World Calling(fantastic song) was a minor hit,apart from that I fail to recall it setting the charts on fire.

Silver/Gold records were based on shipments (orders by retailers), whereas charts were based on retail sales from a selection of stores.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_music_recording_certifications

So it's likely the stores ordered over 100,000 copies on release date, but they were sold over a long period of time, probably at lower prices when the album hit the bargain bins. Even if half the records eventually ended up sent back to the distributors on a sale or return basis, they don't take away the gold record.

There are a number of records that have gone gold with few actual sales. That A Tonic for the Troops went platinum two years after its release shows retailers were ordering to meet actual rather than anticipated demand.

noelindublin · Loudmouth

Does anybody know the albums peak position in the UK charts when it was originally released? Was it Top 40 or Top 75 or whatever? It's very hard to find a site which lists full retro album charts, when you just input the name of the artist and you get a list of how their albums performed.

That old nonsense about orders (shipments), and sales is a bit confusing. Surely it should be decided on actual sales rather than shipment to shops. I have always had a mistrust of record companies and music sales figures anyway. What record label wants the public to know that their rosters stars are underselling? Better to confuse the issue with different criteria for gold/silver/platinum record awards. It's the same with the big Hollywood movie studios wanting us to believe that their product is doing better that it actually is.

Geldof's debut sales sound about right. We have to remember that Geldof's music is somewhat popular in Northern European countries eg Germany, BENELUX, Scandinavia so the first solo albums European preformance was most likely to add a bit to sales . Even in the States it must have sold some also- there has always been a certain American presence on the forum who like Bob's music.

Finally, while I liked This Is The World Calling it wasn't brilliant by any means and sounds a bit dated now, with all that eighties production. In The Pouring Rain was my favourite track and might have made a good single, rather than choosing Love Like A Rocket as the second single. Again Geldof was so preoccupied with other things around that time that writing a masterpiece was no upmost on his mind.

The Vegetarians of Love does justice to Geldof as a solo songwriter- with a bit of space and perspective he came up with the goods and can be considered 'Classic Geldof solo' material in that most unusual of musical sub genres.

-- Edited by noelindublin on Friday 6th of April 2012 02:13:27 PM

ArrGee · Back To Boomtown

noelindublin wrote:
Does anybody know the albums peak position in the UK charts when it was originally released? Was it Top 40 or Top 75 or whatever?

Didn't chart in the UK. Not in top 100. But back then compilations albums also were included. When Vegetarians of Love went in at number 21 the compilations had a seperate chart.

http://www.ukmix.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=35628&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=675

Derek The Dane · In the Long Grass

Does not chart in the UK but gets a gold disc,sound dumb to anyone else than me?.

ArrGee · Back To Boomtown

Derek The Dane wrote:
Does not chart in the UK but gets a gold disc,sound dumb to anyone else than me?.

Sounds dumb, and is dumb! But good news for Geldof as he shipped a pile of records and pocketed the cash despite them all heading into the bargain bins six months later.