The Horror! Nite Songs' 50 Worst Albums Ever Part 6 (10-6)

 

And so we enter the Top 10 of the Worst Albums Ever list. Verily we truly are in the crap de la crap of modern times now. Hope you're ready...

PREVIOUSLY IN THIS COLUMN: Intro • Part 1 (50-41) • Part 2 (40-31) • Part 3 (30-21) • Part 4 (20-16) • Part 5 (15-11)

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10.= THE ROLLING STONES - "Dirty Work" (1986)

10.= MICK JAGGER - "Primitive Cool" (1987)

Similar to the David Bowie entry earlier in the list, let me quantify what I'm about to say by stating that I regard the Rolling Stones as the greatest rock 'n' roll band that this septic isle of ours has ever produced and that their run of albums from 1968's Beggars Banquet to 1973's Goat's Head Soup is arguably, in my opinion, the greatest five album run by any band ever. However, similar again to Bowie, when you've been around for as long as the Stones have been then it's inevitable you'll drop a few clangers somewhere along the way from the limp AOR of 1976's Black And Blue to the ill-advised foray into synth rock on 1982's Undercover.

For the worst Stones album though, there's no contest in my opinion - 1986's Dirty Work really is the sound of a band without a rudder. The group were seriously fracturing at this point in time with both Mick Jagger and Keith Richards off pursuing solo careers (Mick's debut album had come out the year before, Keef's would follow a couple of years after this) and Charlie Watts battling a heroin addiction. The result was a dull lifeless album with the tunes utterly forgettable - it tells you everything that the group ended up putting a cover of Bob & Earl's Harlem Shuffle out as the lead-off single in the absence of any decent originals. So bad was the reaction to the album that the group would actually go on hiatus (not helped by the untimely passing of their road manager and keyboard player Ian Stewart who'd been with the band since the beginning and was actually an original member of the group in its very early days) almost immediately afterwards. The fact that this real "phone it in" effort could have been the group's swansong is something we should all be grateful didn't happen.

It gets worse though - the Stones' temporary split led to a second Mick Jagger solo album, Primitive Cool, which really was watch through your fingers territory, a limp collection of AOR, funk and none-more-'80s FM rock which might as well have been Huey Lewis & The News for all the edge it had. The lowlight was seeing Mick on Top of the Pops performing the unpleasantly patronising lead off single Let's Work (a call for the unemployed of Britain to get off their arses and find jobs - hark at rock's answer to Norman Tebbit over there) where he took over the entire studio to dance around like an embarrassing uncle at a wedding. Hats off to any member of the Beeb's camera crew who managed to keep a straight face through this cringefest.

Hilariously, even this didn't help the single get any higher than number 31 in the charts and by 1989 the Stones would have reunited for the "solid if not spectacular" Steel Wheels album and have remained together ever since putting out a further three albums which were all decent enough even if they weren't anywhere near the standard of the group's imperial late '60s/early '70s phase right up until Watts' sad passing a couple of months ago. But the fact that between them Dirty Work and Primitive Cool came perilously close to sinking arguably the greatest rock 'n' roll band this country has produced should tell you everything about why they're on this list.

9. STEVEN TYLER - "We're All Somebody From Somewhere" (2016)

This record still holds the unwanted accolade of being the only album I've ever given a 1/5 to while reviewing on Pure Rawk which should tell you everything about its high position on this list. I mean, let's be honest, 1970s Aerosmith were great and songs like Draw The Line, Sweet Emotion and the original Walk This Way (leaner, meaner and...well, just plain better than the Run DMC version, sorry guys) are still capable of cheering me up after even the shittiest of days. However, it's safe to say that the group's output quality went well and truly south after they basically handed their collective nuts on a plate to John Kalodner in the '80s and Steven Tyler's country solo album in 2016 really does represent the nadir of how far things had sunk.

Basically, We're All Somebody... comes across as an ill advised ego trip of the worst kind, up there with Naomi Campbell's '90s solo album*. With no less than eight producers and countless outside writers involved, it's not even a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth, more that the material here is just excruciatingly bad from the Kid Rock-isms of the title track to the way I Make My Own Sunshine sounds like an ultra-vapid Taylor Swift knock-off. Worst of all though is the "bro country" one two three of The Good, The Bad, The Ugly & Me, Red, White And You and Sweet Louisiana midway through side two which takes this album into real skin-crawling territory. I mean, does anyone really want to listen to a 69-year-old grandad singing about how "if you've got the peaches I've got the juice" or "free falling into your yum-yum". No. No they really do not.

Thankfully, Steven would return to Aerosmith soon after this and remains there to this day meaning that hopefully this living abortion of an album is something that we will never ever see repeated. But even so, this truly is one of the worst new albums I've heard in the last decade.

* - Quick footnote - I did attempt to listen to the aforementioned Naomi solo album, which came out while she was dating Adam Clayton from U2, while researching this list and rest assured it most definitely would have gone on but I genuinely couldn't bear listening to more than three songs of it - it contains a version of T-Rex's Ride A White Swan which sounds uncannily like the old "Here come de Lilt Man" theme from the old fizzy drinks advert which is probably all you need to know. Ow, my ears...

8. VANILLA ICE - "Hard To Swallow" (1998)

There's nothing quite so likely to guarantee a terrible album as when former pop stars try to go "grown up". Case in point - Vanilla Ice. After the man known to his friends and family as Robert Van Winkle first broke through with the white boy pop-rap of Ice Ice Baby hitting number one, it was pretty much downhill all the way with the law of diminishing returns rapidly kicking in with subsequent singles. Desperately trying to pull his career out of a tailspin, he tried a few reinventions through the '90s but it's safe to say that none of them particularly took off. First up, he signed to Death Row records to release a stoner rap album, 1994's Mind Blowin' which was truly awful and only just missed out on taking this position in the list - I'm not sure which was worse, seeing Ice rapping about "rollin' up the hootie mack" like an Aldi Cypress Hill or the fact that he'd suddenly started looking like a missing member of the Levellers who'd ended up at a Dr Dre concert by accident.

1998's Hard To Swallow managed to somehow be even worse though as it saw Mr Ice Ice Baby teaming up with Korn producer Ross Robinson to go nu-metal. Featuring guest appearances from fellow Worst 50 Albums alumni the Bloodhound Gang's frontman Jimmy Pop (figures) and Amen's Casey Chaos (Casey, what the hell were you thinking dude?), Hard To Swallow really was an absolute trial to listen to. I mean, to be fair, the mix of bad rapping, knucklehead misogyny and cringy self-pity in the lyrics showed that he'd pretty much nailed those particular basics of the genre as did the sub-Wes Borland brickbat guitar riffs but it doesn't make it any easier to sit through for the rest of us. I mean, fair play, I've never made any secret of my dislike of nu-metal but of all the atrocities it was responsible for, the nu-metal rewrite of Ice Ice Baby (rechristened Too Cold) has to be up there as one of the worst.

Scarily, Vanilla Ice has gone on to make a further five albums since Hard To Swallow but for obvious reasons I've refrained from listening to them as a man needs to protect his sanity. The last I heard of him, he was presenting a podcast on BBC Sounds about the disappearance of Shergar. And yes, that really did happen.

Also, just because of how hilariously terrible it is, here's Van's ode to rolling up the aforementioned hootie mack from a few years earlier...

7. BOMBALURINA - "Huggin' And A Kissin'" (1990)

I consider myself to be quite lucky when it comes to avoiding novelty records since the days of Jive Bunny & The Mastermixers (ask yer dad. In fact, don't, he'll probably get some kind of flashback syndrome and start screaming) but I'm embarrassed to admit that this is one I fell into the trap of. For those unaware, Bombalurina was a synth-pop band put together by musical writer and Tory scumbag peer Andrew Lloyd-Webber based around kids' TV presenter Timmy Mallett who was pretty much a ubiquitous presence on early morning telly around this time and whose gimmick basically involved wearing a pair of silly glasses and a baseball cap and whacking kids on the head with a foam hammer. The pair scored a number one with a cover of the old Brian Hyland novelty song Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini and oh lord, it was awful.

I only got reminded of this because the recent TOTP reruns on BBC4 recently reached 1990 and sure enough there that awful bikini song and its follow-up Seven Little Girls Sitting In The Backseat were, like some horrible repressed childhood trauma memory come back to haunt me. It turned out that an album had subsequently come out and, foolishly, I decided to look it up on Spotify. The horror...

Basically Huggin' And A Kissin' is dreadful Euro-synthpop so cheesy that even Pete Waterman would probably look at it and say "erm, actually, you know what, that might just be pushing things too far" with its mix of blaring synths and drum machines and hackneyed samples (including the everpresent Soul II Soul style "ah yeah!"'s that every bugger seemed to be using around this time) and Mallett's gormless vocals combining to make something truly putrid. Gasp as they turn their hand to covering Splish Splash! Marvel as Mallett takes up "yodel-odel-odel-ee!" ing on She Taught Me To Yodel. Shrug and say "yeah, that figures" as he changes the lyrics to the closer They're Coming To Take Me Away Ha-Ha! to reflect that even he realises that this album is utter garbage.

Thankfully both Bombalurina and Mallett's TV career wouldn't be long for this world afterwards but Huggin' And A Kissin' really is proof of just how terrible novelty pop can get. I mean, sure you could argue the case for Crazy Frog or Mr Blobby but even they ain't got nothin' on this if you ask me.  

6. THE RUNAWAYS - "Young And Fast" (1987)

Okay, I can hear you now - "Hang on, the Runaways in your Top 10 worst albums, have you lost your freakin' mind Andy?" Bear with me here, this is very much NOT the trailblazing all girl group of the late '70s that acted as a launchpad for the careers of Joan Jett, Lita Ford and Cherie Currie - that group had broken up a good seven or eight years prior to this album coming out after three pretty damn good albums (their self-titled 1976 debut, 1977’s Queens of Noise and 1978’s Waitin’ For The Night) and a swansong (1979’s And Now…The Runaways) which was a bit of an afterthought as the group were basically self-combusting while recording it. Indeed, by the mid-'80s both Jett and Ford were in the middle of successful solo careers while Currie had also put a couple of well received efforts out after leaving the band.

One man who had noticed this was the group's former svengali Kim Fowley who still owned the Runaways name at this point. For the uninitiated, Fowley was a pretty continuous presence in the LA music scene from the '60s up until his death in 2014, putting out early releases by the likes of Slade and Cat Stevens and even having a solo career on the go himself while managing bands (his 1973 effort International Heroes is worth a curiosity listen). However, his business and personal practices were...somewhat less than ethical at times shall we say and in the mid-'80s he tried to persuade the former members of the group to do a Runaways reunion. Suffice to say that none of them returned his calls.

Undeterred, Fowley simply decided to put together a new band under the Runaways name without any of the original members and Young And Fast was the result, arguably one of the most cynical cash-ins in rock 'n' roll history. Which might have been just about ignorable if the album had been good but, as its presence in this list suggests, it was an absolute musical car crash of the worst kind. The focal point of the group was supposed to be 18 year old New Zealand singer Gail Welch but she only sings on half of the tracks (presumably another who fell out with Fowley?) while elsewhere, it seems as if every jobbing Sunset Strip musician (and this was the hair metal era, there were a lot of them) got roped in - Young And Fast has no less than 28 different musicians playing on it including five different singers. Even worse, the material was just arse-clenchingly terrible from the ear-piercingly bad Ronettes rip-off Afraid Of The Dark to the screechy Speed Metal and Heavy Metal Nights which, spoiler, have less in common with say Anthrax as they do with sounding like a third rate version of Daphne & Celeste.

Unsurprisingly this album sunk like a stone but it remains one of the most egregious examples of a greedy management company exploiting not only the members of a band by trashing their legacy by releasing such a terrible album with no input from them but also the fans who saw this and thought it genuinely was a new Runaways album. And that, folks, is why it's in here.

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Almost there now, join us tomorrow as we look at Nite Songs' official Top 5 Worst Albums Ever. Hope you've packed some clean underwear...