Saturday 15th December

And now for the totally sublime first real incarnation of Eddi Reader in the excellent but shortlived band ‘Fairground Attraction’.   They literally burst on the scene, admittedly a pretty moribund one, in 1988 with ‘Perfect’ the most perfect single which went straight to number one.  The album ‘The First of a Million Kisses’ was in the charts for nearly a year and was chock-a-block full of great songs like ‘Clare’, ‘Find my Love’ and ‘Allelujah’.  It was so fresh sounding, with a bit of folk, jazz and country in the mix all topped off with that fabulous voice.  They had three more hit singles from that one record, but none got to number one.  They won awards for both the album and the single ‘Perfect’.

The band were recording their second album when they broke up amidst the usual arguments about musical direction, whatever that means, and the album has never been released.  They did release an album of ‘B’ sides called ‘Ay Fond Kiss’ and a few years later a superb live album ‘Kawasaki’ recorded in Japan emerged featuring many of the songs which were lost, and if anything they are even better than their only real album.  A great loss, and the writer of those songs Mark E. Nevin has pretty well disappeared too.  Eddi Reader has had a patchy solo career too, releasing good but fairly safe and boring records to lower and lower sales.  But if you know of any other bands who only really had one hit album which shone so brightly and then the band broke up please let me know.