It’s déjà vu all over again in this week’s album chart as Cliff Richard‘s new oldies set Just… Fabulous Rock ‘n’ Roll enters the chart at number 4, one place above Elvis Presley’s latest repackaging. That’ll please him. David Bowie‘s Bowie Legacy enters at 13, proving that the Bowie compilation market is pretty much saturated; a significant number of consumers have decided just to augment their old compilations by buying ★ (Blackstar) instead, which re-enters at 90. Sting‘s new set 57th & 9th enters at 15 just ahead of Simple Minds‘ Acoustic at 16, with Bon Jovi‘s This House Is Not For Sale slipping twenty places to 25 and Madness‘s Can’t Touch Us Now hanging on to a top thirty place at 29. Finally, a big hello to our old friend Brothers In Arms as Dire Straits‘ epic unexpectedly re-enters at number 100 for a 270th week on the chart.
This week Metallica return with Hardwired… To Self-Destruct, their first album in eight years. It’s still hard to tell how many versions of UB40 there are or who’s in any of them, but a version calling itself UB40 featuring Ali, Astro & Mickey releases an acoustic set Unplugged, featuring acoustic versions of sixteen UB40 tracks with a bonus proper greatest hits disc. A new Human League anthology A Very British Synthesizer Group charts the band’s almost forty-year career over a variety of formats including an eye-wateringly expensive 3CD/1DVD set, while Queen‘s Greatest Hits and Greatest Hits II are reissued as heavyweight double vinyl sets. In DVD and Blu-Ray Depeche Mode release their comprehensive 3DVD Video Singles Collection and Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow are captured in concent on Memories in Rock – Live in Germany.
