THE history of popular music is littered with platinum albums that were largely filler. You bought these and wished you’d waited for the greatest hits:
Employment by Kaiser Chiefs, 2005
Leeds’ worst band deserve credit for turning I Predict a Riot into a twenty-year career. Why bother with multiple tunes when your fans are idiots? Employment is made up of Blur tracks if Blur didn’t know how to write songs but were able to scream ‘Ohhhhhhhh’ in performatively manic crescendos.
Hotel California by The Eagles, 1976
Everyone knows the title track, with its cocaine metaphor and excellent guitar solo. The rest of the album’s so middle of the road it could have been done by a council employee with a pot of white paint. It too, in its own way, is a cautionary tale about excessive cocaine use.
Scissor Sisters by Scissor Sisters, 2004
A disco Pink Floyd cover – back when covers of any song in any style weren’t available in their millions on YouTube – brought you in. What followed was an album of safely queer 1970s pop pastiche always destined for Radio 2’s Non-Challenging Daytime playlist. The second album flopped. The 2.7 million people who bought the first know why.
Moseley Shoals by Ocean Colour Scene, 1996
Twat of the 90s Chris Evans (awarded by FHM, 1999) ruined The Riverboat Song by stealing it for TFI Friday, which leaves the album with little to offer outside the nostalgic The Day We Caught the Train. Otherwise it’s a school production of the greatest hits of Traffic or any other late 60s outfits your dad used to like when he had a moustache.
Happiness by The Beloved, 1990
Aged 16 and high on the idea that ecstasy exists, even if not for you personally in the Lowestoft suburbs, you bought the album for the ethereal, monk-sampling The Sun Rising. Then, in an early example of why you should never trust a hippy, realised the rest of it was weak house-pop guff about love and positive vibes. And so you had the experience of being sold bogus E after all.
Hot Space by Queen, 1982
What a back catalogue Queen have – hit after hit, through the 70s, the 80s, even the 90s. And what a song Under Pressure is. And what a lot of crap the rest of this disco album, done two years after disco peaked, is. Not a track on it the casual fan would be familiar with, and the hardcore fans shudder at the mention of its name.
