newvillefan
I Know My First Name Is Stephen
The UK has always gravitated toward "good" music and enthusiastically embraced it. Look at ABBA - The Corrs - Rumer. All do well in the UK. What can I say? They have taste!
Not to get off the beaten track too much, but it's interesting how ABBA had nine #1s in the UK, and the same tracks all failed to hit the top spot in America, with the notable exception of Dancing Queen. I'm not sure why that is really, taste accounts for part of it maybe. I think it's also partly to do with the fact that the Billboard charts had at that time many more acts from many more genres all jostling for position and trying to reach a much larger US audience. Here's the chart listings from wikipedia for those nine singles pulled:
Interestingly, Benny and Bjorn have often said their only outlet to international music in early 1970s in Sweden was listening through the UK, so what they were hearing obviously influenced them and this struck a chord with UK audiences, particularly I guess the 'schlager' type songs that dominated that era and Eurovision Song Contest entries (think Olivia 'Long Live Love', Brotherhood Of Man 'Save Your Kisses For Me'). This sound is heard in many of ABBA's early tracks like 'Money, Money, Money', 'Fernando', 'Hasta Manana', 'Bang A Boomerang' and 'I Do, I Do, I Do'.
Anyway, back to Carpenters...if you look at the acts on Top Of The Pops during the 70s (the main engine behind chart sales and the music show of the week), they were mainly European acts. Rarely did you see American artists on there. Carpenters only performed on there once, and never came back! I always thought that a shame, considering they were at their peak in UK album sales terms for the two year period spanning 1973 to 1975 (but then again, it was a singles-based show I suppose ).