Continuing the season, we take a look at the albums that topped the UK charts this week in two different years...
1993
REM - Automatic For The People
U2's Bono heralded REM’s eighth album “the greatest country record never made”.
It continued the folk/country rock/classical pop elements of Green and Out of Time and became an instant hit upon its release.
But despite the new album's success, the band declined to tour in support of it, just as they had for Out of Time the previous year.
Nevertheless, the album had six singles released, and tied with Monster for the most from any REM album – Drive, The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite, Everybody Hurts, Nightswimming, Find the River, and the Andy Kaufman tribute Man on the Moon, which would become the title of the comedian's 1999 biographical movie starring Jim Carrey.
Mostly acoustic and typified by its dark lyrics (many of which ruminate on mortality, death and those departed), Automatic for the People is generally considered to be among REM's best albums, and one of the finest releases of the 1990s.
It has been revealed that Kurt Cobain was listening to Automatic for the People on the day he shot himself.
The song Everybody Hurts had in fact been composed by Michael Stipe as a reaction to an epidemic of suicides among young people.
Stipe, a friend of Cobain's, later wrote the song Let Me In about Cobain's death.
2003
Coldplay – A Rush of Blood to the Head
Recorded in Liverpool’s Parr Street studios and co-produced by the great Ken Nelson, Coldplay’s second album won the 2002 Grammy for Best Alternative Album.
Packed with the blissful beauty of debut Parachutes, it showed a progression in the band’s style. The songs had also stepped up a gear - from the cascading pianos of Clocks to the melancholy lament of The Scientist it covered a huge variety of musical bases.
Debut single In My Place soared with chiming guitars recalling the Edge, and peppered throughout the album were nods to Chris Martin’s pals and mentors Echo and the Bunnymen.
Clocks, a song centred around a cyclic piano riff and included on the album only at the last minute, ultimately became the band's largest hit to date, earning the band another Grammy for Record of the Year.
Incidentally, if you’re ever in the main studio at parr Street, take a look under the grand piano – the same one on which Chris Martin recorded the album – and you’ll see the graffiti he left for posterity.