Flavorwire

Last week the Guardian ran an interesting piece about “band collapse syndrome,” the disconcerting phenomenon whereby a band’s hitherto loyal fanbase abandons it in droves. They cited a number of UK acts whose record sales have decline precipitously of late — Glasvegas, Kaiser Chiefs, and Duffy, amongst others. This seems to be something you see more and more these days, which we guess makes sense when you consider it in the context of a general decline in album sales and a public who seem to have a shorter collective attention span than ever. But it’s not a new phenomenon — there have been some pretty spectacular crash-and-burn albums over the years. Some of these have been genuinely terrible, others hamstrung by inter-band wrangling or emotional breakdowns, and others just in the wrong place at the wrong time. We’ve collected 10 of ‘em after the jump.

Happy Mondays — Yes Please

In which Factory Records packed Britain’s most unrepentant drug hoovers off to Barbados, the crack cocaine capital of the Caribbean, to record an album. With predictably disastrous results. The band’s career (and their brains) never quite recovered — and neither did Factory, since this fiasco of a record bankrupted the label.