Celebrating vinyl / CD / cassette / memorabilia releases of musical gems and curiosities from the punk era onwards
A few posts back I looked at Cabaret Voltaire’s ‘Here To Go’ UK CD single and dwelt upon the fact that the singles from the parent album which that single and the one in today’s posts hail from, ‘Code’, remain largely unavailable digitally. In the case of today’s featured 12″ release, ‘Don’t Argue’, only the A side ‘Dance’ mix got a re-release, as part of 2001’s ‘Remixed’ compilation CD on EMI.
First released on LP and cassette formats only in 1982, Brian Eno’s ‘Ambient 4: On Land’ arrived with some modesty compared to the esteem with which its influence in ‘dark ambient’ circles would grow in subsequent years. Originally just the fourth (and final) in the ‘Ambient’ series of releases first started with Brian Eno’s 1979 album release ‘Ambient 1: Music for Airports’, the accompanying press coverage would make it clear to anyone still optimistically hankering after a return to song-based vocals pieces, which Eno had been most well-known for since his departure from Roxy Music, that he was done with that for good (or so it seemed…)
Continue reading “Side by side: Brian Eno ‘Ambient 4: On Land’”
2016’s ‘Burning Car’ and 2020’s ‘Concrete and Organised Noise’ LPs had set the scene for ‘companion’ albums gathering up related tracks on vinyl to ‘Metamatic’, and 2021 would see this same concept applied to John’s 1981 album, ‘The Garden’, by way of this post’s featured compilation, ‘Church’.
Release date: 19th November 2021.
As it happens, ‘The Garden’ was being given a 40th anniversary edition re-release on vinyl the same year, with half on green vinyl and half on yellow vinyl. An email from Metamatic records had announced that release thus; Continue reading “John Foxx compilations across the years Part 11”
I have liked Cabaret Voltaire for a long time now. First introduced in 1981 with their classic Rough Trade era singles and EP up to that point courtesy of a school friend, Eddie. I’ve stuck with them over the years and changes in sound and was fortunate enough to be able to see them play live for the first time ever (at least, the 2025/26 incarnation of Cabaret Voltaire) late last year, along with my other schoolmate of the same period – and frequent contributor to this blog – Lieutenant030. I can thoroughly recommend trying to see them live on their tour later this year if you are in any doubt about it. I mention in passing the 2025/26 incarnation of Cabaret Voltaire, as this is a band (along with other Post Punk contemporaries) with a complicated history. Even within the timeframe of the most stable and long-lasting line-up, the duo of Kirk and Mallinder, there were periods that would divide opinion, with radical shifts in the bands sound. This release hails from one of those periods, their era signed to EMI’s Parlophone label.
Continue reading “Cabaret Voltaire ‘Here To Go’ UK CD single (EMI Parlophone, CDR 6166, 1987)”
This 1988 CD EP release is something of a curio as it contains two mixes by Visage that have for whatever reason been rather forgotten about in the digital age. Not that you would know from the sleeve design, as it doesn’t provide any details on the specific mixes included. But these two mixes of interest are the original extended 12” mix of ‘Fade To Grey’ and the ‘Dance Dub’ mix of ‘Beat Boy’.
This original 12” mix of ‘Fade To Grey’ first emerged not on the 1980 UK 12” single but on the West German 12” single release. (The UK 12” single featured the same single edit as the 7” mix). The West German 12” release (Polydor 2141 318) – see discos.com entry – featured an extended mix of ‘Fade To Grey’, though its fair to say that this 12” extended mix has since been eclipsed and replaced as seemingly the ‘definitive’ 12” mix of the song by the later ‘Dance Mix’ version that first appeared on the US ‘Visage’ Mini-Album (Polydor, PX-1-501) released in July 1981, as featured in a previous post. For example, on many various artists compilation CDs in recent decades whenever there is a 12″ or extended mix of ‘Fade To Grey’ it is almost always the ‘Dance Mix’, or, even more confusingly, a slightly shorter edit of this ‘Dance Mix’. (See ‘Postscript’ below for more detail on this.) The most recent example of this is from Rusty Egan’s 4-disc ‘Rusty Egan Presents Blitzed!’ collection (view the discogs.com entry), which features the full-length ‘Dance Mix’ version of ‘Fade To Grey’ in all its glory – it truly is a superb mix.
Meantime, the ‘original’ 12″ mix as featured on this CD single is quite a different affair. It lacks the downright irresistible straight-ahead funkiness of the Dance Mix and has in the past come in for the occasional comment that its basically just the single mix repeated twice.
Continue reading “Visage ‘Fade To Grey’ 1988 CD single (Polydor, 887-586-2, West Germany, 1988)”