Brian Eno’s ‘Music for Films’ has a complicated history and in this post I’ll do my best to unravel the differences between the original 1976 promo-only release, its 1978 wider commercial release and how the stray tracks have reappeared on CD in later years.
Two Bill Nelson releases hailing from 1983, both of the mini-album variety that was so very much in vogue at the time. The first of these, ‘Chimera’, capped off Bill’s short but highly productive two year stint with Mercury records, the second, ‘Savage Gestures for Charms Sake’, saw the return to Cocteau Records as a going commercial concern once more. Both very enjoyable in their own way, they were later brought together on a single Cocteau Records CD for re-issue before later being being split apart again with ‘Chimera’ upgraded to a single CD expanded edition in 2005, while ‘Savage Gestures for Charms Sake’, other than a long since deleted stand-alone re-issue on CD in 1989, currently languishes in the wastelands. First up…
It has an unusual back story, this album. Recorded late 1982 at The Garden and Riverside Studios, it apparently started life with the intention of being a bridging four track EP between 1982’s ‘The Love That Whirls’ album and the next intended full-length album, but ended up a six track mini-album released around the time the intended album should have been with the addition of two extra tracks. (Production work for amongst others Gary Numan and The Units got in the way…) Continue reading “Bill Nelson – ‘Chimera’ and ‘Savage Gestures for Charms Sake’”
The French edition of Kraftwerk’s wonderful ‘Computer World’ album of 1981 is unique for its inclusion of ‘Mini Calculateur’, the en française rendition of ‘Pocket Calculator’. This is one of the four language variants of the song officially released on vinyl, the others being German, English and Japanese. The band also recorded an Italian language version (‘Mini Calcolatore’) and performed it in 1981 on the RAI television show ‘Discoring‘, but this language mix was not released on record. A pity, as it sounds great. (There have been additional live performance variations too, but these were the recorded ones.)
Continue reading “Kraftwerk – ‘Computer World’ (Pathe-Marconi EMI, 2C 070 64370, 1981)”
In the first part of this look at the ’80/81′ box set, the focus was on discs one and two, which spread the ‘Telekon’ studio album across a couple of individually packaged LPs. The remainder of the box finds the 1981 Wembley ‘farewell concerts’ documented by way of the ‘Living Ornaments 81’ album – its only appearance on vinyl to date.
Those 1981 farewell shows are a well established part of the Numan folklore of course. I was still too young to have attended any concerts back in 1981. Instead, it was all lived vicariously through the pages of the music press and the likes of the Numan-sympathetic one-off SynRock fanzine, as well as the immediately preceding ‘Living Ornaments 79 and 80’ box set, which I lavished no small amount of several weeks pocket money on. A few months later came the airing on BBC1 TV (Sunday 6th September 1981) of some highlights from the video recording of the show. Despite being condensed down to only 40 minutes in length, this was A Very Big Deal Indeed for me, in an era of only three television channels airing in the UK. Having to compete with the rest of the family and their viewing pleasures – and with no video recorder yet – was no mean feat. The complete show would be released in full form in 1982 on the oddly named ‘Micromusic’ home video cassette and from which this live recording is derived.
Continue reading “Gary Numan ’80/81′ Box Set – Discs 3, 4 and 5: ‘Living Ornaments 81’”
Rounding out May’s posts is the standard UK 7″ issue of New Order’s first single release of 1985, ‘The Perfect Kiss’.
On first sight, and in comparison to many other New Order singles of the ’80s in particular, it looks quite uninspiring and bland, taking minimalism all the way by being packaged in a high gloss plain black card sleeve, with minimal silver print typography on plain black labels. In the grooves though we find two edits that are unique to only this 7″ single and which have never found their way on to any later CD releases.
Continue reading “New Order – ‘The Perfect Kiss’ UK 7″ (Factory, FAC123, 1985)”
