Tim’s music blog

I remember talking to a friend about Elton John when I was at school. We liked Bob Dylan, David Bowie, The Who, and of course, Elton John. We were convinced that artists like Dylan were for the ages. But Elton John? “Do you think he will last?” I asked. “Of course” was the reply.

My friend was right. The reason for my doubts were ill-founded; the verbal mystique of Dylan seemed to touch the soul, whereas Elton John seemed to be all pop. If you were a serious progressive music fan there was a trace of guilt in enjoying Elton John and his gift for melody.

Time has shown such distinctions to be artificial. There is equal artistry in easy melody.

As for Elton John, his musical talent is amazing and merits the genius word. The rumour is that he worked quickly, writing melodies for Bernie Taupin’s lyrics in short sessions at the piano. Back in the seventies the music poured out of him:

1970
Elton John
Tumbleweed Connection

1971
Friends (Soundtrack)
Madman across the water

1972
Honky Chateau

1973
Don’t Shoot me I’m only the piano player
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (Double)

1974
Caribou

1975
Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy
Rock of the Westies

I find myself still listening to these albums. Elton is a great performer; he plays with extraordinary fluidity, he sings with passion, and Taupin’s lyrics are at times intense and bold, sometimes dark.

Although Yellow Brick Road is magnificent, the albums I play these days are more likely to be Madman or Honky Chateau. Songs like Madman Across the Water and Rocket Man that speak of outsiders who see the world in a different way resonate with me.

I enjoy many of his later albums too though he has never matched that early burst of creativity. His voice is not as strong as it was. He is one of the greats though and has nothing to prove now.

In the autumn of 1975, David Bowie was immersed in the alien character of  Thomas Newton in Nicholas Roeg’s film The Man Who Fell to Earth. He was also addicted to cocaine, suffering delusions, and by accounts of those close to him at the time, seemingly near to breakdown. It’s all a bit hard to take in, considering that during this period of his life he produced what I consider his best work, the album Station to Station – though his flirtation with fascism makes me uncomfortable.

The music is magnificent though; powerful, unsettling, emotional. Stylistically it is an amalgam of the the funk of Young Americans and the rock which preceded it; though saying that does no justice to the fact that Bowie had moved on from both.

The title itself is a pun – the track opens with white noise and chuffing train noises, a radio tuning, a train travelling. Bowie is mentally travelling too, too fast for safety. Earl Slick’s guitar is frenetic and urgent. The album is cold in feel, perfectly suited to the start mostly black and white cover, but humanised by the two softer ballads which conclude each side on the original vinyl release: Wild is the Wind and Word on a Wing.

Now Station to Station is getting the super deluxe treatment. In September EMI will release a lavish special edition box which includes  5 CDS, a DVD, three vinyl records, and a pile of memorabilia. How can you get that lot from one album? Here’s how:

CD 1: 2010 transfer of Station To Station from the original stereo analogue master
CD 2: Station To Station 1985 CD master
CD 3: Station To Station single edits five track EP containing Golden Years, TVC15, Stay, Word On A Wing and Station To Station
CDs 4 & 5: Live Nassau Coliseum ’76
DVD containing the following…
Station To Station (original analogue master, 96kHz/24bit LPCM stereo)
Station To Station (new Harry Maslin 5.1 surround sound mix in DTS 96/24 and Dolby Digital)
Station To Station (original analogue master, LPCM stereo)
Station To Station (new Harry Maslin stereo mix, 48kHz/24bit LPCM stereo)
12" heavyweight vinyl of Station To Station from the original stereo analogue master in replica sleeve
2 x 12" heavyweight vinyl of Live Nassau Coliseum ’76 in gatefold sleeve
24-page booklet with sleevenotes by Cameron Crowe and chronology by Kevin Cann and also including…
- Previously unpublished Steve Shapiro photo
- Geoff MacCormack photos
- Andrew Kent live Nassau photos
Replica David Bowie On Stage 1976 press kit folder containing the following…
- Replica Nassau ticket from night of the show
- Replica backstage pass
- Replica A4 biog
- Replica band line-up
- 3 x 10×8" press shots
Replica 1976 Fan Club Folder containing the following…
- Replica fan club membership card
- Fan club certificate
- 2 small collector cards
- 2 A4 photo cards
- Replica 4-page biography
- 2 badges
- 6 panel folded Steve Shapiro photo poster of Bowie kneeling

Some of this deserves a little explanation. Why is the “1985 CD master” included? This would be the first CD release, on RCA. and sought after by collectors. The reason for the popularity of these early CDs is that in general they sound closer to the original vinyl records. Bowie’s back catalogue has been remastered many times, but all the later CD versions sound quite different, from the over-bright Ryko issues to the noise-reduced later efforts. I guess someone noticed that some fans still seek out the RCA CDs and decided to include it here.

The concert from the Nassau Coliseum was a famous bootleg called The Thin White Duke, though it is to be hoped that the sound quality here will be superior. It is a great concert, and better than any of the other official live material in my opinion.

Very nice; but I find myself rather irritated by this release. Although there will also be a CD release with the remastered Station to Station and the Nassau Coliseum concert, much of the material is unique to the big box. In particular, the high resolution stereo, the new surround sound mix, and the new stereo remix. Fans who want to hear these also have to purchase the rest of the box, even though they might not have a record player for the three vinyl records, for example. It’s annoying if like me you are mainly interested in the music.

Another disappointment is the absence of any true rarities. Many of us would like to hear the unused soundtrack Bowie created for the Man Who Fell to Earth, for example.

Nevertheless, there’s a lot here to look forward to – if you can live with feeling somewhat exploited as you open your wallet for this super-deluxe, super-expensive box containing material some of which you have most likely bought at least once before.

Station to Station on Amazon.com

Station to Station on Amazon.co.uk

The Who at its best is the equal of any live band ever, so the new double CD Greatest Hits Live has plenty of potential. On the other hand, cherry-picking from concerts over a 42-year period (1965 to 2007) is unlikely to offer the coherence or adrenalin rush of a single concert – get the sublime Live At Leeds in the unlikely event you have not heard it yet – and much of this material has appeared before, especially if you snagged the fanclub-only release View from a Backstage Pass.

The first CD here covers the original band including the late, great Keith Moon. Not a bad track here, though personally even by 1976 there was some decline in the band’s live performance in my opinion.

The CD does not present the songs chronological order which seems odd to me. I’ve sorted them for the list below. Great to have the songs from Hull, the day after the famous Leeds gig. In detail:

BBC Session 1965
My Generation

Leeds 14 Feb 1970
Magic Bus

Hull 15 Feb 1970
Happy Jack
I’m a Boy

San Francisco 12 Dec 1971
I Can’t Explain
Substitute
Behind Blue Eyes

Largo 6 Dec 1973
5.15
Won’t Get Fooled Again

Charlton Athletic FC, 18 May 1974
Naked Eye/Let’s See Action/My Generation

Swansea, 12 June 1976
Pinball Wizard
I’m Free
Squeezebox

CD2 on the other hand starts 15 years later. The first part is a good chunk of a 1989 concert from a tour which honestly was not one of The Who’s best. But it is still The Who and worth hearing. Then we get a scattering of tracks from more recent concerts, including a fine Real Me from Watford in 2002 and Eminence Front from Brisbane last year. Overall though, it’s not a particularly good representation of the best latter-day Who. In fact, I’d rather have had the entire Watford concert. In detail:

Los Angeles, 24 August 1989
I can see for miles
Join Together
Love Reign O’er Me
Baba O’Riley
Who Are You

Watford 31 Jan 2002
The Real Me

Royal Albert Hall, London, 7 Feb 2002
The Kids are Alright

New York, 11 March 2007
A man in a purple dress

Brisbane, 24 March 2009
Eminence Front

Overall, enjoyable but not a very satisfactory release. I’d recommend the At Kilburn 1977 [DVD] [2008, which also includes a concert at Coliseum 1969, ahead of this – the Coliseum concert on that is just fantastic. Greatest Hits Live on the other hand is mainly for Who enthusiasts.

I’ve listened to this CD by James Mercer (ex The Shins) and Brian Burton (half of Gnarls Barkley) numerous times and can’t shake off the feeling that this could have been much better. That said, it’s good in lots of ways. The sounds are inventive, the melodies are strong, the talent is obvious.

The sound is a little dated, though I’m guessing that’s deliberate; there are echoes of eighties-style new romantic crooning plus electronica.

What’s missing then? Well, one of the songs is called "Sailing to nowhere" which sums it up nicely. The CD is lacking in passion or any real sense of direction.

If you like what James Mercer and Danger Mouse have done before, then you’ll likely enjoy this, though I doubt you will find it their best work. For others, there’s little compelling reason to grab this CD, though it passes pleasantly enough

Peter Gabriel’s Scratch my Back is an intriguing release – an album of cover versions of pop and rock songs, but with an orchestral backing. It actually works, once you set your expectations accordingly.

The thing I want to draw attention though is a remarkable offer that comes with the deluxe version of the CD (worth it anyway for Waterloo Sunset, otherwise unavailable). You get a code with it that buys a three month trial of membership at the Bower & Wilkins Society of Sound site. The details are here:

The stunning super-high quality version of Peter Gabriel’s new album ‘Scratch My Back’ is available now from Society of Sound as a 24-bit FLAC download.

If you have bought an enhanced CD you will have a voucher code entitling you to download the album from us as well as giving you three months full membership. If you don’t own the album you can subscribe for six or twelve months to access it.

This means you get not only the high-res version of Scratch my Back (without Waterloo Sunset, unfortunately), but also “any past albums of the month” on Society of Sound, many of which are also in 24-bit FLAC. I counted 19 albums in all, with artists including David Rhodes, Ennio Morricone, Speed Caravan, Brett Anderson, Charlie Winston, Gwyneth Herbert, Tom Kerstens, Skip McDonald, and the Portico Quartet.

I’ve been working through them and enjoying what I hear.

This still begs the question, of course, of whether hi-res is audibly any different from standard CD quality. If this is a question that interests you, as it does me, then you get plenty of material to experiment with. In addition, the overall standard of the recording quality found here seems excellent.

I have reviewed the AVI ADM 9.1 active speaker system. This is a distinctive system, in that it builds amplification – both pre- and power amps – and a DAC into the loudspeaker cabinets. There is a remote to control volume and to select between two digital inputs or an analog input.

Why distinctive? Well, most consumer hi-fi is based on passive speakers with an external amplifier. There are lots of active monitors on the market aimed at the professional audio engineer, but most of these lack the pre-amp, DAC and remote.

What is an active speaker? Read the review; but in a nutshell it is one where each speaker driver has a dedicated amplifier, so that the crossover, which divides the audio signal into frequencies suitable for each driver, works on a low-level signal rather than one that is already amplified. This is well-known to reduce distortion. It also means that the amplifiers can be tailored exactly to the characteristics of the speaker drivers, since they are the only ones they ever have to drive.

The ADM 9.1 is expensive, but less so than the very high-end active systems on the market from the likes of Naim and Bang and Olufsen.

It raises the question: why are there not more active systems in consumer hi-fi? The short answer is that they do not sell that well, because they are inherently more expensive – you need at least double the number of amplifiers, presuming a two-way loudspeaker.

The long answer, claimed by AVI, is that the hi-fi industry is wedded to the idea of an upgrade cycle that keeps customers buying more. Passive systems, with several separate boxes, are more amenable to that process.

I’ve just received my copy of David Bowie’s A Reality Tour, a double CD for which I paid £11.98 from Amazon.co.uk – though if I’d waited a few days, I would have been able to buy a US import for £8.59 including shipping, at today’s prices.

For my money I get a tri-fold package with photos from the tour, and a 12-page booklet with more photos and credits.

The CDs between them have 33 tracks – not bad value.

Still, I could have downloaded from Apple iTunes for £9.99 – which is a little less, or a little more, than the CD price depending whether you compare with what I paid or the best current deal.

What is annoying though is that the iTunes download has two additional tracks:

• 5.15 the Angels Have Gone
• Days

They are probably nothing special; but it is irritating.

On the other hand, iTunes has its annoyances too. The tracks are lossy-compressed; and even if you don’t think the difference is audible, that is still a disadvantage if you want to convert to some other format, as generational loss creeps in. I miss out on the packaging (though there may be some digital booklet, I’m not sure). In addition, the rights I purchase are non-transferable, so if I decide I don’t like the album, I can’t stick it on eBay to reduce my loss.

The end result of each purchase is similar, as I rip the CD for streaming anyway.

On balance, I think the CD is a better buy; but I can see where this is going.

I enjoyed this interview with Brian Eno, partly because it echoes some of my own musical journey – as a listener, I must emphasise:

I like Abba. I did then and I didn’t admit it. The snobbery of the time wouldn’t allow it.

Quite. Which is why a couple of years ago I bought the 4CD set Thank you for the Music, and not only do I love it, I admire what they did, the technique, the melody and the emotion.

I may have been foolish to buy it. It sounds like Eno doubts we will have to for much longer:

I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a living from them for a while were lucky. There is no reason why anyone should have made so much money from selling records except that everything was right for this period of time. I always knew it would run out sooner or later. It couldn’t last, and now it’s running out. I don’t particularly care that it is and like the way things are going.

Kudos to Eno for portraying this not as some evil thing, but just something of our time. I love Spotify; millions of songs on demand and for free. I’m not sure how long Spotify itself will last, but clearly the era of the record shop is over and there are many reasons to be glad about that – even if one cannot help a little nostalgia for the fun of browsing the racks and the excitement of setting the needle onto a groove for the first time, or the CD equivalent.

DGM has released a magnificent CD/DVD box set reissue of King Crimson’s classic debut, The Court of the Crimson King.

Maybe I will write more about this when I have listened to it properly, but in the meantime a few observations.

This is completist heaven. There is always argument about whether reissues should feature the original mix (for authenticity) or a new mix (to benefit from modern noise-free mixing techniques). The makers of the recent Genesis boxes contentiously chose the latter. DGM by contrast offers both.

Not only that, you get several versions of both. You get a new 2009 mix in CD and several DVD versions – several DVD versions because only DVD audio players can cope with the highest resolution, and most people only have DVD video players – so we end up with a 2009 surround mix in two audio versions; a 2009 stereo mix in two audio versions; and the original mix as mastered in 2004 in two audio versions.

It doesn’t stop there. We also get a needledrop from the first pressing of the UK vinyl release on Island Records; and an alternate take version of the album with different performances, such as an instrumental-only 21st Century Schizoid Man.

Then there are the other extras: the full version of Moonchild; a live concert from 1969 (Hyde Park, July 5th combined with Filmore East, New York in November); a mono album mix issued for US radio.

If 5 CDs and a DVD aren’t enough for you, you can also enjoy the LP-size box, which enables the original artwork to be printed at its proper size, and inserts including a well-written 24 page booklet, two photographs from the era, and rattling aimlessly about inside, two little badges.

But I promised some observations, not just a description. I love the album; never be deceived by the opening clamour of 21st Century Schizoid Man, this is thoughtful music, not a mindless thrash. It was extraordinary hearing it for the first time; I’m not sure when that was for me – not 1969, but a couple of years later. It might have been on that wonderful Island Records sampler, Nice Enough to Eat, which I listened to in 1972 or thereabouts. If any album deserves this kind of treatment, this one does.

It was particularly thoughtful of the compilers to include the vinyl needledrop and the full-size artwork. Still … as it happens I have the record, not the first pressing, but an early ILPS, 4U matrix if you really want to know.

I played the record and then the CD needledrop. You know what? My record sounds better to my ears. Oddly, on the “declicked” needledrop you can easily hear pre-echo of the opening salvo of Schizoid, where it goes from very quiet to very loud. This is a vinyl flaw, where a quiet groove picks up a faint echo of the louder groove which follows it. My cut doesn’t have that, at least not audibly. It also sounds richer, more open, more dynamic.

Another thing I noticed: the artwork. Honestly, you have to see an early pressing of the original LP to appreciate this very striking image. The definition is much better, the colours more vibrant, those eyes – they stare manically out of the original, in the new print they are muted.

I’m guessing that they didn’t manage to get hold of the original artwork, and that what we have here is a print of a print.

Never mind. If you love this album, get the box; it is fantastic. You can get it from burning shed.

Apple (computer) held a press event yesterday, one that had been buzzed extensively ahead of time. The date was 9th September 2009, or 09/09/09, and the same date as the worldwide release of the Beatles remasters. The date ties in with a song on Let it Be, One after 909, and a song on the White Album called Revolution 9.

Despite the enduring popularity of the band, the Beatles music is not available on iTunes … yet. Naturally, the pundits foresaw a Beatlish announcement.

It seemed obvious; but doubts were raised when the official invitations went out. The invitations bore a lyric not from Lennon and/or McCartney, but rather from the Rolling Stones: It’s only rock and roll, but we like it.

As it turned out, Apple (computer) announced new iPods and an update to iTunes, but there was nothing about the Beatles.

What goes on? It’s now clear that the remastered Beatles were headed for iTunes – and probably still are – but whatever deal was in place fell through. The first evidence was a rapidly withdrawn comment from Yoko Ono shortly before the press event. Now we have confirmation from Bob Smeaton, who created mini-documentaries that are included with the new CDs:

Originally what happened was, the albums were going to be released on iTunes but that deal, you know, fell through for whatever reason. Some sort of political reason. So we actually set about creating a mini-documentary for each of the albums, so that when you bought the albums on iTunes, if you bought the whole album, because on iTunes you can pick like one song, right, if you bought the whole album, as an incentive to buy the whole album rather than just to cherry-pick songs, you would get this mini-documentary.

Indeed, this idea of bonus non-musical content that you get when purchasing an entire album from iTunes was announced yesterday. The concept is imaginatively called the iTunes LP – but only a few examples are available so far, just six according to Cult of Mac – Dylan’s Highway 61, The Doors 40th anniversary hits, American Beauty by the Grateful Dead, and albums by the Dave Matthews Band, Tyrese Gibson and Norah Jones. Pretty unexciting, especially when compared to a might-have-been announcement of all the Beatles albums appearing on iTunes for the first time and in the snazzy new format.

Of course you can have the Beatles in iTunes if you want to. Just buy the CDs and import them; and I’ve heard tell of other methods that fall foul of copyright.

Still, it seems Apple (computer) vs Apple (corps) is not quite over yet. No wonder Steve Jobs chose a lyric from that other Sixties band to launch the iTunes LP.