A very exclusive playback event is happening on Thursday 2 November in Central London where the new Dolby Atmos Mix of Soft Cell’sNon-Stop Erotic Cabaret will be premiered in front of a small audience.
SDE will be there co-hosting this and I’d like to offer the opportunity for a few SDE readers to come along and hear this Non-Stop Immersive Cabaret.
So if you would like to attend, and you are available, early evening on Thursday (details will be provided), please leave a comment below. We’ll randomly select eight lucky winners on Monday morning at 8am and be in touch via email.
The Dolby Atmos Mix features on the SDE-exclusive blu-ray of Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret. If you haven’t pre-ordered your copy yet, it’s available only via the SDE shop using this link, or the button below.
The blu-ray also features bonus singles (‘Memorabilia’, ‘Torch’, ‘What!’) in Atmos, Dolby Atmos Instrumentals, the remastered original stereo mix of the album and four HD videos. It’s released on 1 December 2023 alongside the 6CD box set and vinyl formats.
Tracklisting
Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret Soft Cell /SDE-exclusive blu-ray
SDEtv explores the new Kirsty MacColl box set that features eight CDs worth of music from across her career including over 40 previously unreleased tracks. Watch the video!
Perhaps no artist lends themselves as well to the super deluxe box set treatment as Prince. As everyone knows, he recorded vastly more music than he ever released. Even the quickest flick through Duane Tudhal’s books, which dissect his studio sessions from 1983-84 and 1985-86 with in-depth research and scholarly rigour, leaves you both agog at Prince’s Stakhanovite approach to music – did the guy ever sleep? – and profoundly glad you weren’t working with him: subject to phone calls in the middle of the night demanding your immediate presence in the studio or, in the case of one member of The Revolution, obliged to leave your own wedding party midway through in order to record a new track. Paisley Park’s infamous Vault – wherein, it’s alleged, lurk thousands of unreleased tracks – has proved impossibly fertile ground for posthumous compilers. It slightly undersells the vastly extended editions of Purple Rain, 1999 and Sign O’ The Timesthat have appeared over the last eight years to say they contain ‘extra tracks’: they are home to albums and albums of material as good as the stuff he deigned to release in the 80s. Sometimes, what’s emerged is of a quality that’s baffling: if he had an album as good as Welcome 2 America in the can in 2010, why didn’t he release it then, instead of the sub-par 20Ten?
Which brings us to the latest instalment in the super-deluxe series of Prince reissues. On release, 1991’s Diamonds And Pearls sold 6m copies – his biggest album since Purple Rain – but it occupies a hotly-contested position within the Prince canon. There are people who’ll tell you it was the last incontrovertible classic Prince released in his lifetime, a brilliant and unexpected marshalling of his energies and eclectic tastes after the uneven Batman soundtrack and the disaster of Graffiti Bridge; the final time Prince made an album that needed no special pleading, with his genius evident from soup to nuts. Equally, there are people who think that particular ship sailed some years before, and that Prince’s genius last seemed unquestionable on Lovesexy or even Sign O’ The Times. There are also people who’ll tell you that Prince’s greatest album is The Rainbow Children or Musicology, but they’re either insane or engaged in posturing of the eye-understand-Prince’s-work-on-a-deeper-and-more-profound-level-that-U variety and either way their opinion need not detain us.
Diamonds and Pearls occupies a hotly-contested position within the Prince canon
Alexis Petridis
After consuming the box set – which expands the original album’s 65 minutes to over seven hours of music (plus a blu-ray featuring a frankly astonishing 1992 live performance from Prince’s Minneapolis nightclub Glam Slam), and arrives packaged with an impressively detailed hardback book and features vinyl mastered by Bernie Grundman, whose name is about as close to a trademark of quality as you can get in these matters – you find yourself wavering between the two viewpoints. On the one hand, Diamonds And Pearls itself contains more no-further-questions classics than either of its predecessors – ‘Gett Off’, ‘Money Don’t Matter 2 Night’, ‘Insatiable’, ‘Cream’, the title track – and it’s impressively varied in its scope. It variously touches on jazz, T Rex, funk, Steely Dan, hip hop and soul. Opener ‘Thunder’ attempts to meld together psychedelia (by way of a sitar), early 90s R&B, squealing hair metal guitars and a nagging pop chorus, a cocktail no one other than Prince would have thought of mixing. The backing track of ‘Willing And Able’ sounds a little like The Police, of all people.
On the other, it feels noticeably more dated than Prince’s earlier albums. The influence of New Jack Swing is pronounced, which locks it into its era, partly because the version of New Jack Swing it alights on – stabbing samples, then-cutting-edge drum machines heavy on the cowbell sound – is one that 21st Century pop has yet to revive. There are good songs among the deep cuts – the jazzy ‘Strollin’’ is lovely – but nothing you’d describe as an overlooked masterpiece, and not all the experiments work. As Chuck D puts it in the accompanying booklet’s introductory essay, Prince “didn’t jump into rap right away”, which is a tactful way of saying he dabbled in it – rapping on 1983’s ‘Irresistible Bitch’ – then took to dismissing it: “the only good rapper is one that’s dead,” he sang on The Black Album’s ‘Dead On It’. By the time of Diamonds And Pearls, he’d clearly reconsidered, apparently impressed by Digital Underground’s ‘The Humpty Dance’. Indeed, the outtakes and b-sides assembled on the box set reveal that Diamonds And Pearls might have been a far more hip hop-influenced album than the one he eventually released: ‘Something Funky This House Comes’, ‘Horny Pony’, ‘The Last Dance (Bang Zoom And The Whole Nine)’, ‘Things Have Gotta Change’.
There are good songs among the deep cuts – the jazzy ‘Strollin’’ is lovely – but nothing you’d describe as an overlooked masterpiece, and not all the experiments work.
Alexis Petridis
The problem was Prince’s choice of rapper: it was a golden age for hip hop, and Prince could presumably have had his pick of top-tier collaborators, but instead he opted to stay local, employing Tony M, a Minnesotan whose rhymes were of a similar standard to those found on early 90s pop/dance tracks – ‘Rhythm Is A Dancer’ by Snap!, ‘Dirty Cash’ by The Adventures Of Stevie V. His presence makes Prince’s ventures into hip hop seem a little dilettantish, as if something of it lay beyond his grasp: a disappointment, given that he’d previously seemed capable of making pretty much any musical genre bend to his will.
Outside the album itself, and the plethora of additional remixes – ranging from the essential (the Damn Near 10 Minutes version of ‘Gett Off’), to completists-only single edits – the haul of songs from The Vault seems a little less abundant than that on 1999 or Sign O’ The Times, perhaps because a lot of the tracks here ended up being released by other artists: El DeBarge, Rosie Gaines, Mavis Staples, three songs from Martika’s 1991 album Martika’s Kitchen. Then again, that doesn’t stop Prince’s original versions being great: you listen to the joyous title track from Martika’s Kitchen and boggle that it was only a minor hit in the UK, and flopped altogether in the States. And among the material that never found a home, previously known only to bootleg collectors and file-swappers, there’s real gold. Not enough to suggest that Prince could have easily released two albums of equivalent quality in 1991, but enough to have drastically reconfigured Diamonds And Pearls itself, and possibly to have improved it: the frantic ‘Streetwalker’ – co-written with Rosie Gaines – the vaguely ‘Little Red Corvette’-esque ‘Lauriann’, the stuttering electronic funk of ‘Hey U’. The best thing here might be the drum-machine-driven ‘Schoolyard’, which is implausibly funky and richly melody, although you can understand why Prince elected to keep that one to himself: even by his standards, the lyrics are a bit much. They depict his first sexual encounter, aged 16, with a girl two years younger than him, complete with – and there’s no easy way of putting this – a fairly detailed description of her vagina.
Elsewhere, even the less essential stuff is intriguing: a remix of Glam Slam from which ‘Gett Off’ was ultimately derived; a hugely extended and re-arranged version of ‘Thunder’ that was used as music for a ballet; ‘Letter 4 Miles’, a jazz piece composed in response to his friend and sometime collaborator Miles Davis’ death. You can argue that it would have been more exciting had the super-deluxe treatment been meted out to one of Prince’s unquestionable classics – Around The World In A Day, or Parade – but wallowing in what’s here is still a pleasure. Diamonds And Pearls has its flaws, evidence that Prince wasn’t as unfailingly great in 1991 as he had been four or five years earlier, but he was still great: great enough to make a deep dive as extensive as this seem a delight, rather than a chore.
Review by Alexis Petridis for SDE.
The Diamonds and Pearls reissue is out today via Warner Records. The exception to this is the blu-ray audio edition which is delayed until 24 November. It’s available via the SDE shop using this link or the button below.
2023 Editions of ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ on CD & vinyl with extra songs & 36 new stereo mixes • ‘Now and Then’ added to the ‘Blue’ album & available as a physical single
1962-1966 and 1967-1970, the two classic Beatles compilations – better known as the ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ Albums – will be reissued next month, newly remixed and expanded with the notable inclusion of ‘Now and Then’ the first ‘new’ song from the Fab Four since ‘Real Love’ in 1996.
The two compilations were first issued in 1973, created by Apple and EMi/Capitol in response to 4LP vinyl bootlegs called Alpha Omega Volumes I & II: The Story Of The Beatles being advertised on TV and radio stations in the US and sold by mail order. In fact, Allen Klein, the maligned manager of Apple’s and The Beatles’ business affairs instigated the two official collections not long before he was dismissed.
Both compilations remain 2CD sets, despite the extra tracks (1967-1970, pictured above)
‘The Red Album’ starts with ‘Love Me Do’ in 1962 and ends with ‘Yellow Submarine’ from 1966. It included none of The Beatles’ many cover versions, nor any songs written by George Harrison, all being Lennon-McCartney compositions. For the new edition of 1962-1966, 12 songs have been added, including George’s ‘If I Needed Someone’ (from Rubber Soul) and ‘Taxman’ (from Revolver). ‘Twist and Shout’, the last song recorded for 1963’s Please Please Me by a voice-shredded John Lennon also features, as does ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ which is sung by George and features on With The Beatles (also released in 1963, of course).
Revolver was, arguably, under-represented originally (only featuring ‘Yellow Submarine’ and Eleanor Rigby’), so now in addition to ‘Taxman’, ‘The Red Album’ now features ‘Got to Get You into My Life’, ‘I’m Only Sleeping’ ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ and ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. At seven tracks, there’s now a case for the pendulum having swung too much in the other direction and it might be over-represented!
1967-1970 has fewer tracks added. The only addition to what was the first record in this 2LP set is George’s ‘Within You, Without You’ from Sgt. Pepper. Harrison’s ‘I Me Mine’ (the last Beatles/Threetles session until the 1990s) is added to what was LP 2, along with ‘Dear Prudence’, ‘Glass Onion’, ‘Blackbird’, ‘Hey Bulldog’, ‘Oh! Darling’, and ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’.
The cover art to ‘Now and Then’ is by Ed Ruscha
The headline news is that a ‘new’ Beatles song called ‘Now and Then’ ends what is now an inaccurately titled 1967-1970. Like ‘Free As A Bird’ and ‘Real Love’, this song is an old John Lennon demo from the 1970s that Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr attempted to ‘finish’ during the Anthology period of the mid-90s. It was abandoned, reportedly because Harrison was apparently not too keen. ‘Now and Then’ features elements from the 1995 sessions including George’s guitar parts, and vocal and instrumental parts recorded by Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr in 2022, along with a new arrangement for strings. It’s produced by Paul and Giles Martin. Talking of ‘Free As A Bird’ and ‘Real Love’, it’s curious that neither song earns a place at the end of ‘The Blue Album’ while ‘Now and Then’ does.
The songs are all in stereo versions with 36 of the 75 tracks across the four CDs in brand new stereo remixes using state of the art ‘de-mixing’ technology utilising ‘Machine-Aided Learning [MAL]’, which was used for last year’s Revolver box set. The 36 songs are mostly (but not entirely) from 1962 to 1965. All tracks have been mixed for Dolby Atmos too (existing or new mixes), although for the second year running there is no physical blu-ray to host the Atmos Mixes of a major Beatles reissue campaign. John Harris contributes new sleeve notes.
In terms of the actual new physical products, on CD 1962-1966 and 1967-1970 remain 2CD sets. The extra songs have been slotted in place in chronological order. On vinyl, both titles become 3LP editions. 6LP and 4CD box sets are available but they only add a slipcase.
‘Now and Then’ is also being issued as a seven-inch vinyl record with ‘Love Me Do’ on the B-side, in various coloured vinyl editions. There are also 12-inch and cassette variants. The single is officially ‘released in a week’s time on 2 November.
1962-1966, 1967-1970 and ‘Now and Then’ are all released on 10 November 2023 via Apple/UMR.
NOW That’s What I Call Music continue their vinyl-only 80s Dancefloor series with a 2LP set focussed on Disco & Electro.
The first volume (HI-NRG and Pop) was issued earlier this month, while this new selection features 29 tracks pressed on purple and pink vinyl, including songs from Carly Simon, Irene Cara, Sister Sledge, Diana Ross, Donna Summer, Chaka Khan, Nu Shooz, The SOS Band, Malcolm McLaren and many more.
NOW 80s Dancefloor: Disco & Electro will be released on 1 December 2023.
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Various Artists
Now 80s Dancefloor - Disco and Electro - 2LP coloured vinyl
Sheryl Crow’s debut album, Tuesday Night Music Club, is being reissued on vinyl for its 30th anniversary.
Surprisingly, the 1993 album wasn’t released on vinyl until the 2018 2LP blue vinyl edition that was put out for Black Friday RSD in the USA. At the time, SDE expected a more widely available 2LP black vinyl of that edition to follow, but it never happened.
This new 30th anniversary edition is a 1LP pressing on black vinyl. Bernie Grundman, who originally mastered the album, recently used the original 1/2-inch flat master tape to create a new master and then cut the lacquers. That suggests it should sound better than the 2LP edition, although we’ll have to wait and see.
The album was of course a massive success at the time, particularly in America, where a string of singles, particularly ‘All I Wanna Do’ and ‘Strong Enough’, did well in the Billboard Hot 100. A 2CD+DVD deluxe edition was issued in 2009.
Tuesday Night Music Club will be reissued on vinyl on 1 December 2023 via UMR/Polydor.
Earlier this year, Sheffield’s bequiffed, baritone-voiced singer-songwriter, Richard Hawley, put together a brilliantly eclectic compilation album of mostly instrumental garage rock, surf, rock ‘n’ roll and R & B seven-inch singles from the ‘50s and ‘60s that he’d hand-picked from his own vinyl collection. Called 28 Little Bangers From Richard Hawley’s Jukebox, and released on Ace Records, it was full of killer riffs, dirty sounds, fuzzed-up guitars, mean organ and twangy licks. Now, only a few months later, there’s another Hawley compilation being released, but this time it’s a collection of his own songs – the career-spanning Now Then: The Very Best of Richard Hawley.
Prompted by the success of the award-winning musical, Standing At The Sky’s Edge, which is transferring to the West End in February next year, Now Then is the first compilation of Hawley’s music and has been curated by the man himself and his long-term collaborator, Colin Elliot (musician, producer, arranger). It’s available as a double ‘half and half’ coloured vinyl version – in a gatefold sleeve, with 22 tracks, while the 2CD digi-pak edition offers 32 songs.
Originally the guitarist in ‘90s indie-rockers Longpigs, Hawley, who has also played with Pulp, launched his solo career in 2001 with a self-titled, seven-track mini-album. There’s a song from it included on the CD version of this new collection, the bleary-eyed yet gorgeous, post-break-up ballad ‘Naked In Pitsmoor’: “What have you done to me baby? I’m just wasted and wake in the morning and get up screaming,” he croons, over acoustic guitar, twinkling sounds and weird humming electronica, with the song building to a dramatic crescendo that’s part ‘50s dancehall, part BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
The country-flavoured ‘Coming Home’, which is also from Hawley’s first record, appears only on the vinyl version. It should be noted that Now Then hasn’t been put together in chronological order and it doesn’t feel like your typical ‘Best Of’ album – on the CD, there’s room for the atmospheric, slide guitar instrumental, ‘Kelham Island’, which was the B-side of 2005 single, ‘The Ocean.’ The album opens with ‘Open Up Your Door’ – see what they did there? – from 2009’s Truelove’s Gutter. It’s a beautiful and towering romantic ballad that’s coated with delicious Easy Listening strings that will melt even the hardest of hearts – well, it was once used as the soundtrack to a TV campaign for Häagen-Dazs ice-cream, which almost certainly, er, opened up Hawley’s music to a lot of people who hadn’t heard it before. ‘Tonight The Streets Are Ours’ – another of his more well-known songs – is also included. It’s soaring and majestic – ‘60s-style orch-pop with spooky female backing vocals that sound like they were recorded in Joe Meek’s bathroom.
Famously, when fellow Sheffield musicians, Arctic Monkeys, won the 2006 Mercury Prize for their debut album, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, they joked: “Somebody call 999. Richard Hawley’s been robbed.” On the CD version of this compilation, there are four songs from the masterful Coles Corner – the album that was nominated for the Mercury Prize alongside the Arctic Monkeys’ record that year: the stately title track, the sublime ‘The Ocean’, with its swelling strings, the late-night, twangy ‘50s romanticism of ‘Hotel Room’, and the Morrisseyesque ‘Born Under A Bad Sign.’ You can’t help but think that Alex Turner and co were right when they made that quip…
Ahead of the release of Now Then, Hawley put out the wistful ‘Not The Only Road’ as a digital single. It’s a rerecording of ‘The Only Road’ from 2003’s Lowedges – the new version, with sweeping strings, was used on the soundtrack to the TV series of The Full Monty.
Much has been made of Hawley’s melodramatic and melancholy balladeering – he’s often been called Sheffield’s answer to Roy Orbison – but as this collection expertly demonstrates, there’s so much more to him than that. As well as a superb singer, he’s a gifted and inventive guitarist – he worked as a session musician for acts including All Saints and Robbie Williams – and he loves psychedelia. ‘She Brings The Sunlight’ (on the CD version, but not the vinyl) dates back to 2012’s Standing At The Sky’s Edge and is one of the compilation’s heaviest moments. With a blistering guitar solo, it’s full-on, cosmic, Beatles-like, droning raga-rock that could’ve easily come off one of Oasis’s albums from the early Noughties. There are more psych sounds on the reflective and cinematic, ‘Don’t Stare At The Sun’, which was inspired by flying a kite with his son, and has a wonderful John Barry-like instrumental break, and loads of trippy guitar effects.
The shadowy and dramatic ‘Which Way’ – only on the 2CD set – has a slight Bond song feel to it – but, sadly, there’s no room on either format for the magnificently moody and bluesy space-rock of 2012 single ‘Leave Your Body Behind You’, which could’ve quite easily graced the soundtrack of a 007 film. The swooning single ‘Valentine’, from the 2007 album Lady’s Bridge doesn’t make the cut either, but the playful skiffle-rockabilly of ‘Serious’ – another Lady’s Bridge track – gets a look in on both the CD and vinyl.
It’s nice to see the inclusion of Hawley’s powerful cover version of Dylan’s vitriolic ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ on both formats. It was previously only available digitally, or on the Peaky Blinders vinyl and CD soundtrack album that came out in 2019. The song was used as the finale to season five of the TV show.
‘Heart of Oak’ – the lead single from 2015’s Hollow Meadows – is anthemic, life-affirming stadium rock, and the collection closes with one of Hawley’s finest moments, the full version of ‘There’s A Storm A’Comin’, which was played over the end credits of the 2010 remake of classic crime film, Brighton Rock and has become a staple of his live sets. It perfectly encapsulates what he’s all about, starting off as a delicate, stripped-back, ‘50s-sounding, country-tinged ballad, before exploding into a dark and menacing, guitar-heavy epic, with a funereal orchestral arrangement.
Now Then serves as an ideal introduction to Hawley’s music, expertly showcasing his different sides, but with some added bonuses for diehard fans or completists. One of the more recent songs on the compilation is called ‘My Little Treasures’ – it was the second single from 2019’s Further. It’s about true love and loyalty, and Hawley wrote it after he met up for a pint with two of his late dad’s friends. In it, he sings: ‘My little treasures – I keep close to me. They give me so much pleasure and some company. Cold beer in warm places – heartbreak and old faces.’
Let’s raise a glass to Hawley – he really is a national treasure.
Now Then: The Very Best of Richard Hawley was reviewed for SDE by Sean Hannam. It’s out now.
Trevor Horn’s forthcoming album, Echoes – Ancient & Modern, features a series of guest vocalists – including Tori Amos, Iggy Pop, Marc Almond and Rick Astley – singing on classic songs. It is #14 in the ongoing SDE Surround Series and I’m pleased to report that we have managed to add some extra content to it, to hopefully make it more interesting and compelling for you, the listener!
This was announced about a month ago and the content promised was as follows:
Dolby Atmos Mix
5.1 Mix
Hi-Res Stereo Mix
Video of Trevor Horn taking you through the album track-by-track
I interviewed Trevor the other day (coming soon!) and I assumed the 5.1 mix was derived from the Atmos, but no, Horn has done a dedicated 5.1 mix from scratch – it was not rendered from the Atmos. Great news!
But the bigger news is that we have now secured an instrumental version of Echoes – Ancient and Modern for this blu-ray audio. Not only that, the instrumental is in 5.1! Those Trevor Horn backing tracks are a very interesting listen.
The Trevor Horn SDE-exclusive blu-ray now includes FOUR audio streams
As far as I’m aware, the 5.1 mix and the instrumentals are totally exclusive to this disc and I hope you’ll agree that this now makes this a very well-spec’d blu-ray.
We’ve opened up the pre-order again, in light of this new content. The blu-ray is only available via the SDE shop so use this link or the buy button below (‘pre-order’). It will ship with a FREE and collectible SDE Surround Series slipcase. Note: There are no longer any extra charges for shipping to the EU.
Two further SDE exclusives have been announced since Trevor. They are Soft Cell’sNon-Stop Erotic Cabaret and the stereo-only PWL Extended Big Hits and Surprises. Both are shown below for your convenience.
Trevor Horn’s Echoes – Ancient & Modern will be released on 1 December 2023, via Deutsche Grammophon. You can buy the stereo version on CD and vinyl as well, of course (widgets below).
TECHNICAL NOTES: This blu-ray audio requires a blu-ray player. Decoding the Dolby Atmos mix requires a Dolby Atmos-certified soundbar or a Dolby Atmos-compatible AV Receiver/Amp. The Dolby Atmos mix will ‘fold down’ to 5.1 or stereo if a Dolby Atmos decoder is not detected.
Prince/Diamonds and PearlsCD, Vinyl, Box Set, Blu-ray
The standalone blu-ray of Prince’s 1991 album Diamonds and Pearls is released a month after the other formats. It features a Dolby Atmos Mix of the studio album and can be ordered via the SDE shop.
Taylor Swift continues her series of re-recorded albums with 2014’s 1989. This new version features 21 tracks, five of which are previously unreleased songs ‘from the vault’. The 2LP blue vinyl edition looks appealing.
Bucks Fizz / The Land of Make Believe – The Definitive Collection
This 5CD set offers the entire singles collection of Eurovision winners and ’80s hitmakers Bucks Fizz along with unreleased instrumentals and backing tracks for all the official singles. If that’s not enough there’s a whole disc of unreleased extended mixes. 31 previously unreleased tracks, in total.
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BUCKS FIZZ
The Land of Make Believe - The Definitive Collection
Aqualung was the first Jethro Tull album remixed by Steven Wilson and was originally re-released as a 40th Anniversary package in 2011. This new edition was issued in 2016 but has been hard to get hold of for some time. The first CD contains the album mixed and mastered by Steven Wilson, CD 2 features additional 1970 and 1971 recordings (also mixed and mastered by Steven Wilson). The DVDs include Steven Wilson 5.1 mixes, hi-res stereo mixes, the 1974 quad mix and flat transfers of both Aqualung and the Life Is A Long Song EP (two of the EP’s tracks haven’t been available in this form previously).
This box is £180 in the UK so that’s a tremendous saving, via Amazon France. If you are buying these deals to ship to the UK don’t bundle big items together because you’ll breach the €150 threshold and be liable for import VAT/charges. Best to keep the orders separate, especially since shipping is very reasonable.
Amazing price in Amazon France for The Who’sWho’s Next box set. Works out at £97 for the product and around £6 shipping to the UK. Since the total is under €150 there’s nothing to worry about in terms of import duty/Brexit.
ABBA’s penultimate studio album The Visitors will be released for a belated 40th anniversary reissue in December.
What we used to describe as ABBA’s ‘last’ studio album was released in 1981 and featured the singles ‘One of Us’ (the group’s last top 5 UK single) and ‘Head Over Heels’. The title track and ‘When All Is Said And Done’ were also released in some territories.
The Visitors is released as a half-speed mastered 2LP set
There’s no surprises in terms of formats, with a 2LP half-speed vinyl edition of the album and individual seven-inch picture discs and a coloured vinyl seven-inch box set available. Having said that, two of the four singles in the box and the individual discs are the non-album tracks ‘Under Attack’ and ‘The Day Before You Came’ which were released to promote ABBA: The First Ten Years in 1982 and are not really anything to do with The Visitors.
There’s no CD edition, which is not unexpected but it’s still a shame. I’m sure many fans would have at least welcomed a repress of the 2012 CD+DVD deluxe which, unlike any of the 10 pieces of vinyl being released here, actually offered something unreleased, in the form of the fascinating exploration of ‘Like An Angel Passing Through My Room’ which was called ‘From A Twinkling Star To A Passing Angel (Demos)’. There’s also no Dolby Atmos Mix and if any ABBA album is suited to Atmos, it’s The Visitors!
The 40th anniversary editions of The Visitors are released on 1 December 2023, via UMR/Polydor. The coloured vinyl seven-inch box seems to be a D2C exclusive. You can order via The Sound Of Vinyl.
Dolby Atmos Mix + bonus tracks • Instrumentals in Atmos • Original Stereo Mix Remastered • HD Videos • Only available via theSDEshop.com
Soft Cell’s 1981 album Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret is one of the most influential and iconic albums that emerged from the 1980s. I’m thrilled to announce that, in collaboration with EMI/UMR and the band, that a brand new Dolby Atmos Mix of the album and bonus tracks will be available via an SDE-exclusive blu-ray.
A critical and commercial success, Marc Almond and Dave Ball’s debut paved the way for countless synth-based music duos, fashioning something dark and distinctive with a hint of pop that helped kick-start a new decade.
The album features three massive UK hit singles including the chart-topping ‘Tainted Love’, the best-selling UK single of 1981 which enjoyed phenomenal success in America and helped open up the U.S. for alternative and electronic artists such as The Cure and Depeche Mode.
Initially released in November 1981, the 10-track song cycle, in the words of Marc Almond, “Tells a story of a bored ordinary bloke seething with his life wanting more and looking for excitement and adventure in a red neon lit Soho world of red-light cabarets, prostitutes and sex dwarves, looking back at his youth and wondering what happened.”
This SDE-exclusive blu-ray audio edition offers you a Non-Stop Immersive Cabaret, featuring a brand new 2023 Dolby Atmos Mix of Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret created at Abbey Road Studios under the supervision of the band. Additionally, three non-album singles ‘Memorabilia‘, ‘Torch‘ and ‘What!’ are also included in Dolby Atmos. So this blu-ray includes all five of Soft Cell’s UK top 10 hits, in Atmos.
Furthermore, instrumentals of the album and the three bonus tracks are also included in Dolby Atmos and the same 13 tracks also feature in the original 1981 stereo mix, remastered.If that’s not enough, four original Tim Pope promo videos for ‘Bedsitter’, ‘Say Hello Wave Goodbye’, ‘Torch’ and ‘What!’, available physically in HD for the very first time.
Blu-ray content summary:
Dolby Atmos Mix of Album + bonus singles (Memorabilia, Torch, What!)
Dolby Atmos Instrumentals of album + bonus singles
Remastered Original Stereo Mix of album + bonus singles
Four HD videos: Bedsitter, Say Hello Wave Goodbye, Torch, What!
This Soft Cell blu-ray audio is No 15 in the ongoing SDE Surround Series and will be packaged the same as previous editions and ships with a free, collectible SDE Surround Series slipcase with the number 15 on the spine. Here’s the now traditional reminder as to why this blu-ray is highly recommended:
It’s the only way to enjoy the Dolby Atmos mix of the album via a physical product
You don’t need to sign-up to a streaming service such as Tidal or Apple Music to hear the spatial audio mix
The Atmos Mix on the Blu-ray is not compressed due to streaming bandwidth restrictions
You own the product, you are not renting it from a digital service provider
The Blu-ray audio is an excellent format for music and you don’t want to see it die off
Supporting SDE with these initiatives is leading to similar collaborations with labels/artists and we are keen to bring your more in the near future!
The SDE-exclusive Blu-ray Audio of Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret is a limited edition item. It will be pressed based on demand and due to the short lead time to manufacture, it will be available to pre-order for 10 days only. Availability after that cannot be guaranteed, so secure your copy today by pre-ordering at the SDE shop, either directly via this link or using the special SDE shop buy button (‘add to cart’) below. A selected number of still available similar products are listed below for your convenience (Trevor Horn has newly added 5.1 instrumentals!)
We ship worldwide, you can now pay in your local currency and there’s no longer any extra charges to the EU (if your order is worth less than €150).
Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret will be reissued on 1 December 2023 via EMI/UMR. Other vinyl and box set formats are available via the Soft Cell shop.
Tracklisting
Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret Soft Cell /SDE-exclusive blu-ray
Bananarama are releasing Glorious: The Ultimate Collection, a new compilation that celebrates four decades of music.
This set features 40 tracks, chosen by Sara and Keren with more recent output sharing space with the familiar hits of the 1980s. Sara says, “We wanted this to be a unique collection, a celebration of all the twists and turns in our career. We compiled endless lists of songs, album tracks and hit singles and whittled it down to forty: our favourite tracks from the past four decades.”
Glorious also includes two new dance-pop tracks: ‘Feel the Love’ and ‘Supernova’; you can preview the former, below.
This compilation is available as a 2CD set and as a 3LP set pressed on transparent gold vinyl. The official shop offers a 3CD edition (with bonus remix CD) which comes with a lavish hardcover book and a signed print. The 3LP vinyl pressed on red vinyl with both the book and the signed print is also available. The book is available on its own and there’s a double cassette edition.
Glorious: The Ultimate Collection will be released on 8 March 2024, via London Records.
After a year of ‘full moon’ songs Peter Gabriel has today finally announced the release date of i/o, his 10th studio album.
The 12-track album was recorded mostly at Real World Studios and Peter’s home studio. Guitarist David Rhodes, bassist Tony Levin and drummer Manu Katché are present throughout and several songs bear the fingerprints of long-time associate Brian Eno. There are also notable contributions from Richard Russell, pianist Tom Cawley, trumpeters Josh Shpak and Paolo Fresu, cellist Linnea Olsson and keyboard player Don E, amongst others.
2CD+blu-ray edition of i/o features all three mixes (click image to enlarge)
As you may be aware by now, there are two different stereo mixes: the Bright-Side Mix, handled by Mark ‘Spike’ Stent, and the Dark-Side Mix, as reshaped by Tchad Blake. These are available together as a 2CD set or as individual 2LP vinyl packages. The gatefold vinyl editions come with an obi-strip, 32-page booklet and hi-res download card.
A 2CD+blu-ray edition features both stereo mixes on CD and a blu-ray with a Dolby Atmos Mix – known as the In-Side Mix which was created by Hans-Martin Buff. The blu-ray is packaged as a digipak with 32-page booklet and comes with an OBI-strip. It also includes both stereo mixes in 24/96 hi-res.
A deluxe box set which will not be released until March next year simply gathers all these formats together: it includes 2CDs, four vinyl LPs and the blu-ray. This foil-blocked, clamshell box includes a casebound book with expanded sleeve notes and a poster.
i/o will be released on 1 December 2023, via Realworld. The super deluxe box set is issued on 26 April 2024.
Legendary producer Tony Viscontisits in his New York City studio looking unfeasibly youthful for a man in his late Seventies. He’s Zoomed into talk to SDE about his new box set which spans the producer’s entire working life and features famous material from David Bowie, T.Rex, U2, Joe Cocker and many more…
SDE: We’re here to talk about Produced By Tony Visconti, your new box set. There’s so much music: five and a half decades, with an amazing array of artists and genres, across the decades. Are you pleased with your life’s work?
Tony Visconti: I’m very pleased with my life’s work. I’ve worked over five decades, and I’m still working! The music I produced in every decade was different from the last and then the next one to come. I’m pretty happy that this set is a little overloaded with the 80s. That was a fertile decade for me.
How did you cope in the 80s with all the technology, like the Fairlight and sequencers? Did you enjoy that aspect of it?
Yeah, I realised quite late in the 70s, that if I don’t get into the technology, I’m going to be seen as a dinosaur. So, I got into the technology and I had full blown digital studio. I linked it up with my analogue machines. I went high tech, I had a good technical staff, and I was pleased that I moved into the 80s gracefully.
The role of a producer, within the industry, is quite well understood and established, but to the public at large, maybe it’s a little bit of a mystery. In your own words, could you explain what a producer’s role is, in a studio?
Well, a record producer is somewhat like a film producer. Inasmuch as, I will arrange everything from the beginning; I will hire people, like if I need a musical director. Of course, I’ll need an engineer, I’ll need a studio. So I organise all that. But the other role, the major role, that a record producer plays is he or she is more like a film director. So I roll my sleeves up in the studio and I get involved with the group’s music and their ethic. I want to know what they’re trying to achieve. Unlike a lot of producers who have a ‘sound’, I have no sound. I want to know what the group sound is, and I want to embrace it and embellish it, and make it stick to the wall [laughs]. All those things.
It’s very interesting you mention about not having a sound, because I was going to ask you about that. Jeff Lynne is a good example of a producer who has what you might call a signature sound, for example the drum sounds on the records he producers tend to sound quite similar.
I’ve got two sounds of mine that I’m involved with that are very identifiable, and I would say they are as much as my sound [as the artist’s] .When Marc Bolan and I worked together it was our sound. He could only go so far, technically and musically and I supplied the rest with the strings; the mixing; the engineering; backup vocals – when Flo & Eddie weren’t available, I did backup vocals with Marc – so that’s my that’s my sound. I’m 50% of that sound. With Bowie, whenever I worked with him, the two of us were autonomous; we made decisions together. Sometimes he would override mine or I would override his, so it was very cooperative. And all the Bowie records I produced, from Space Oddity to Heroes and onwards, that’s much very much a collaboration and I have to say, that that’s my sound too. Some other artists I work with, I put maybe a little more of myself into it, if they just have good songs, but no real ideas. I’m never at a loss for ideas! I mean, my brain… I wish I could stop it sometimes, you know, I just keep thinking and thinking. But that’s how I would describe the role: we are, in the sense of films, a producer, we organise it, and then we’re like a film director, we direct the artists.
Musicians and singers are frightened when they get in a studio
Tony Visconti
Film directing is a good analogy. Some people say if you can ‘see’ the direction then it’s getting in the way. In other words, you shouldn’t notice it. Do you feel the same about music production, that maybe people shouldn’t be noticing the production, necessarily?
That’s a kind of a goal. But because they don’t spend as much time in the studio every year as I do, musicians and singers are frightened when they get in a studio, they’re a bit trepidatious; all kinds of things are going on in their heads. And I can see that. They say a producer has to be a psychologist, and I never took a degree in psychology, so I’m not going to say I’m a psychologist, but psychology is obviously a good tool, if I can read what they’re going through. And I try to understand, what a particular pain is, in the whole process and what their strengths are. I like to find the strengths and build them up, give them confidence. And if I have to step in, I’ll suggest a chord change, or a melody change – with permission, I won’t force it on them – you know, “maybe this will sound better?”. And they’ll try it and they say, “good”, or they’ll say “rubbish”. I’m very flexible and I’m very compassionate as a producer.
When you take on a job, do you insist on hearing the songs first? Do you want to understand the quality of the material that you’re going to be working with?
That helps a lot. I would love to hear the scraggiest demos they have, it doesn’t matter. They don’t have to be slick. Although in recent years, people now have studios in their laptop. They send me like these enormous [and sophisticated] demos. And sometimes we just take them and put them into my Pro Tools. And we just build up the demos, because they’re so good. But in the old days, demos were pretty nasty. They were just sung into a cassette player and so you had to build up on something that was very, very basic.
When artists seek you out and try and get you to produce their record, what do you think they’re looking for? Do they just want some of that Bowie/Bolan fairy dust? Or are they after something specific?
Well, having had all these great records with Bolan and Bowie, of course, I get called and it’s like “give us some of the fairy dust”. And as I said just earlier, the Bowie and Bolan sounds are pretty much part of me, as well. That’s my bass playing, sometimes, it’s my string writing, it’s my backing vocals, my ideas. So when they want to get a Bowie or Bolan sound, they’re getting me; I was there, I did that stuff. Not everyone wants that, but the people who do, we can do it. To make a glam-rock track nowadays isn’t a bad thing. People are still going for it. Nowadays, it can sound more like a pastiche, but if it’s a good pastiche, it’s sellable. Fans will appreciate it. You know, I love to go the other way and do something completely opposite. Like I get some singers who are a soloist who are very dramatic. And they need they need everything and they want a big string section. I was very attracted to Elaine Page a few decades ago, because my goal is to work with the greatest singers I could find. They have to be really great if I work with them, because you can do more with a great singer; they’re more flexible. You could suggest things and they’re capable of going out of their comfort zone and trying their best. Elaine Paige was so good to work; with I made four albums with her.
I was going to ask you about that. Yes, four on the trot in the 80s
Yeah, I’m working with a West End musical singer! She wasn’t very tall, but her voice was huge, absolutely huge. And she loved to be directed; she wanted direction. One of the first things she said to me when we started working together was “I don’t suffer fools” and I said “Well, you won’t suffer me, so don’t worry about that!”
The limited edition 4CD deluxe signed by Tony Visconti (click to enlarge)
Sometimes with a band, where you might have five, six members in the group, you’ve got the baggage of keeping everyone happy, but I guess it simplifies things when you’ve just got one vocalist?
Yeah. When you have a five-piece band, you’ve got five producers as well, and you can see what happens when that happens with the infamous ‘Troggs Tapes’ when it just goes south, from almost the first minute for the next half hour!
Tony, you’re a very accomplished musician, yourself. You can score and arrange strings and all that kind of stuff, which is an amazing talent on its own. How important has that been for you? Do producers need to be musicians or understand music themselves?
Well, in my case, I am musically trained, and I learned to write scores before I left high school. So I was writing scores at 16 years old. And I was taken under the wing of the head of the music department, a lovely man called Dr. Silberman. And he gave me private lessons as well; my parents couldn’t afford to send me to a university. So this was it. Shortly after I left high school, I was writing arrangements for people, always remembering the lessons of voicings that Dr. Silberman taught me. My idol is this day is Beethoven but also George Martin. Beethoven was a very accomplished musician, but he was never was in a recording studio, but George Martin used all of his musical training, and it didn’t hurt, to have that kind of a background. I don’t have to impose that upon people, but when I’m called upon to help them with their backing vocals, that comes from my musical training background, I know a lot about this stuff, without coming down heavy on them, you know. And a lot of people know that I have this and they want it. So it depends. I’m flexible.
There’s a couple of tracks from Badfinger, although they were called The Iveys for the first number, ‘Maybe Tomorrow’. That’s a lovely song, one which I’m amazed wasn’t a bigger hit at the time. You were in the middle of that 1968/Apple Music/Beatles vibe. You were there when that was happening, which must have been extremely interesting.
It was fabulous. I went into Apple, they had an open-door policy for a while, and you had Hells Angels walking in and all kinds of people. One day, I walked in to speak to one of the Directors [of Apple], it was maybe about The Iveys, and the door opens and George Harrison casually walked in, sat in another chair, and he just crossed his arms and he listened, you know, and I just thought “Wow, that’s George Harrison!” [laughs]. But if you walked around Apple, you’d eventually see every Beatle. 3 Saville Row, I’ll never forget the address, it was such a cool way of doing business and being so open about it. It backfired though and they eventually had to put a lock on the door, but it was a great time.
Paul McCartney gave ‘Come and Get It’ to Badfinger, and he was a mentor for them for a little while, wasn’t he, but it occurred to me that when he got you to work on the orchestration for Band on the Run a few years later, that was because he would have known about you through this period. He must have been aware of your skills and what you could do.
Partially. He was aware of that, but he double-checked by phoning me. He was a T. Rex fan and he said “Those string arrangements, they’re really good. Who wrote them?” I said, “I wrote them”. He then asked if I could read and write music and I said “Well, yes, I can. Because I wrote them!”. And he goes, “Okay, well, I’ve got this little project and maybe you could come over to me”. So I went to his house a few days later, in St. John’s Wood, and then we started together working on those arrangements, for Band on the Run.
George Martin got a little upset when I was doing those ‘Band on the Run’ orchestral arrangements
Tony Visconti
But would you ever pitch for a job, Tony? Or do you just think, “if they want me they’ll ask”? Because I was thinking about that with Band on the Run, because Paul had got back from Lagos, and he had all these tapes and recordings and you could easily have taken a bit more of a production role on that record. I know Paul’s an accomplished producer himself, but was that something you thought of suggesting or hinted at?
It was in the air. We talked about it. He was definitely trying to be known as a producer. His first experiment was ‘Those Were The Days’, with Mary Hopkin. And he did very well. That’s an incredible production; it’s really great. So I don’t think there was enough space for me in his productions to be a co-producer, or anything like that. He saw me as an arranger, which was good, because I really enjoy that role as well. I know, George Martin got a little upset when I was doing those arrangements. He assumed that he was always going to write arrangements for the Beatles. Even when they were solo.
That’s interesting. He would have orchestrated Live and Let Die before that.
When George and I finally met, we got on. We had a great lunch at some recording studio in North London. I had a few meetings with him, and he was charming. He was really a great guy.
What about the commercial aspect of producing? In the heydays of the 70s, and the 80s, were you thinking about how many millions the album might sell and how much money you might make? When he worked with Madonna, Nile Rodgers ended up making a lot of money, because he brokered a great deal. Everyone needs to make a living and everyone enjoys seeing their songs go to the top of the charts. How much does that influence you?
Well, you know, I see it is an art first. But secondly, it’s always been my business since I was about 17 years old. When I started, I played a wedding and I got paid. I liked playing music, and somebody’s paying me for playing music. When I went into the recording business, obviously, you read the newspapers, and you see that if you sell a million records, and you have a percentage of that, that’s a big windfall. So I was attracted to that part as well because it creates a sustainable career in life. For me, I’m able to have a family – or two; I’ve had two families – and so the commercial aspect is important. But I’m a bit of a snob, so it needs to be on my terms. I can’t I can’t copy the style [of someone/something else]. A lot of labels will look at the top five in the charts and they’ll ask you to produce something like those top five – I can’t do that. So, my experience is that records that come out that sound very unique, something you haven’t heard before, they also sell well. And in my case, you know, T Rex and Bowie and a few other people I’ve worked with, we’ve come out with some pretty wild sounds and they’ve gone to the top of the charts too.
Talking of David Bowie, I think there’s four selections on CD boxset but none on the vinyl which I understand is down to licensing issues.
Yes.
The four songs you have included are ‘Young Americans’, ‘Memory of a Free Festival’, ‘The Man Who Sold The World’ and ‘I Would Be Your Slave’. What informed that selection, because there were many great songs to choose from and there’s nothing from the so-called Berlin Trilogy?
I worked very closely with Demon Records, they made a lot of selections, which they put to me. I looked at the list and they said you can take anything off or put anything on. The problem is my memory is pretty selective these days, I can’t remember everything I’ve recorded. Someone said to me, the other day, “You left [British Afro Rock band] Osibisa off the box set”. Quite honestly, I forgot that I recorded them! [laughs]. I didn’t remember. I mean, I think my manager has a list of my recording history, but I was so busy during this period, I just was very happy that they made the selections. And then I took some off and I added quite a few, as well.
You had such an amazing experience working with David Bowie in the 70s. And then later on, of course. In the early 1980s, he moved on to work with Nile Rodgers on the Let’s Dance album, of course. I’ve read that you were you were a little bit upset at the time, but do you think that was the right decision? Or do you still think he made a mistake and you should have produced that album?
No, I think I think he made the right decision because he told me that he wanted that elusive number one hit American hit [‘Fame’ did actually get to #1 in the USA, of course]. So David wanted Nile for that. And it was so good that I spoke to David and I said, “Well, I guess we’re not going to work together anymore. But good luck. Congratulations. Let’s Dance is a big hit”. I personally never liked it. It’s just not David Bowie.
It was interesting, because whatever you think of that record, it turned him in a slightly different direction for the next half a decade or so, which is probably the more important fact about Let’s Dance. He seemed to go off course, a little bit, by his own standards anyway.
Some of the tracks, I love. I love ‘Modern Love’. That was a good track. It wasn’t a bad album in any way; he just did something different. We didn’t always work together, which was a good thing. Because over my career, I’d do a few albums with other people, a David Bowie album, then I go and work with other people. So he had every right to work with other producers. What happened, when we came together again, was that we’d learned more stuff from the people we’ve worked with. I haven’t counted, but I’m sure I produced over 20 David Bowie albums, when you put the live albums together and the reissues and bonus tracks. I’m pleased… I mean, I produced one of his first and certainly his last, his last four in fact, in this very room [Tony is in his Manhattan studio], I’m sitting in, we did the finishing off of those last four albums.
Joe Cocker’s version of ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’ is on this collection, and that’s obviously an amazing track. What was your involvement with that particular song?
Well, for my first year in London, I was Denny Cordell’s apprentice, and assistant. I didn’t really know how to produce records, until I worked with him. He didn’t know how to arrange things [although] he was a good vocal coach, a good band coach and he was charming. He had a lot of charm. The first strings I wrote for him was for The Move. And then with Joe Cocker, he wanted some brass and some help with the backing vocals. And so, I was always at his side. I’m an Assistant Producer on that track, although I’m not credited and I wrote brass for the entire song, but he wanted the brass only to come in during the fade out. Also, I mixed that record which I’m not credited for.
I was in the Top of the Pops studio audience in 1984 when Adam Ant performed ‘Apollo 9’. That was quite exciting for me, but what was it like for you to work with him on that record and the album?
It was great. I had a lot of people tell me that so and so is a problem. They told me Elaine Paige was a problem, and we got on like a house on fire. [They told me] Adam Ant was a problem, and we got on like a house on fire. He was a charming man to work with. He was smart, I could see immediately he was smart and very focused. He was very, very sharp. And was also okay with me making suggestions and changing things around a little bit. I got his confidence very early on. But there was nothing difficult about him. As far as I was concerned, I listened to him, he listened to me. And we had mutual respect for each other.
That’s a very 80s sounding record. When you’re working on those kinds of productions, was there ever a little bit of you thinking, “I prefer the classic sound of 60s or 70s rock”?
No, I always move on. I know that there are certain qualities of 60s and 70s rock that you could always use, cautiously. But you don’t want to imitate it, you don’t want to recreate the decade, it’s gone. I wanted to be an 80s record producer, definitely. I didn’t want to be seen as a dinosaur. And I learnt the technology, the language. And one thing that was really on my side, I was very prolific in the 80s because my studio in Dean Street was almost a closed shop. I was recording so many people as a producer, we almost never had any time to sell to other producers. So in that decade, you see people like Altered Images and Hazi Fantayzee coming walking in through the doors… My studio was like a Hit Factory, it was fantastic to have that facility, and not having to worry about booking studio time – it was my studio.
Where did that work ethic come from? It is a crazy amount of artists that you’ve worked with and albums you’ve produced over the decades. What instilled that work ethic in you?
What’s that expression, “Make hay while the sun shines”? It was it was a very good decade for me and I already had a good track record. I was attracting younger people to come to work with me and I think it was vital that I work with younger people. And also, the crossover band was Thin Lizzy from the late 70s to the early 80s. I was I was working with them and I always loved them and I thought I wouldn’t be a good match for them, but I made three decent albums with them that charted and did well for them too.
Morrissey said, “I only want you to tell me two things, whether I should sing louder or quieter”
Tony Visconti
Like Adam Ant, Morrissey is another one of those characters whose reputation precedes them a little bit, but you seemed to work quite harmoniously with him. Unfortunately, there’s nothing from the album [2006’s Ringleader of the Tormentors] on this collection, but how was your experience with Morrissey?
I don’t know why we didn’t get a Morrissey track. It could be that the licence holder said no. Or maybe he’s got plans to release a ‘best of’ Morrissey. I could see that. But again, people said that he’s difficult and to work with and all that, and I remember the first day I went into the studio with him and I went in cold. I didn’t have any pre-production. He’d had a producer already on that album, whom he sacked. And so, I inherited the backing tracks; we didn’t cut new tracks. And I started out with overdubbing guitars and building up the production and he was very bemused by it. He wouldn’t say much; he would sit in a studio and ponder everything that was going down, and he was just thinking very strongly about things. If he had something to say he’d say it in a very nice, soft spoken voice, but he never opposed me on anything. And the funniest time was when we came to doing the lead vocals. We waited until the very end, most of the band is left and he’s front of a microphone, and he said, “Now I only want you to tell me two things, whether I should sing louder or quieter”. He didn’t want to be coached. So by take one, or two, or three, I just said, “I think you could do another one, for me” and he said, “Why?” And I said something like, “Maybe you could give me one with little more energy, just to give me an alternative. So if I do a composite of your voice, I’ll have a few options. You never know, you might, sing a gem, something that’s really great that you haven’t done already”. And when I put it to him like that way, he was agreeable. I think a lot of producers really don’t know how to talk to artists, and he must have had a bad experience. The reason why I think I communicate well, with artists, including the most difficult ones, is because I had a musical career. And I thought record producers were horrible people. I was spoken to in the rudest manner, by some record producers, when I was sitting there playing guitar and singing and stuff like that, back in New York. And I vowed never ever to treat it artists like that. I think that’s why I’ve got a lot of respect from the people I’ve worked with. And there are testimonies in this box that book from people I work with. They’re confirming that I’m a cool guy to work with [laughs].
There’s that story about Nigel Godrich, when he worked with Paul McCartney [on 2005’s Chaos and Creation in the Backyard”] and he put Macca’s nose out of joint a little bit, by saying “this song isn’t good enough”, or something like that. I’m guessing that isn’t the way you work?
Oh, I have rejected songs. Without naming names, I worked with a very big group, and I would say “this song could be better. And instead of recording it right now, could you go home and consider a rewrite some of the lyrics” and the artist took it very well, and the group took it very well. We ended up making a couple of hit records together. Depends how you frame it. You know, you can’t be an [adopts English accent] an arsehole.
Are there any people that got away? Any artists you’d love to have worked with? People that you haven’t ticked off the list?
Well, I was I was lucky enough to meet every Beatle and work with [some] of them in one form or another. I would have loved to have worked with John Lennon. And I think had he lived, that time would have come. I mean, he and Paul were the two favourite Beatles but all of The Beatles had a unique quality – that’s what made them a unique group. It was like four lead singers, four lead musicians, and all that. McCartney… it would be nice to work with him. He’s still around. I might still work with him again, you never know.
You did work with Paul in the 1980s of course, at least a little bit. You orchestrated the single mix of ‘Only Love Remains’, from Press to Play.
Yeah. And I’ve met Paul socially, since then. Mick Jagger threw a big party at his Chelsea home and I had this funny conversation with Paul where he’d come up to me and we talked face-to-face about music and about our families and everything. Then he starts adjusting my lapels on my suit jacket, and then he starts adjusting my tie and he’s dressing me! [laughs]. I found this bizarre, except I know there’s this thing called neuro-linguistic programming which I studied and it’s when you touch people, and tap them and you’re actually putting a slight hypnotic control over them. So I thought, maybe he studied that, he’s very erudite. Maybe this technique works for him. But I knew what he was doing. And I found that a little funny, you know. Awkward, but a little funny. He’s an amazing guy. A friggin’ genius. I love him.
Because it’s to do with production – although it’s not on this collection – I wanted to ask you about working with the Finn brothers, about 18 years ago, for their second album, which [Tony’s version] ultimately didn’t get released. They ended up working with Mitchell Froom and did some more recordings. There’s a song called ‘Luckiest Man Alive’, and your version of that song did appear on a special edition, so fans can actually compare two producers’ work on the same track, which is fascinating and not something they would normally be able to do. This is a long-winded way of saying, what happened with that album? Have you got thick skin? Can you just shrug it off and go, “Oh, well, they wanted someone else”?
Well, you know, I put a lot of myself into that record, I worked very hard making it. And we originally worked with musicians they brought from New Zealand, to play with them. They were okay… It was hard work with them, but you know, they wanted like their ‘music brothers’ with them. But when I was finished with it, it was a quite an organic album. It sounded like a band in a studio, there were overdubs and I liked it very much. But all along, I think Neil… he wanted a real artificial [sounding] record, you know, something like bigger than life very, very controlled. Everything tuned and fixed and tempos fixed and everything like that. So he went on to record with someone else [Mitchell Froom] and it’s not the first time that happened to me, that a record was taken away. A Difford & Tilbrook album was one that was also taken from me. One day I wake up, and they just say, “Don’t bother coming to the studio, we’re going to finish the album with someone else”. Thanks a lot!
It must be hard not to take that personally, because you put all the energy into the record.
Of course, I was hurt. You know, I got feelings.
What do you think has happened in the industry to the role of the record producer today? And is it even a sustainable career for an up and coming aspirational producer in the way that it used to be?
Well, over the years, the role of a record producer has been modified, changed a lot. There were record producers in the 50s and they weren’t even called record producers. It would just be someone in charge of the record. In my generation, the 70s was such a golden decade, because people were making real records and real studios, with great musicians and we didn’t have auto-tune, and the only way you got into the recording studio is by being great. Record labels signed people who were great, they didn’t sign a cute looking person and then fix the voice, fix the image, Photoshop the photos, which came later. With the record industry now, they almost bypass producers completely and go with some young person who is a whiz on the laptop and make their own stuff. They make their own videos. And I think that’s very admirable, but it has less dimensions in it then the organic music does. When you hear it once, you hear it all; the second hearing of modern music you don’t hear anything different or anything new. It’s everything’s repeated, everything is fixed to death. There is no idiosyncrasy in the vocals anymore, unless they do auto-tune on purpose, in the way that Cher made famous.
The 70s was a golden decade. Record labels signed people who were great, they didn’t sign a cute looking person and then fix the voice, fix the image, Photoshop the photos
Tony Visconti
People are still making organic music, and I’m involved in a couple of groups that are doing that, but labels are frightened of that and the labels never had courage. Never ever, in a million years, did labels have courage to break new ground; it happened in spite of them. You get someone like Marc Bolan coming up, or a Bowie. The times now aren’t right for a new Bowie to come out. He would be too radical. You wouldn’t sound like the top 10. And why should he? Why should anyone sound like the top 10? We’ve got enough of those people. But we don’t have enough geniuses making records anymore, I’ll tell you that much.
Is this a cycle that we will eventually spin out of, or are we going to be stuck in it for a long time?
Well, it’s a good question. I can’t predict the future. But I know that the fans, people who buy records, have a low threshold of boredom, they want to hear something new, but that’s not the philosophy of the record labels. There are some labels who are very progressive, and they do sign new people, and they do take a chance. One of the big problems is you have managers and agents who want to get millions of dollars for a signing, they want to get that out of the label. That’s destroyed the business. My advance for making a T Rex album was like £50. But when the royalties kicked in, I made a lot of money from the royalties. You know, some of these deals where a person gets $100m, for making a record, they’re not going to get any royalties from that. That’s it. They’re going to owe the label for like, the next 50 years! [laughs]. That’s a bad business model. If you ran a bank, or any other business, like they were running record labels, it wouldn’t be considered a good business model. It’s not a good business model. So hopefully, there’s going to be some less overburdened record labels, smaller labels, making more money. I think that’s the future of the record business.
But would you encourage someone to want to learn the trade? Engineering and production? Or does that pathway not exist in the same way it did before?
Oh, they still need producers. Everyone’s still needs engineers. Studios in New York are thriving, and I think they are in London, the ones that survived. There are a lot of very skilled engineers who know how to work analogue equipment. People think if it’s analogue, it’s gonna sound wonderful. But it’s the talent on the analogue that sounds wonderful. You still need talent, you need good chops, you need to sing well, play well. But people find out the hard way. Of the 50,000 records that are released a year, only about two percent become hit records, that’s the hard cold fact.
I get the feeling you’re not hanging up your hat, just yet? You’re still busy working and looking forward to the next project?
I’m currently working on two albums. There’s a couple of ones that are coming up in December. And I’m also working in my band, Holy, Holy. We now call it ‘Tony Visconti’s Best of Bowie’ because Woody Woodmansey left the band. Holy Holy was his name. I’m gonna keep working ‘til I drop. I love what I do. Why would I quit this job?
Thanks to Tony Visconti who was talking to Paul Sinclair for SDE. The Produced by Tony Visconti box set is released on CD and vinyl on Friday 20 October 2023.
Richard Hawley / Now Then: The Very Best Of Richard Hawley
Now Then: The Very Best of Richard Hawley spans Hawley’s 20 plus year career featuring his best-loved work and a host of hidden gems from his early work. Includes tracks from Richard Hawley (2001), Late Night Final (2001), Lowedges (2003), Coles Corner (2005), Lady’s Bridge (2007), Truelove’s Gutter (2009), Standing at the Sky’s Edge (2012), Hollow Meadows (2015) and Further (2019)
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Richard Hawley
The Very Best of Richard Hawley - 2LP coloured vinyl
Aretha Franklin’s first five studio albums of the 1970s are collected in a new box set called A Portrait of the Queen1970-1974.
The albums in question are This Girl’s In Love With You (1970), Spirit in the Dark (1970), Young Gifted and Black(1972), Hey Now Hey (The Other Side of the Sky) (1973) and Let Me In Your Life (1974). They have all been remastered from the analog master tapes by Chris Bellman at Bernie Grundman Mastering.
The 6LP vinyl version of APortrait of the Queen 1970-1974
These were all were produced by Tom Dowd, Arif Mardin and Jerry Wexler, except for Hey Now Hey (The Other Side of the Sky) which saw Aretha work with Quincy Jones. This Girl’s in Love With You saw the first commercial release of The Beatles’ ‘Let It Be’, which is remarkable (Paul McCartney apparently sent her a demo and Franklin’s album was issued on 15 January 1970, almost two months before The Beatles’ version).
APortrait of the Queen is available as a 6LP set or a 5CD box. The vinyl version has a bonus disc of “session alternates, outtakes & demos” not included in the CD box which is a low blow. Both come with booklets featuring sleeve notes by Gail Mitchell and David Nathan
APortrait of the Queen1970-1974 will be released on 1 December 2023, via BMG.
