Kim Wilde’s 1988 album Close will be reissued as a 2CD+DVD deluxe set, in March.
The album delivered five singles, three of which (‘You Came’, ‘Never Trust A Stranger’ and ‘Four Letter Word’) were top 10 hits in the UK.
The audio has been remastered for this reissue and CD 1 appends nine bonus tracks (B-sides and single edits) to the album. The second disc offers 13 bonus remixes. The bonus content across both CDs is identical to the 2013 2CD deluxe that Universal put out, except for the addition of two ‘You Came’ instrumentals. It’s worth noting that the original CD of Close included 11 tracks, not 10, due to a single bonus track (‘Hey Mister Heartache (12″ Mix)’).
The DVD is the big draw here, with promo videos, footage from the Michael Jackson’s Bad Tour and a selection of BBC archive videos featuring Kim performing on popular TV Shows like Wogan, Top Of The Pops and Going Live!
Close will be reissued on 13 March 2026, via Cherry Red. Vinyl pre-order links coming soon.
The Colourfield’s short-lived recording career, which spanned from 1984 to 1987, is celebrated by Sound of The Colourfield, a forthcoming 5CD+DVD deluxe set.
The band was, of course, fronted by Terry Hall and featured guitarist and organist Toby Lyons (formerly of 2Tone’s Swinging Cats) and bassist Karl Shale from Coventry mavericks Zanders System. They released two studio albums: Virgin and Philistines (1985), which featured the UK top 20 hit, ‘Thinking of You’ and Deception, from 1987, which saw the addition of drummer Gary Dwyer.
The new deluxe set features both albums and three bonus CDs featuring rarities including B-sides, remixes, live concert performances and a complete disc of unreleased demos and outtakes. There are 96 tracks in total, with 42 of them previously unreleased. Audio is newly mastered from original tapes.
Sound of The Colourfield features five CDs and a DVD
A DVD (region-free) completes Sound of the Colourfield and all the group’s promo videos and BBC TV performances. It is presented as a DVD-sized ‘mediabook’ and includes a 22-pages with new sleeve notes by John Earls and contributions from Toby Lyons and Karl Shale, along with producers Hugh Jones and Ian Broudie.
This set has been approved by band members Toby Lyons and Karl Shale, and started with the involvement of Terry Hall before his death in December 2022.
Sound of the Colourfield will be released on 27 February 2026 via Chrysalis.
NOW Musiccontinue their 12″ 80s series with a 4CD look at 1986.
This set (which is Part One) features 46 tracks in extended form from classic artists of the era, including George Michael, Pet Shop Boys, a-ha, Duran Duran, Eurythmics, Culture Club, OMD, Simple Minds, Frankie Goes To Hollywood and more.
Highlights include George Michael’s excellent standalone single ‘A Different Corner’ (albeit the 12-inch version is only different thanks to a 30 second string intro), the near nine-minute Julian Mendelsohn ‘Full Horror’ extended mix of Pet Shop Boys ‘Suburbia’, the ‘Broad’ mix of Frankie’s ‘Rage Hard’ and the 12-inch version of Culture Club’s underrated ‘Move Away’. a-ha are represented by two tracks: the extended version of their only UK No 1 ‘The Sun Always Shines On TV’ and the long version of ‘I’ve Been Losing You’ which was the first single from Scoundrel Days. As ever, full tracklistings are below.
NOW 12″ 80s: 1986 Part One will be released on 6 February 2026.
Paul Draper has re-recorded 11 Mansun tracks for a new album, Mansun Retold.
The songs, which include hit singles ‘Wide Open Space’, ‘I Can Only Disappoint U’, were recorded at The Loft Studios in Surrey, and co-produced with Paul “PDub” Walton. These arrangements feature a full acoustic band. Musicians include Julian Fenton (Mansun’s own drummer during their early days) and a string quartet led and arranged by Audrey Riley as well as Draper himself, who handles most other instruments. Preview, ‘I’ve Seen The Top Of The Mountain’, whichis the first single, below.
“I picked some of my favourite songs that I had written during my time in Mansun, ones that I also felt could be interpreted by a full unplugged acoustic band & reimagined in a more mature way for a new audience as well as existing fans.”
Paul Draper
Mansun Retold is available on CD and vinyl but a 2CD+blu-ray deluxe edition comes in 48-page hardcover book packaging and offers bonus ‘stripped back’ versions on CD 2 and a Dolby Atmos Mix of the main 11-track album on blu-ray audio. SIGNED versions of this are available from the official Paul Draper shop.
Mansun Retold will be released on 20 February 2026, via Kscope.
I’d like to start off by wishing you all a healthy and prosperous 2026 – Happy New Year! I very much look forward to your company in the next 12 months – SDE’s 15th year – and we will be here, as ever, to deliver news, reviews, interviews, unboxing videos, deals and plenty of exclusive physical products which will be available via the SDE shop. I have planned enhancements to both this website and the shop and there’s some very cool products in the pipeline, including from our own SDE Records label, which has so far only officially released two products: The ‘De Luxe’ blu-ray version of Duran Duran’sDanse Macabre from 2024 (sold out) and Matt Deighton’s truly excellent Today Become Forever, released last year (we have a few left).
What would you like to see more of in 2026? Leave a comment and let me know!
Peter Gabriel
Very good news yesterday about Peter Gabriel and his new single and album, o/i, the latter of which suffers from ‘autocorrect’ hell when you try to write it on a computer! Some of you have mentioned that we still don’t have an Atmos Mix – or a 5.1 mix for that matter – of So, Peter’s best selling 1986 album, and here he is ploughing on with a brand new record which will undoubtedly be mixed in Atmos.
I have mixed feelings about this. At least Peter is getting on and doing new things and embracing Immersive Audio. We could be in what you might call a ‘Kate Bush‘ situation where the artist has, apparently, no interest in Atmos at all and is still thinking about, maybe, starting a new record. I know which I’d prefer.
For those of you who have been on this SDE ‘journey’ (apologies…) since the beginning, you might recall that an early ‘win’ was me getting PG to respond to my slightly pompous ‘open letter‘ when I complained about how underwhelming his 25th anniversary So super deluxe box set was. One of the major points of annoyance was the lack of a 5.1 mix and, 14 years later, he still hasn’t issued a 5.1 mix, although of course, these days it would be in Atmos. I felt a pang or two of regret at the time, because Peter had the courtesy to actually respond and address the points (albeit unconvincingly – there really was no justification for not including ‘Sledgehammer’ B-side, ‘Don’t Break This Rhythm’) and seemed like a throughly decent chap.
Anyway, the point is, he’s going to have a busy year finishing his album, commissioning Dark-Side and Bright-Side mixes of each track, doing his Full Moon updates and planning the physical releases, so even though 2026 is the 40th anniversary of So, unless the Atmos Mix is already in the bag and a physical blu-ray release has been prepped, I just cannot see it happening. I could be wrong (I could be right). Let’s wait and see, but he has not done this in his ‘quiet’ periods, so why would he choose to do it now?
In the meantime, below is the Dark-Side Mix of Peter’s new single ‘Been Undone’ in full – all seven minutes of it! Let us know what you think, in the comments.
SDE Reissue Preview
The annual SDE Reissue Preview, this year for 2026, is coming soon!
Welcome to the SDE Reissue Preview for the year ahead, the 12th consecutive annual preview published on this site. As usual, we will start with the first few months of this year where we have confirmed releases and then move on to what we know/think/presume/hope will be reissued later in the year! Of course they’ll be plenty of things not covered, so please as well as offering your thoughts on reissues mentioned below, do chip in with forthcoming products you know about that SDE hasn’t mentioned! You can do this via the comments section.
There’s a sense of Deja Vu when talking about Paul McCartney for the year ahead. For the third year running we are ‘hoping’ that he might jump start his Archive Collection reissue series (dormant since 2020’s Flaming Pie) and announce re-releases of the only Wings albums that have not had the reissue treatment, namely London Town and Back to the Egg.
However we have Morgan Neville’s Man on the Run film coming in February and when asked ‘What are you most looking forward to in 2026?’ in his regular ‘You Gave Me The Answer’ feature on his website, Paul’s response was “My new album! We’re just starting to think about how to put that together“.
At The Speed Of Sound is the next Wings album to celebrate its 50th anniversary (on 26 March) so there will undoubtedly be a half-speed vinyl edition to mark the occasion and likely a Dolby Atmos version available on streaming. With the success of the Wings compilation on blu-ray last year I’m hoping the powers that be might be persuaded to repeat this exercise for At The Speed Of Sound, but we will have to wait and see if there is any enthusiasm for such an idea.
2026 is the 40th anniversary of Press to Play (the excellent SDE exclusive 35th anniversary bookazine is still available) but only a true optimist would expect anything to happen with that album before London Town or Back to the Egg.
John Lennon
We thought we might see John Lennon’s ‘Lost Weekend’-era Walls and Bridges album reissued last year, but the Estate choose to reboot (and rebadge) the mothballed Some Time In New York City reissue which was delivered as a 12-disc box set called Power to the People (read the SDE review).
This means that Wall and Bridges is surely next, being the only ‘proper’ studio album left from the 1970s era, although whether they are ready to do another big reissue campaign for the third year on the trot, remains to be seen.
The Beatles
It has been over three years now since we’ve had a Beatles studio album reissued as a super deluxe edition (Revolver in 2022). After the ‘Now and Then’ / ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ album shenanigans of 2023 and the US Albums-celebrating vinyl box of 2024, we thought last year would be when the Fab Four re-releases would get back on track, but no… they choose to focus on The Beatles Anthology with the slightly botched Anthology Collection / Anthology 4 campaign.
There is a wide feeling amongst fans that Apple and Universal Music need to go ‘back to basics’ and revert to what they were doing so well between 2017 and 2021 – releasing album-based box sets with excellent outtakes, Dolby Atmos Mixes on blu-ray and great accompanying books. 2026 is 61 years since Rubber Soul was released, but specific anniversary dates are no longer important, after all Let It Be was celebrated a year late for its 50th in 2021 (to coordinate with Disney’s The Beatles Get Back documentary).
Other artists and albums
ABBA’s 40th anniversary album vinyl reissues came to an end in 2023, with a delayed The Visitors, but almost immediately they pivoted to 50th anniversary reissues the following year, with ABBA’s second album, 1974’s Waterloo. I don’t know about you, but I’m getting really bored of the 2LP half-speed vinyl, seven-inch picture discs and seven-inch box sets. It’s dull and predictable. Hopefully they might get their act together with decent Dolby Atmos Mixes, but the song ‘Waterloo’ was awful in Atmos which is probably down to the usual Benny and Björn control freakery. I do not expect anything great to happen in 2026.
a-ha’s brilliant ‘sophomore’ album Scoundrel Days is 40 in 2026, although whether we’ll see any marking of that anniversary is not clear. To many Scoundrel Days is the better, more compelling album that Hunting High and Low but often it appears as if Warner Music is obsessed with ‘Take On Me’ and a-ha in 1985 almost to the exclusion of everything else. Stay On These Roads (1988), East of the Sun West of the Moon (1990) and Memorial Beach (1993) are all over 30 years old and still haven’t been reissued on vinyl, even though 2000’s Minor Earth Major Sky has now been re-released twice on the format in the last six years. An ‘all albums’ vinyl box was rumoured to be in the works, but nothing has come to pass. Obviously, with Morten’s health issues, I think we can forget about anything new from a-ha, which is really very sad.
As mentioned above, Tori Amos’ 2001 album Strange Little Girls is reissued (and expanded) in February, a few months before her new album In Times Of Dragons, which is expected in April. With a UK and European tour in the diary to support the new record it’s perhaps unlikely that we’ll see any other activity this year, although if you are looking for anniversary potential, Boys for Pele is 30 years old in a few weeks, although that album was remastered and expanded back in 2016, for the 20th anniversary, so it seems unlikely.
Black Box Recorder reunite for a gig at London’s Palladium in May. The outfit fronted by Sarah Nixey also features Luke Haines and John Moore, and is only mentioned because there’s an outside chance of some new material, but nothing is confirmed. A 25th anniversary vinyl reissue of England Made Me, the band’s debut album (they released three long-players between 1998 and 2003) was issued in 2023 (read Alexis Petridis’ SDE review) and subsequently disowned by Haines after public grumbling about the streaming royalty rates the band were earning at Chrysalis.
Last year saw the last of the David Bowie era box sets, which after a decade, marks the end of… an era. As to what happens, next, we don’t know. I think most fans would be pleased to see the continuation of Divine Symmetry style super deluxe editions based around (or leading up to) an album. The last release was the Rock ‘n’ Roll Star! deluxe which came out in June 2024 and charted Bowie’s journey from February 1971 through to the creation of Ziggy Stardust and the recording of 1972’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars album. That deluxe missed the anniversary by two years and David was so prolific in the 1970s, that fifty years ago today he had already recorded Station to Station which was then issued in January 1976 (hence the anniversary vinyl).
So what of Aladdin Sane, Pinups, Diamonds Dogs and Young Americans? Clearly not everything justifies being a 5CD set and I guess Warner Music and the Bowie Estate have given up trying to keep to anniversaries, with the exception of putting out bog-standard albums on vinyl. To throw in a random fact, Bob Clearmountain has confirmed that he’s remixed Let’s Dance in Dolby Atmos (in this interview on Vintage King website). Now, whether that’s just to put up on streaming or to form part of some wider, physical reissue is not clear. Talking of Bowie and Atmos, in case you haven’t noticed, the title track of David’s 1977 album “Heroes” has appeared in streaming platforms in recent days.
Kate Bush last year announced that she was “very keen” to start work on her new album. Given that her last new material appeared in 14 years earlier in 2011 (50 Words For Snow), this was rather disappointing news. Kate has only released two studio albums featuring new material in the last 32 years so given that she hasn’t really got going with the new one (assuming she’s not telling porkies) then saying we shouldn’t expect anything anytime soon, would be an understatement. Reissues? We might possibly get some newly artworked version of The Sensual World or The Red Shoes on vinyl, but anything else is unlikely. The now preposterously named The Whole Story compilation is actually 40 years old later this year, so it would be an opportune time to expand and reissue it, but there have been loads of opportune times to do that in the last 20 years and no one has bothered.
Lloyd Colesaid back in 2022 that his 2003 album Music in a Foreign Language had been remastered and prepped for a reissue which would include a 10-track bonus album of Lloyd’s rough mixes before other musicians were brought in. According to LC it’s “quite different” to the final version. Curiously, this reissue hasn’t come to pass, despite no real activity from Cole in 2024 or 2025, apart from his semi-regular touring commitments. SDE has an ambition to ‘do’ Lloyd Cole and the Commotions’ 1984 debut album Rattlesnakes in Atmos for blu-ray, but even if that did come to pass it probably wouldn’t be any time soon.
In my opinion, Sheryl Crow’s best album is her self-titled second record from 1996. Not only has that album never been issued on vinyl, there has also not been any kind of deluxe edition, as there was for Tuesday Night Music Club, way back in 2009. With five singles and a plethora of bonus cuts on the various UK CD singles (two each for most of them) it would be easy to put something together that was compelling, perhaps with some live content and even an Atmos Mix (why not?). Crow did speak out a few years ago about missing/burnt-in-the-fire master tapes, but I’m sure there was a suggestion since then that it wasn’t as bad as originally thought.
Crowded House seem to be on a hiatus at the moment after 2024’s excellent Gravity Stairs, although interestingly they will be performing at the opening ceremony of the Australian Open tennis at the Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne on 22 January. But the main focus for Neil Finn and his brother Tim, for a while at least, will be touring with Split Enz. They have dates in Australia lined up in April and May and fans in the UK and Europe will be hoping they continue on the road over here. Talking of Split Enz, expect Chrysalis’ excellent reissue campaign to continue with 1977’s Dizrythmia.
Duran Duran have had some success in ‘owning’ Halloween, with versions of their Danse Macabre album released in 2023 and 2024 (including an SDE Records blu-ray exclusive), a digital only reworking of ‘Shadows on Your Side’ last year and superb spooky gigs each October 31, including a memorable turn at Madison Square Gardens in 2024 (SDE was there).
That is all well and good, but it does prompt the wider question, ‘what’s going on with their back catalogue?’. Last I heard, they were working on ‘finishing’ Reportage, the album that got canned when Andy Taylor left in 2006. I think there’s a genuine chance of seeing this in 2026, which marks the 20th anniversary of it, er, not being released, and it’s basically as close to getting a brand new album as we’re going to get. Of course The Power Station box set is being reissued this month but sadly we’ve heard nothing about Arcadia. The eponymous album’s 40th anniversary has now come and gone. Duran Duran and Nick Rhodes in particular have spoken of an anthologies in the last few years but nothing ever happens. They are unreliable soothsayers. I’m sure BMG promised a Medazzaland box in 2023 (which didn’t happen) and there’s rumours of a Pop Trash extravaganza being prepped. The common thread here is that the band are interested primarily in things they own and control so for Duran Duran fans that means managing expectations: Think Danse Macabre, Medazzaland, Pop Trash, Reportage not Duran Duran, Rio, Notorious and ‘The Wedding Album’.
Depeche Mode are stubbornly refusing to engage with Dolby Atmos for both new albums and old ones and have only just launched the documentary and concert film combo M / Memento Mori:Mexico City, the former of which is coming to Netflix on Friday. Black Celebration is 40 this year, so if they wanted to surprise us then that would be the one, although I can’t see it happening. I suspect ‘downtime’ might be the buzzword for Martin Gore and Dave Gahan, after a busy few years.
The future is so not bright for Eurythmics fans that they don’t need to think about shades. 2026 will mark eight years since Sony’s decent vinyl reissue campaign (SDE spoke to Annie and Dave at the time) and nothing, barring the odd RSD vinyl, has happened since. It has also been over 20 years since any of the albums have been reissued on CD and those 2005 reissues were modest if you’re being polite or not very good at all, if you’re feeling less charitable. It’s borderline criminal that the band’s superb back catalogue has been neglected for so long and whatever the reasons, let’s hope something changes soon. For the record, the hit-packed rock-a-thon that is Revenge is 40 in June this year and next year the experimental masterpiece that is Savage has the same birthday (blu-ray with Atmos Mix and the full restored video album, anyone?).
With the successful and well received reissue of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s 1984 album Welcome to the Pleasuredome last year, fans will be hoping that a similar treatment for Liverpool will follow in 2026. Certainly various band members have spoken positively about such an idea but we will have to wait and see if it happens. It’s worth remembering that the Inside The Pleasuredome box set of 2014 wasn’t followed by a Liverpool equivalent, which suggests a caution amongst record company executives about stepping out of the ‘safe zone’ that is 1984 and the Pleasuredome singles. Watch this space…
Phil Collins’No Jacket Required got the Steven Wilson treatment with a Dolby Atmos Mix and a physical blu-ray release, last year. SDE expects more Collins’ albums to be mixed in Atmos with Face Value a likely candidate as the next release.
We should hopefully see more from both Dire Straits and Mark Knopfler in the next 12 months as the reissue campaign continues and likewise the positive activity around Bryan Ferry’s back catalogue is a great thing and we are most likely to see a Boys and Girls reissue on CD and vinyl (Ferry mentioned that they were doing archive work on this album when I spoke to him early last year).
George Harrison’sConcert For Bangladesh was remastered and made available on streaming in 2024 and we know from Dhani Harrison that work is ongoing both from a film restoration point of view and on audio mixes. Whether anything will be ready for release this year, is not clear, but this feels like the next major George project at this moment in time.
The Later Years 2001-2020 is a 7CD box set featuringLevel 42’smost recent output which is already on the schedules for March and after a massive year for Oasis, we will definitely see more reissues and a glut tour related releases, including a live album on CD, vinyl and video formats.
Madonna is expected to release a new album in 2026. Recorded with Stuart Price in the producer’s seat, Madge has described it as Confessions On A Dance Floor Part 2, although to SDE that sounds more like a working title than the actual name. One thing is for sure, when it comes to reissues (the “multi-year catalog series” was announced over four years ago) don’t get your hopes up. This non-starter of a campaign is like when you were a kid, hoping for a BMX for Christmas and you actually get socks. That’s where we’re at with Madonna. If the new album comes out early enough in the year, then there could be time to do something with the catalogue in ‘Q4’ but even if that does happen, we know what to expect.
Pet Shop Boys seem to be in a more nostalgic mood than usual and in April they play five consecutive nights a London’s tiny Electric Ballroom in Camden under the banner ‘Obscure’ where they will play “only non-single album tracks and B‑sides from across their acclaimed career”. Whether this translates into any kind of reissue activity is So Hard to say. There’s plenty they could do, including some kind of remix collection or even another B-sides compilation. Please is 40 in 2026 and while they’ve done two rounds of reissues to date, their debut album would make sure a good super deluxe edition you do just wish that they’d do it and stop being so stubborn. Chris and Neil resigned to Parlophone for 2024’s excellent, Nonetheless which must surely help. And I know I speak for many when I say PSB albums in Dolby Atmos – especially the first 4 or 5 – would be most welcome!
Pink Floyd are on a roll with two number one albums in 2025. With The Dark Side of The Moon, Wish You Were Here and Animals all reissued in recent times and all now available in Dolby Atmos, the focus must surely now turn to 1979’s The Wall which has not been reissued since 2012 and has never even been issued in 5.1 surround sound, never mind Atmos. In the old days, reissuing this Waters-heavy project might have been problematic, but since the $400m sale to Sony in 2024 (which covers recordings and image rights) the individual members are free from what David Gilmour described as the “mud bath” of past disagreements. This is good news for fans and Sony seem motivated and hungry for more success with Pink Floyd. If it happens another number one album would not be out of the question.
Prince’sAround The World in a Day was reissued late last year, but the Dolby Atmos Mix was only available on streaming. SDE expects this to end up on blu-ray in 2026, just like Purple Rain, but there’s no official news as yet.
Queen’s second album,1974’s Queen II is confirmed (by Brian May) as coming in 2026 and like Queen / Queen I this has been rebuilt and remixed for release and there will also be a Dolby Atmos Mix available. The new version will contain a previously unreleased Queen version of ‘Not for Sale (Polar Bear)’ a song originally recorded by Brian May and Roger Taylor’s band Smile.
Last year Stingallowed expanded CD editions of many of his classic albums to be released in Japan and there was also a new super deluxe of his musical The Last Ship. However, it doesn’t seem very likely that anything will be reissued from his classic era since Sting has committed to a very busy schedule of touring, with The Last Ship residencies in Amsterdam, Paris and Brisbane taking him up to May and followed by more stripped down Sting 3.0 tour dates in Europe and America until late summer.
Talking Heads reissues in recent years have been excellent, if somewhat pricey. Fans will be looking forward to 1979’s brilliant Fear of Music which will almost certainly appear this year, since the first two albums were reissued in 2024 and 2025, respectively. Expect a 3CD+blu-ray set with outtakes, live material and a Dolby Atmos Mix, in the same large format book packaging
Tears For Fears will head back to the studio in 2026 and there are rumours of a possible UK tour later on this year. Steven Wilson’s as yet unreleased Dolby Atmos Mix of The Seeds Of Love may well see the light of day before the year is out although personally I’d love to see some activity around 2004/5’s Everybody Loves A Happy Ending which is very much a hidden gem in their back catalogue (and hasn’t been commercially issued on vinyl). 1993’s Elemental deserves some attention too, but since Curt was not involved in that project it seems unlikely to be given any priority.
U2 are widely expected to release a new album this year, nine years after 2017’s Songs of Experience. In terms of reissues, Pop is probably the most requested although maybe they will wait for next year’s 30th anniversary before tackling that one.
The Who seem to be in a happy place with reissues at this moment in time, having approved some fantastic box sets and reissue campaigns in the last couple of years (Who’s Next, Who Are You, etc.). But they are running out of albums that haven’t been done. The Who By Numbers, Face Dances and It’s Hard are all theoretical candidates for expanded reissues/box sets.
Despite touring extensively to support last year’s very well received The Overview and keeping busy remixing numerous classic albums in Dolby Atmos, Steven Wilson has found the time to record a brand new solo record which will be released in 2026. A concept album, Steven has told SDE that it is “quite angular and experimental” by his standards and has a “folk horror” vibe. The lyrics are courtesy of XTC legend Andy Partridge and we can expect “lots of unusual sounds and tracks that unfold in unexpected ways”.
Neil Young has been planning the fourth volume of his long-running Archives series for some time now. It’s expected to cover the period 1987 to some time in the mid-2000s, possibly as late as 2007. We may get this in 2026, or we may not. One thing about NY is that you cannot complain about levels of activity – there’s always some new album or reissue of something old coming out. We should celebrate this attitude and look forward to whatever 2026 may bring.
Do you know of any reissues confirmed for 2026? Leave a comment and let us know!?
Another year of a new song each full moon beckons!
Peter Gabrielwill repeat what he did back in 2023 and release a new album at the end of the year – called o/i – while delivering one track from the new record each month, every full moon.
The first single, ‘Been Undone’, is released tomorrow and as with his last album i/o there will be ‘Dark-Side’ and ‘Bright-Side’ mixes of all songs issued during this year. Tchad Blake and Mark ‘Spike’ Stent will again be handling the mixing duties, taking on the Dark-Side and Bright-Side respectively.
The first mix of ‘Been Undone’ is actually the Dark-Side Mix. The second mix of this and each of the subsequent songs will be released each month on the new moon.
The cover of ‘Been Undone’ features ‘Ciclotrama 156 (Palindrome)’ created by Janaina Mello Landini (click to enlarge)
This is what PG has to say about the album: “The songs are a mix of thoughts and feelings. I have been thinking about the future and how we might respond to it. We are sliding into a period of transition like no other, most likely triggered in three waves; AI, quantum computing and the brain computer interface. Artists have a role to look into the mists and, when they catch sight of something, to hold up a mirror.
These are my lumpy bits – i/o: the inside has a new way out and o\i: the outside has a new way in. We are not, and have never been, the exclusively self-determining, independent beings that have been given the run of the world. We are something else, a part of nature, a part of everything and feeling a connection, shaking our booty and giving and receiving some love can help us find our place – and put a big smile on our faces”.
Some of these songs are going to form part of the brain project that I’ve been exploring for a number of years, and some just make me feel happy. I hope you like them.”
Peter Gabriel
PG in the studio recording o/i with longtime collaborators Tony Levin, Manu Katché and David Rhodes. Photo: York Tillyer. (click to enlarge)
As with i/o, each track on the new album will be accompanied by a piece of art and ‘Been Undone’ is accompanied by ‘Ciclotrama 156 (Palindrome)’ by São Paulo–based artist Janaina Mello Landini.
Further details on the release plans for the album will follow, but assuming we get various physical formats at the end of this year, o/i will be the quickest follow up to a Peter Gabriel studio album of new material since 1980’s Peter Gabriel (3) / aka ‘Melt’, was released less than two-and-half years after 1978’s Peter Gabriel (2) aka ‘Scratch’.
‘Been Undone (Dark-Side Mix)’ will be available on streaming at midnight tonight.
Recording session at Real World Studios. Photo: York Tillyer (click to enlarge).
The pre-order window for theGeorge MichaelFaith SDE-exclusive blu-ray closes today.
The blu-ray audio – #56 in the ongoing SDE Suround Series – features a Chris Porter Dolby Atmos Mix of album as well as a 5.1 Surround Mix and a newly mastered stereo mix.
Dolby Atmos Mix (48/24)
5.1 Surround Mix (48/24)
Stereo Mix (48/24)
Additionally, the blu-ray features 13 stereo bonus tracks, including the 13 minute Monogamy Mix and 7″ mix of ‘I Want Your Sex’, the radio edit version of Shep Pettibone’s ‘Hard Day’ remix, the instrumental version of ‘Father Figure’ and two commercially unreleased promo-only versions of ‘Monkey’. The 7″ version of ‘I Want Your Sex’ (and the Monogamy Mix) is featured on a Faith reissue for the first time.
Stereo bonus tracks included on the blu-ray
I Want Your Sex (Monogamy Mix) 13.12
Hard Day (Shep Pettibone Remix) 9.05
Faith (Instrumental) 3.08
Father Figure (Instrumental) 5:38
Monkey (Extended Version) 8.09
Kissing A Fool (Instrumental) 4:34
I Want Your Sex (7” Version) 4.45
Hard Day (Radio Edit) 4:12
Monkey (7” Edit) 4:48
Monkey (A’Capella) 3:46
Monkey (Extra Beats) 3:44
Monkey (Instrumental) 5:35
Monkey (Dub Version) 5:20
This Faith SDE exclusiveblu-ray audio will be released on 20 February 2026, via Sony Music. It will be packaged similarly to previous editions (in a clear amaray case) and ships with a free, collectible SDE Surround Series slipcase. Please note: this blu-ray will be shipping without shrink-wrap.
Do not miss out. The pre-order window TODAY. Availability cannot be guaranteed after today. Pre-order via the SDE using this link or the buttons below.
Tracklisting
FaithGeorge Michael/SDE exclusive blu-ray
FAITH in Dolby Atmos, 5.1 Surround and Stereo
Faith
Father Figure
I Want Your Sex (Parts I & II)
One More Try
Hard Day
Hand to Mouth
Look at Your Hands
Monkey
Kissing a Fool
A Last Request (I Want Your Sex Part III)
Stereo Bonus Tracks
I Want Your Sex (Monogamy Mix) 13.12
Hard Day (Shep Pettibone Remix) 9.05
Faith (Instrumental) 3.08
Father Figure (Instrumental) 5:38
Monkey (Extended Version) 8.09
Kissing A Fool (Instrumental) 4:34
I Want Your Sex (7” Version) 4.45
Hard Day (Radio Edit) 4:12
Monkey (7” Edit) 4:48
Monkey (A’Capella) 3:46
Monkey (Extra Beats) 3:44
Monkey (Instrumental) 5:35
Monkey (Dub Version) 5:20
55 Bryan Ferry / Boys and Girls (still available)
54 Thin Lizzy / Nightlife (still available)
53 Fine Young Cannibals (FYC) / The Raw & The Cooked (still available)
52 Tears For Fears / Songs From The Big Chair
51 Propaganda / A Secret Wish
50 Frankie Goes To Hollywood / Welcome to the Pleasuredome
49 Elton John / Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy
48 The Who / Who Are You
47 The Human League / Dare
46 Split Enz / ENZyclopedia Volumes 1 & 2
45 Mark Knopfler / Sailing to Philadelphia
44 Matt Deighton / Today Become Forever
43 De La Soul / 3 Feet High and Rising
42 Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel / The Best Years of Our Lives
The Alan Parsons Project’s second album, 1977’s, I Robot, was reissued back in October as a super deuxe edition 4CD+Blu-Ray+LP box set (watch the unboxing here) and more recently as a standalone blu-ray audio featuring the Dolby Atmos, 5.1 and hi-res stereo mixes.
SDE recently caught up with Alan Parsons to discuss the album and the Dolby Atmos mix which Parsons himself has created.
SDE: You started at Abbey Road Studios. Could you explain what the role of a recording engineer? What influence you have on the sound of a record?
Alan Parsons: You want me to explain what a producer does?
Well, not so much of what producer does, but what a recording engineer does. You worked on The Dark Side of the Moon as a recording engineer, and your work on that record is attributed, in part, to the sound of that record, but you weren’t the producer on it. You were the engineer...
The official role of a recording engineer is to decide where microphones are going to go, choice of microphones, and [making sure] the mic-ing would be in line with the requirements of the artist. If it was a full orchestra, you’d have a different set of parameters to deal with. And on the session, particularly in the old days, there was the engineer and the producer. And the producer would work with the engineer to get the possible result for the artist. In terms of creativity, the engineer’s role was actually to keep his mouth shut. Nothing creative. Don’t ever say “I think he could play it better”, or “He’s a bit out of tune” or “We’ve got two vocal takes – I think we need another one” and all that kind of stuff. In a way, I think I probably broke through into production through not keeping my mouth shut. I would say what I felt about a performance and I would say when the guitar was out of tune. Essentially at Abbey Road, engineers used to be called Balance Engineers, and that’s what it was. Obviously, the engineer needs to know the studio, needs to know what plugs to plug in to make everything work and deal with special effects, reverb, delays and so on. So, that’s the basic role. But like I said, I kind of side-stepped a bit. I think the artists I worked with liked the fact that I would say what I thought about anything that wasn’t quite right or spoke up about a way of improving something.
Paul McCartney always talked Abbey Road having ‘men in white coats’ in the early days. Had it moved on from that?
Yeah, I never wore a white coat [laughs]. Although I did wear a white coat with job prior to that; I was mending tape machines. But no, the engineers and second engineers didn’t wear white coats. It was a requirement to wear a tie, though.
It wasn’t like a film set, where unions decreed what you could do and couldn’t do in the studio?
No unions, thank goodness. It was pretty relaxed, really. The funny thing is, there were more engineers than there were sessions, so there were a lot of engineers just simply hanging around, reading the paper every day. They had show up, even if they weren’t on session.
You must have made your mark on Paul McCartney, in particular, when you were working on those two last Beatles albums (Let It Be and Abbey Road) because you went on to do the Wings Wild Life and Red Rose Speedway albums
I did not once say to The Beatles that one of the guitars was out of tune! I had no creative input at all. But I’m very grateful for the fact that I can get through the rest of my life saying I worked with The Beatles, and I’m never allowed to forget it [laughs]
Being on the rooftop of 3 Savile Row, when they were doing their last live performance… It can’t have just been like another day in the office. You must have realised this was going to be an historic event?
Yes, indeed. And I was having the time of my life, frankly, watching The Beatles play together for the first time in years. And I think I recognised that it would be the last time.
What did it sound like? Were they as you expected them to be, playing live as a unit?
The overall sound was not transmitted back to the roof from downstairs. So I couldn’t hear vocals. I could only hear vocals through the monitors.
Some people think that was the end of The Beatles, but of course, they went on to do Abbey Road, which you worked on, as I said. Did you learn a lot from being in the same room as George Martin? Because George wasn’t really involved much in those, Let It Be sessions, was he?
No, he wasn’t. But I followed, the history of, Let It Be, and eavesdropped on sessions, with Phil Spector and stuff. I was in two minds about ‘The Long and Winding Road’, for example. Is he ruining it, or is he making it wonderful?
Paul McCartney always said he ruined it, but then McCartney did a version of it that was quite slushy on his Give My Regards to Broad Street soundtrack, which had a saxophone on it! Let’s talk about I Robot. In terms of your association with Eric Woolfson, he was your manager, before he was your creative partner, wasn’t he?
Yes. I hadn’t really anticipated the creative partnership between us, at the beginning. I just needed a business advisor; a manager, who would go chasing after the royalties that I hadn’t received and so on.
So he was managing other musicians as well?
He was managing Carl Douglas of ‘Kung Foo Fighting’ fame and a band called Gonzalez, who whose lead singer was Lenny Zakatek [who sings on ‘I Wouldn’t Want To Be Like You’ on I Robot].
What was the time period between when he started managing you and when the creative partnership started?
Probably a matter of weeks.
You must have known from the beginning, that Eric was writing songs and he had aspirations in that area?
I knew he was a musician. He was a pretty good pianist. We actually met on a session that somebody had booked and he also had a fairly early synthesizer, so he could do a bit of synth as well as piano. In later years, he completely dropped his technical side. He never touched a synth keyboard again, I think. As technology developed, he just watched it, he didn’t go with it.
The I Robot limited edition super deluxe box set (click image to enlarge)
You signed to Arista for the I Robot album, which is one of the interesting developments after the first record. This is a long time ago, back in 77, but Clive Davis has got this reputation for being a sort of cut-throat guy. What was it like dealing with him?
It was a complete surprise. He just came out of the blue and said, “I want to sign you for a three-album deal based on Tales of Mystery and Imagination, which had been a small hit. He liked the music enough to want to hear more and to sign us up, which was great. We were in no way ready to do anything but sign on the dotted line and go with it.
In the book, in the box set, there’s a quote from his autobiography where he states ambitions of reaching a large audience, which he did ultimately do. But, was that an ambition you shared? You wanted to sell a lot of records and be successful?
My motivation was creative, not business. I just wanted to make good music. And with each successive album, it was astounding to me that people were buying this stuff. I mean, I Robot did really well, Pyramid did very well. And, you know, each successive album did better, and Eye in the Sky was probably the pinnacle of our success.
Was it always the case that you were going to be a studio-based project. There was never any temptation to try and get a band together and go out on the road?
Oh yes, at that time it was very much the case that we were a studio band, and [we thought] there is no way that this can be reproduced with a full orchestra and all the different singers and stuff. It would have been an absolute nightmare to bring it to the stage. But in later years, synthesizer sounds got better, musicians got more competent dealing with lots of different sounds at the same time and I was all in favour of playing live. Eric had no desire whatsoever to do that. It was after we separated, Eric and I, that it was decided that putting a live show together was something I could do.
How was it working with all the different vocalists in the studio? I imagine dropping in to do one song on a record and going away again is probably a relatively nerve-wracking experience. How did you get the best out of vocalists?
Well, I think in the case of at least a couple of the singers, they liked the idea of not singing to [necessarily] further their own careers. That was very much the case with Alan Clarke, for example, with The Hollies. When he came in, he just saw it as another job – he was delighted to do it.
‘Some Other Time’, has two lead singers on it, which is quite unusual. Tell me about recording that song and the thought process behind the two different singers.
‘Some Other Time’ was was influenced by a conversation I had with Paul McCartney. I asked him to do a brief spoken appearance on the album, and he said, “I can’t do that right now. Let’s do it some other time”. So that became a line in the song. I mean, I was hopeful that Jaki Whitren would be the singer of on that song. I just couldn’t get the right performance out of her on the verses. There was a connection of some sort with Peter Straker and he came in, and he did a nice job on it. I think he was still doing [the musical] Hair at the time.
There’s an interesting outtake on one of the CDs in the box set where you can hear the song with Jaki Whitren singing everything, which is very interesting. And it shows, I think, that the right decisions were taken…
Of course, at the time I would have said “nobody is ever going to hear this”, but Jaki and Peter were very well matched, in the timbre their voices.
How many takes would you be doing with them? These were all accomplished singers or course, but how hard would you push them?
I remember, in particular with Jaki, asking her to sing a line more to emphasise a certain word. Things like that. I can’t generalize – my memory fails me because it was a long time ago – but my usual way of working was that I would have them do two or three takes, start to finish that would listen to them and talk about the strengths and weaknesses of those performances and maybe do a repair for a line or two, or a chorus or two, or whatever.
What about the technology that you were using in the studio? Tell me about this thing called the ‘Projectron’?
It was built, but to my specification. I wanted a keyboard that could play notes from a 16 track machine – or whatever was on a 16 track machine – with attack and decay and that kind of thing, like the buttons you normally find on a synthesizer. And then I spent a long time making vocal loops, making them totally continuous. That was then transferred to 16-track, and I could actually play chords on the Projectron, using those voices – as many as I needed.
What would the advantage be over a Mellotron? Would it be more reliable because you’re connected to a proper, robust tape machine?
Yes, that’s true. The mellotron was terribly temperamental, the reset time was too long and it basically sounded awful.
‘I Wouldn’t Want To Be Like You’ was obviously quite a big hit single in America, and was a great bit of promotion for the album. It has the disco beat of the era. Was that song written to be a commercial hit?
I think it was a perfect lyric for the for the concept of I Robot, whether it be man talking to machine, or machine talking to man. I think it really fitted the concept better than any of the other songs on the album. It was recorded in 1977, which was the absolute height of the of the disco period and it was also the time that Star Wars was released. So we had the strength of the disco period in our favor and also the ‘robot’ side of the album connecting perfectly with Star Wars.
You never really had any hit singles in the UK, like you did in America. Why do you think that was?
Two words: Radio One. That was the problem. We just didn’t fit into the type of music they were playing at the time. Alan Freeman was always ready to play something progressive, something new, and he was a huge, huge boon to our career. We became friends and he did radio commercials for us. He was amazing and I think he actually played a whole side of I Robot on one of his shows. But the likes of Tony Blackburn and whoever else was on daytime radio, they weren’t interested. And as we all know, Radio One had a playlist, done by committee.
Tell me about recording budgets and time spent in the studio. With groups like The Beatles and Pink Floyd they seemed to just be able to spend as much time as they wanted on anything, understandably enough. But you were in a new band; you’d just been signed – there must have been some constraints, even if it doesn’t sound like it, with the big choirs and everything. Who was looking after the purse strings?
Well, that would have been Eric, and he seemed undeterred by any decisions on my part to use choirs or a large orchestra, or whatever. His atitude was “this is going to be a great album, let’s spend money on it”.
So no one ever said “no, we can’t do that.”
We were in charge. Unusually, because normally people sign to labels, then the labels would say, well, here’s your budget, and if you go over the budget, you have to let us know. And they would, um and ah about what a record was costing to make. But we were in charge. They gave us an advance but we had money in the bank to pay for the album, so that’s what we did.
Over the period of time where you recorded all the Alan Parsons Project albums, you personally were obviously still working doing other things. Were you producing other artists in between?
I call it double dipping, because I was not only working for The Alan Parsons Project, I was working for other artists, and I was on the payroll at Abbey Road, so I was still being paid my monthly salary.
That’s quite surprising, isn’t it? So you were still on the payroll, even though you were basically in a band and doing your own thing?
Yes, I was being paid a salary to make my own records. That was the irony.
Because you weren’t touring, was it relatively easy to manage your own diary?
It’s funny, we were always busy, even though we weren’t touring. Busy either recording or promoting. We spent a lot a lot of time doing interviews and traveling around doing playbacks. A lot of playbacks in big cities in America, usually associated with radio stations.,
That must have been really enjoyable, because you don’t have any of the stresses and strains of touring, I suppose, and it’s all paid for by the label. You’re traveling around telling people about your record.
You’ve raised the question – I hope the labels were paying for it?! [laughs]. I think they probably were…
But Clive Davis was quite astute, because there’s a quote from him in the book [in the box set] where he says, you were like film directors, going around talking about a film that’s about to come out. And it’s a very good analogy, isn’t it?
It is, and absolutely – that’s what we did. We didn’t have a lot of time off. We were always busy.
How do you think Abbey Road compared to other studios around London at the time? Because the punk scene happened and I think maybe some people started to get sniffy because Abbey Road was considered a bit old school. Was it still state of the art? The Beatles always complained Abbey Road took too long to get to 8-track and all the rest of it. How was it as a facility at that time?
I think the period of I Robot was when Abbey Road was really on top of everything. They had the latest gear; they had 24-track consoles. It’s true to say, in The Beatle days, the studios were way behind. But I think as time went on, they became absolutely top-of-the-line studios.
And was it as collaborative as it always sounds? With people poking their head around the door and saying, “Can someone help me with some backing vocals in studio three?”?
Yeah, that happened now and again. I did some backing vocals on a Wings track, actually.
Which one was that?
‘Tomorrow’, a song called ‘Tomorrow’ [from Wild Life, which Alan engineered]
Let’s talk about Dolby Atmos, because, there’s a lot of people coming out of the woodwork doing Atmos mixes now, but you go back to the very early days of surround sound because you did the Quad version of The Dark Side of The Moon, didn’t you?
Which, interestingly, was critically acclaimed, by many, as being better than the first 5.1 mix.
Yeah, I’ve read the same thing. You can only get it in the Immersion box set that came out in 2011, I think – they didn’t include it on the most recent blu-ray. But what are your thoughts on Atmos? How much do you enjoy working in Atmos?
I love it, but I also like working in 5.1. The change from stereo to 5.1 was, was colossal – huge – but the change from 5.1 to Atmos, I think, is less so.
What’s your process when you do an Atmos mix?
I don’t rebuild stereo. I would normally go to 5.1, listen to the balances and make sure all the everything’s heard, everything’s right. The Atmos, is about taking the 5.1 and making it more interesting by adding ‘upstairs material’, as we call it (Alan is referring to the height channels).
Interesting. So your 5.1 mix is a dedicated 5.1? You’re not rendering that from the Atmos at the end?
No, the process is 5.1 and then Atmos.
Not everyone works like that. Some people do their Atmos mix, and then in the Dolby renderer, export it as a 5.1.
That’s criminal. I think that’s cheating [laughs].
I did notice on the blu ray that you didn’t do a new stereo mix. You didn’t see any need to do that?
[No]. I Robot was mixed analogue, it’s therefore high definition. Whereas when, when we [later] went to digital, that’s not high def, that’s 16 bit.
50 years later, what, are your lasting impressions of I Robot? Are you very proud of the album that you created with Eric?
Oh, I was very proud of I Robot, but I was even more proud of Pyramid, believe it or not. I distinctly remember saying, this is much better than I Robot…
Interesting…
Of course, it was the first taste of success. ‘I Wouldn’t Want To Be Like You’ became a hit, and that was really good for what happened in the future.
For anyone who has not listened to The Alan Parsons Project music, they might look at the album cover/concepts and wrongly get the idea that it’s very sort of oblique, hard-to-get-into music. But, to me, it’s very commercial sounding, for the most part.
We’ve kind of been branded as ‘progressive rock’. I’m not sure that’s really accurate. I mean, there were tracks that had progressive rock stuff, you know, time signature changes, something changed from one one style to another, that kind of thing, but I think it should have been branded as ‘progressive pop’.
Thanks to Alan Parsons who was talking to Paul Sinclair for SDE. I Robot is out now as a super deluxe box set and standalone blu-ray and vinyl editions.
Order the I Robot standalone blu-ray from the SDE shop using this link or the button below.
I wanted to post a few words to acknowledge the death of guitarist, singer and songwriter Chris Rea, yesterday.
I’m not going to pretend I was a diehard fan, but I dipped in and out of his catalogue over the years and was always fascinated by the man and his music.
Rea was something of a late starter, not getting his first guitar until he was in his early 20s which makes his initial achievements – playing in bands Magdalene and The Beautiful Losers and getting a solo deal with indie Magnet Records – even more impressive since that all that happened within a few years.
His first album Whatever Happened To Benny Santini? (great title) was released in 1978 and its lead single ‘Fool (If You Think It’s Over)’ reached No 12 in the Billboard Hot 100 and earned Chris a ‘Best New Artist’ Grammy nomination. Weirdly, Rea had peaked too early. He would never replicate this success in the US again and chose not to tour in America.
It took Chris Rea eight years to match this singles success in the UK when ‘Let’s Dance’ reached No 12 in 1987. In the intervening period, Chris released seven further albums that slowly became more popular, despite singles that stubbornly only flirted with the outer fringes of the chart (the UK top 30 hit ‘Stainsby Girls’ being an exception). During this time Magnet Records stayed loyal to Chris and he remained loyal to them. Rea only ended up on WEA because Warners acquired Magnet in 1988.
1987 to 1994 was the peak of Rea’s success in the UK. Surprisingly, there were no further hits from Dancing With Strangers but that didn’t stop the album from getting to No 2 and a well timed greatest hits, New Light Through Old Windows – which as the title alludes to, was actually re-recordings of old songs – allowed the new version of 1986’s ‘On The Beach’ to become a hit. This compilation album also featured ‘Driving Home For Christmas’ and that festive song was released as a single (although wasn’t a hit, peaking at 53).
The original version of ‘Driving Home For Christmas’ had actually been the B-side to 1986 single ‘Hello Friend’. And this brings me to an aspect of Rea’s career that I find fascinating: He loved to re-record his songs or ‘try again’, with B-sides becoming A-sides. As an example, ‘Driving Home For Christmas’ was also the B-side to ‘Joys of Christmas’, the third single (and opening track) from 1987’s Dancing With Strangers. The single version of ‘Hello Friend’ itself was a re-recording of the On The Beach album cut and of course ‘Driving Home For Christmas’ was re-recorded for New Light Through Old Windows.
The B-side version of ‘Let’s Dance’ was later recorded and became a big hit.
Another example is the aforementioned ‘Let’s Dance’. Before this became Rea’s first big UK hit in 1987 it had been the B-side of the lead single from 1986’s On The Beach, ‘It’s All Gone’. It was re-recorded for the hit version in ’87 and then re-recorded again for New Light Through Old Windows! However the very best example of Rea’s constant fiddling is the song ‘Josephine’. There are apparently eight different versions! It was originally the second single from 1985’s Shamrock Diaries. The single version was completely different to the album cut, then there was the ‘La Version Française’ variant – basically an extended remix created for a European single release. Then the song was re-recorded for New Light Through Old Windows and even that re-recording also exists as a faster alternate, issued only in America. Rea would also re-record it once more in 2008. All this is crazy, but great fun for collectors at the same time.
The Road to Hell and Auberge albums both went to No 1 in the UK in 1989 and 1991 respectively. I used to play the former a great deal and it benefits from a vague concept of the world going to shit (‘The Road to Hell’, ‘You Must Be Evil’ ‘That’s What They Always Say’, ‘Looking for a Rainbow’). For the first time Rea had two top 30 singles from the same album in the UK (‘The Road to Hell’ got to No 10 – his highest charting physical single – and the affecting ‘Tell Me There’s A Heaven’ reached 24). The Road to Hell was just one of those albums that everyone seemed to own (it eventually went 6 x Platinum).
Rea continued to release albums in the late 1990s (including a surprisingly unsuccessful The Road to Hell: Part 2) until his well documented health issues intervened and motivated him to return to his blues roots in later life, with a series of albums that had little mainstream appeal but were mostly great and offered some really cool physical packages for collectors (particularly 2008’s The Return of the Fabulous Hofner Bluenotes).
There’s a lot of good music to enjoy and, as I said at the beginning, while I’m far from a massive fan I always planned to explore early albums such as Tennis, Deltics or Water Sign and the like. Rhino started an excellent reissue campaign in 2019, maybe Rea’s death will encourage them to continue.
Thanks for the music and rest in peace, Chris Rea.
On Thursday this week, the Financial Times (FT) in the UK published an article about SDE, featuring an interview with myself, under the heading ‘Mission to keep music physical’. I’m obviously delighted to see such high profile coverage of this website in the ‘mainstream media’ and I think interview David Honigmann did a good job with the article. Here is a link to the piece online, but if you have problems accessing (due to paywall) then I don’t think they will mind me showing the image below which you can click on to enlarge and read. Thanks to David and the FT for this wonderful coverage!
“Mission to keep music physical”. FT reports on SDE (click image to enlarge)
Chartwatch
Kylie Minogue wins the ‘race’ to be Christmas number one in the UK singles chart (make your own mind up about the track, but my (Scottish) mother texted me last night to say “that Kylie song XMAS is shite”) but we are mostly interested in the album charts and the big news is that Pink Floyd are number one with the reissue of Wish You Were Here. Floyd have now chalked up their second number one album of the year after Pink Floyd at Pompeii. Compare this to the rather lacklustre performances of The Rolling Stones’Black and Blue (peaked at No 40 in November) and The Beatles’Anthology 4 (No 9 earlier this month) and you have to wonder what is going on? What is making the difference? Is it the product, the marketing spend, or just the evergreen, hip appeal of Floyd?
The Wish You Were Here blu-ray sold over 4,000 copies in the UK
Wish You Were Here sold just under 25,000 copies in the UK and over 4,000 were blu-rays. Neither The Beatles nor The Rolling Stones issued standalone blu-rays of their releases (no blu-ray at all for the Fab Four). Also Sony really went for it with Pink Floyd, authorising two Blood Records vinyl editions, as well as the yellow flame vinyl, a late-in-the-day white vinyl and so on. No laurels were rested upon. Okay, I’m not particularly a fan of labels doing large number of vinyl variants, but it works, or at least has done in this case with over 13,000 vinyl records sold.
Blu-ray sales resulted in the highest UK chart position for Frankie’s Welcome to the Pleasuredome for 30 years
Wish You Were Here will almost certainly be the best-selling blu-ray audio in the UK for 2025, but I’m delighted to say that the SDE exclusive blu-ray of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’sWelcome to the Pleasuredome should comfortably be in second place, as the album re-enters the UK album chart this week at No 44 its highest position since the first half of 1995 (when all four singles were reissued). This is almost entirely blu-ray sales (approximately 3,000 units) and comfortably beats the No 70 peak of the same album in early November, after the box set, CD and vinyl reissue. Obviously, it’s a real shame the blu-ray was delayed, since who knows how high the album would have risen to with the combination of all four formats. Them’s the breaks, as they say.
This is the last Saturday Deluxe before Christmas, so I’d like to say thank you for continuing to read and support SDE. Merry Christmas and hope you have a healthy and prosperous 2026. There’s lots to look forward to in the next 12 months…
Ian Gillan‘retired’ from the music business post-Deep Purple to pursue other business ventures (some successful, some not) but was soon back with a new group called, the Ian Gillan Band. Their output is celebrated in a new 8CD box called Down The Road: The Complete Ian Gillan Band Story.
Gillan recruited guitarist Ray Fenwick, bass player John Gustafson, keyboard player Mike Moran and Mark Nauseef on drums, and Ian Gillan Band would go on to release three studio albums (on three different labels) between 1976 and 1977: Child in Time, Clear Air Turbulence and Scarabus.
The sound was a departure from the heavy sound of Deep Purple to a more progressive jazz rock fusion and the band found an audience in Japan, in particular.
The new box set features newly mastered versions of all three studio albums along with rare mixes, some demos, single edits and three live shows.
This comes in seven-inch style packaging (to match the Gillan box from last year) and includes a 24-page booklet with sleeve notes by Rich Davenport who has interview Ian Gillan about his time with the band.
Down The Road: The Complete Ian Gillan Band Story will be released on 27 March 2026 (was 27 February) via Edsel and seems like exceptionally good value at less than £40.
The Temple of the King 1975-1976 is a forthcoming 9CD deluxe set which marks 50 years since the formation of Rainbow and the release of the debut album Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow.
The set includes the first two studios album, a trilogy of live albums from Rainbow’s debut world tour, documenting the band’s first shows in Europe with shows from Cologne, Dusseldorf and Nurnberg.
A bonus ninth CD offers rarities in the shape of rare mixes, edits and studio rehearsal performances. Audio is newly mastered by Andy Pearce and Matt Wortham and this set comes with a 24-page booklet with new sleeve notes by Rich Davenport reflecting on the impact of the band after Ritchie Blackmore’s split from Deep Purple.
The Temple of the King 1975-1976 will be released on 27 March 2026 (was 6 March) via Edsel.
The A’s, The B’s & The Monkees is a new Monkees compilation set for release early next year.
As the title suggests, this 2CD collection offers A-sides and B-sides released between 1966 and 1970, including the hits ‘Last Train To Clarksville’, ‘I’m A Believer’, ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday’ and ‘Daydream Believer’.
The A’s, The B’s & The Monkees (click to enlarge)
Amongst the B-sides are ‘(I’m Not) Your Stepping Stone’, ‘The Girl I Knew Somewhere’ and ‘Tapioca Tundra’. The 2CD set is presented as a digipak.
The A’s, The B’s & The Monkees will be released on 30 January 2026 via Rhino.
Seven months after the last announcement, NOW Music have confirmed a new Vault release (a Yearbook sub-brand) focusing on 1982.
A reminder that the Vault is concerned with ‘lesser compiled’ singles. Tracks that were perhaps not big hits, or indeed not hits at all. Or maybe they achieved success in the US but not in the UK.
4CD deluxe of NOW Yearbook: Vault ’82
There’s plenty of big names represented in this new 1982 release including The Cure (‘The Hanging Garden’), The Police (‘Secret Journey’), Paul McCartney (‘Tug of War’), The Who (Athena’), SteveWinwood (‘Valerie’, which stalled at No 51 in ’82 but reached the top 20 in 1987), Elton John (Empty Garden (Hey Hey Johnny)), Culture Club (‘I’m Afraid of Me’), Grace Jones (‘The Apple Stretching’), Level 42 (‘Are You Hearing (What I Hear)?’), XTC (‘Ball and Chain’), Mike Oldfield (‘Five Miles Out’), Marillion (‘Market Square Heroes’), Bruce Springsteen (Atlantic City), John Mellencamp (‘Hurts So Good’), Michael McDonald (‘I Keep Forgettin’ (Every Time You’re Near)’ which only reached No 43 in the UK, remarkably) and many more! Full track listings are below.
The usual formats are available: 4CD deluxe with hardcover book and 28 page booklet, 3LP coloured vinyl (yellow in this case) and standard 4CD in a card sleeve.
NOW Yearbook Vault ’82 will be released on 16 January 2026.
Watch, as SDEtv unboxes the 50th super deluxe edition box set of Pink Floyd’s1975 album Wish You Were Here, which is released today. The video also looks back at the Immersion box from 2011.
George Michael’s classic 1987 debut album Faith is being reissued early next year with formats including an SDE exclusive blu-ray audio with a Dolby Atmos Mix and 13 bonus tracks.
Faith’s commercial success was incredible. It topped the charts in over 10 countries, including the UK and the USA, and spawned four Billboard Hot 100 No 1 singles (‘Faith’, ‘Father Figure’, ‘One More Try’ and ‘Monkey’). It won album of the year at the Grammy Awards in early 1989 and has sold a reported 25 million copies worldwide.
As with the Wham! SDE blu-rays of 2024, the Dolby Atmos Mix (and 5.1 mix) has been created by the album’s original engineer, Chris Porter. The following audio streams are included on the Faith SDE exclusive blu-ray (the stereo mix is newly mastered).
Dolby Atmos Mix (48/24)
5.1 Surround Mix (48/24)
Stereo Mix (48/24)
Additionally, the blu-ray features 13 stereo bonus tracks, including the 13 minute Monogamy Mix and 7″ mix of ‘I Want Your Sex’, the radio edit version of Shep Pettibone’s ‘Hard Day’ remix, the instrumental version of ‘Father Figure’ and two commercially unreleased promo-only versions of ‘Monkey’. The 7″ version of ‘I Want Your Sex’ (and the Monogamy Mix) is featured on a Faith reissue for the first time.
Stereo bonus tracks included on the blu-ray
I Want Your Sex (Monogamy Mix) 13.12
Hard Day (Shep Pettibone Remix) 9.05
Faith (Instrumental) 3.08
Father Figure (Instrumental) 5:38
Monkey (Extended Version) 8.09
Kissing A Fool (Instrumental) 4:34
I Want Your Sex (7” Version) 4.45
Hard Day (Radio Edit) 4:12
Monkey (7” Edit) 4:48
Monkey (A’Capella) 3:46
Monkey (Extra Beats) 3:44
Monkey (Instrumental) 5:35
Monkey (Dub Version) 5:20
Other formats in this reissue campaign include a CD, a single LP black vinyl edition, and 2LP black and coloured (red and black marbled) vinyl editions of Faith with a single bonus track: The Monogamy Mix of ‘I Want Your Sex’ on side four. The vinyl and 2LP sets are pressed on BioVinyl at Optimal and come in gatefold sleeve with printed inners.
The red and black 2LP vinyl edition of Faith
This Faith SDE exclusiveblu-ray audio is #56 in the ongoing SDE Surround Series and will be released on 20 February 2026, via Sony Music. It will be packaged similarly to previous editions (in a clear amaray case) and ships with a free, collectible SDE Surround Series slipcase. Please note: this blu-ray will be shipping without shrink-wrap.
Do not miss out. This product is a limited edition and has a 14 day pre-order window, which closes on 24 December 2025. Availability cannot be guaranteed after that date. Pre-order via the SDE using this link or the buttons below.
Tori Amos’ covers album Strange Little Girls is being reissued early next year to mark the record’s 25th anniversary
The album was originally released in 2001 (between To Venus and Back and Scarlett’s Walk) and saw Tori tackle 12 tracks written and originally performed by men, reinterpreted from a female point of view. Tracks included Depeche Mode’s ‘Enjoy The Silence’, 10cc’s ‘I’m Not In Love’, Lloyd Cole and the Commotions’ ‘Rattlesnakes’, Neil Young’s ‘Heart of Gold’ and The Beatles‘ ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun’.
Tori created a distinct female persona for each track and was photographed as such, giving the album a striking visual identity.
The 2026 reissue sees audio remastered and the track count upped to 16, since the album now features a couple of B-sides from back in the day (David Bowie’s ‘After All’ and Alice Cooper’s ‘Only Women Bleed’) and two previously unreleased tracks: covers of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Growin’ Up’ and Elvis Costello’s ‘Hoover Factory’.
The re-release has new cover art (the ‘Rattlesnakes’ version) and is available as a 2CD set (with poster) and is also released on vinyl for the first time (as a 2LP set).
Strange Little Girls will be issued by Rhino on 20 February 2026.
Pink Floyd/Wish You Were HereCD, Vinyl, Box Set, Blu-ray
Pink Floyd’s 1975 album Wish You Were Here gets the full 50th anniversary treatment, with a whole suite of physical products available, most of which include unreleased studio and live audio.
This limited edition Bill Wyman box set collections six solo albums, 30 non-album tracks, extended versions and B-sides for a total of 107 tracks. Bonus disc of demos of 12 unreleased songs. Comes with a print signed by Bill Wyman.
