Saturday / Deluxe 1 July 2017

Suzanne Vega anniversaries

Suzanne Vega will be touring later on this year to celebrate the 30th and 25th anniversaries of Solitude Standing and 99.9ºF respectively and the singer-songwriter has made a limited edition purple vinyl edition of the former available via her new webstore.

According to the blurb on the site, only 500 of these are being pressed, although the problem is that if you are in the UK, the site (run by Music Glue) charges you £21.12 for the vinyl and then a further £19.82 to ship to the UK!! That’s a grand total of £40.94. If the item was then to be caught via Customs & Exercise they’d charge 20% VAT on top of that (call it £8) and you’d get the dreaded ‘admin’ charge of £11.50. In short, this could end up costing £60!

So as much as I’d like to purchase, it’s simply not viable right now. Here’s hoping these become available from a platform that ships from the UK or they are on-sale at her shows later in the year.

Order the purple pressing of Solitude Standing.

SDE Chartwatch

Radiohead‘s anniversary reissue of OK Computer outsold the Prince Purple Rain reissue in the UK this week, although neither album could ‘do a Sgt. Pepper‘ and actually top the UK albums chart.

Ed Sheeran (yawn) rises to number one while Radiohead are number two, although on the physical album chart, which discounts streaming and downloads, Radiohead are indeed number one. Purple Rain enters a number seven on the ‘proper’ album chart and is a couple of places higher on the physical chart.

It some ways it doesn’t seem ‘fair’ that Radiohead pipped Prince, because despite a great sounding triple vinyl set, the reissue offers very little that’s new, save for a trio of unheard songs. Compare that to the Purple Rain reissue which delivers a whole disc of unreleased material, an entire concert on DVD for the first time and a CD packed with 12-inch versions and single edits.

The difference in sales probably comes down to promotional activity (Thom Yorke has being doing interviews) and Radiohead getting some major mainstream coverage on BBC TV thanks to headlining at Glastonbury. To underline what a difference that can make, even the Foo Fighters‘ seven year old Greatest Hits compilation outsold the Purple Rain reissue last week, because they too headlined Glastonbury’s Pyramid stage the night after Radiohead.

Prince never played Glastonbury, but it’s not hard to imagine the impact it  would have had if he was still with us and had played a a two or three hour hit-packed set last weekend.

A review of the Purple Rain reissue will be published on SDE on Monday.