Saturday Deluxe / 29 August 2026

Tears for Fears / The Seeds of Love – blu-ray ‘easter egg’

I am very happy to have announced the SDE blu-ray of Tears For Fears’ The Seeds of Love on Wednesday and thanks as always for an amazing response.

It will be great to finally have all three 80s TFF albums as part of the SDE Surround Series and there’s loads of great content on the disc. However, with all the excitement around the announcement, I did forget to tell you about something quite interesting on this disc, an ‘easter egg’ of sorts.

The SDE blu-ray has exclusive instrumental versions of all the album tracks in Atmos, 5.1 and Stereo but there’s two songs in instrumental form that run longer than their ‘vocal’ counterparts. These are ‘Sowing The Seeds of Love’ and ‘Standing on the Corner of the Third World’. The album version of the former is 6.19 but the instrumental is 7.04. I think Steven Wilson basically let it run to the very end of the usable performance. This is now officially the longest commercially released version of this song, beating the 6.52 single version by a whisker. ‘Standing on the Corner of the Third World’ runs to 6.18 compared to the standard version of 5.32.

If you are wondering why SW didn’t do this extension to the vocal versions of the songs as well, there are two issues: Firstly, the Atmos version of an album has to sync precisely to the stereo on Apple Music and if these two were longer then that wouldn’t happen; and second, the album is basically sacrosanct, letting a couple of instruments run longer is different from changing the actual studio album.

Still, this is a nice little quirk to know about and it wouldn’t have happened without this exclusive blu-ray product, which is still available to pre-order only via the SDE shop.

ChartWatch

Paul Heaton enters the UK charts at No 1 this week with his new studio album Jenius. He’s had five chart-topping albums before but never as a solo artist (three with The Beautiful South and two collaborative albums with Jacqui Abbott. With 23k worth of sales (almost all physical) Heaton sold more than double the second highest new entry, which was Brandon Flowers who has to settle for No 3, with Thrasher, a new solo album. Remarkably, all of The Killers’ studio albums and both of Flowers previous solo efforts have gone to number one in the UK, so he’s probably not used to not reaching the top! By the way, Michael Jackson’s The Essential best of refuses to go away and is No 2, in between Heaton and Flowers (undoubtedly almost all streaming).

Dolly Parton’s 2022 greatest hits, Diamonds and Rhinestones re-entered the UK chart at No 6 for obvious reasons and it’s not a great week for the Happy Mondays since the reissue of Pill ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches doesn’t even make it into the top 75 (No 81) despite all that effort with the various physical editions.

RIP Amazon Movers and Shakers

I’m sure some of you will have noticed that Amazon’s ‘Movers and Shakers’ page for music (and, I think, other categories) is no longer serving any content. These pages existed for years for all the various Amazon country sites and they highlighted the “biggest gainers in sales rank over the past 24 hours”. This meant it flagged new entries, surges in sales ranking due to discounts (or mis-pricing!) and similar. It was an extremely useful tool and I really do mourn its loss. The pages still actually exist but there’s simply no content. The UK page reads: “Sorry, there are no movers and shakers available in this category. Please check back later.”

At first I thought this was just a glitch that someone would eventually notice – and fix – and we’d be back in business but, sadly, that is not the case. Don’t bother checking back ‘later’, because I reached out to a contact at Amazon and asked what was going on. I was told “Unfortunately the Movers & Shakers pages have now been discontinued“. It’s hard to understand why they are no longer supporting these pages when they were purely data driven and, surely, to a certain degree they created (and supported) themselves. Annoying. Oh well… I was thinking about this the other day, but does anyone else agree that ‘peak’ Amazon / deals / low shipping costs, etc was probably 2017? Those days have gone…

Simple Minds / Once Upon A Time – SDE blu-ray delayed

I’m sorry to inform pre-orderers of Simple Minds Once Upon A Time SDE blu-ray that the release is now delayed until 18 September. This had previously gone back to 4 September, but now slips another two weeks. As I say, apologies; I think it’s just some kind of production delay – nothing to worry about and let me tell you that we are as keen to ship these to you, as you are to receive them, so it’s frustrating on all sides! We will email everyone to let them know.