Saturday Deluxe / 31 October 2015

Just tell me that you want me – Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk box

This week’s really big news was that Rhino are to reissue Fleetwood Mac‘s 1979 album Tusk as an 8-disc box set. This is almost three years after Rumours got the same treatment, making Paul McCartney‘s six-months-to-a-year hit rate when it comes to reissues look positively rushed.

Eight discs sounds quite impressive, although a close inspection reveals that four of the discs (CD 1, LP 1 & LP 2 and DVD) simply repeat the same content – the Tusk album, albeit the DVD gives us a 5.1 surround mix.

The biggest grumble from fans judging by the comments left here on SDE is the fact that the two vinyl records are being bundled in as part of the super deluxe set. Fans that have no interest at all in buying vinyl records (a majority, regardless of the vinyl ‘resurgence’) are forced to buy them because the box set with the 5.1 and live material isn’t available without them.

I have to say, I have a great deal of sympathy for this point of view. In fact, I’d go further and say even if you are a vinyl lover you probably aren’t that interested in the vinyl in this box either, because if it’s anything like the LP in the Rumours box it will be a thin pressing, in a low-grade paper white inner sleeve (i.e. not poly lined) and exhibiting no ‘audiophile’ qualities at all. Collectors who buy vinyl are looking for quality pressings, probably on 180g vinyl. Rumours was pressed on a limited edition double 45RPM pressing a few years back – that is the kind of thing that’s of interest, not something bundled in with a load of other content, done on a budget. Also, perhaps you have an original pressing at home that you know will never be beaten, so why would you want a new one with your CDs and DVDs?

Rhino would make more money by not doing this, so why they insist on including the vinyl is a mystery. The Tusk box is £48 on Amazon UK at the moment. If you removed the vinyl, you would still be left with a 5CD+DVD package, giving you a six disc set for less than £50. The Jam‘s new Fire and Skill box is six-CDs for about £60. The forthcoming Simple Minds Once Upon A Time box set is a 5CD+DVD set and is retailing for £44. So I don’t think fans would be outraged at the Tusk box set as it stands being available minus the vinyl for between £40 and £50.

It would also be a hell of a lot easier to store. If you don’t buy vinyl, the likelihood is that your shelving and storage situation is designed to cater primarily for CDs, so these 12″ x 12″ boxes are going to be nothing short of a pain.

The only saving grace is that this isn’t £100 like the Led Zeppelin boxes. It’s cheap enough to shrug your shoulders, give the records to some mates and enjoy the stuff you are into – CDs, DVDs etc.

What do you think about vinyl being bundled in with CD/DVD box sets? Leave a comment!

Read more about the Fleetwood Mac Tusk reissue here.

Queen combo price-drop

If you’ve been keeping an eye of the forthcoming Queen A Night at the Odeon set then you may be aware that the CD+Blu-ray combo pack has dropped in price (from £30) and is now available for about £23 in the UK. In fact there’s a reasonable chance that may drop further – you can keep an eye on prices here.

If you are determined to pick-up the super deluxe box set then I’d ignore Amazon UK for the time being and perhaps shop at Amazon France where It’s less than £80 at the time of writing.

Read more about Queen’s A Night at the Odeon here.

The Beatles’ Christmas Record

When Universal and Apple announced The Beatles‘ forthcoming 1 video collection there was talk of a new vinyl edition coming ‘later’. I actually expected this to come out in early 2016 but this is the Fab Four we are talking about here and there is now a release date of early December and the 2LP set can already be pre-ordered from Amazon UK to arrive on doormats before Christmas. It’s a bit overpriced at the moment although the Italian pre-order price isn’t bad.

This is the same 27-track compilation and the same double-LP set but the difference is that this contains the brand new stereo remixes that were created (by Giles Martin) alongside the 5.1 surround mixes, for the CD/blu-ray and CD/DVD sets.

Read more about The Beatles 1 release here.

SDE ChartWatch

The brand new UK charts were announced yesterday. SDE takes a look at the movers and shakers with regards to reissues and box sets.

David Gilmour‘s Rattle That Lock finally drops out of the top ten in the physical UK album chart (for the first time since its release six weeks ago. For an hour or two this week you could have picked up the CD+Blu-ray version of this for a tenner over on Amazon Italy. I was toying with doing a ‘deal alert‘ but it’s cheapness must have been brief because it had gone up again, when I next looked!

Meanwhile Mogwai‘s Central Belters retrospective is a new entry at number 26 which is quite impressive. This equates to number 40 on the ‘normal’ album chart. I have the vinyl box of this, so look out for a SDEtv video soon!

I’m personally really pleased to see the Susanna Hoffs and Matthew Sweet‘s Completely Under The Covers box set do so well. It enters this week’s physical chart at an impressive no. 41, thanks in no small part to the fantastic price point of the 4CD set which was under £14 on Amazon for ages (gone up a bit now). If you haven’t read my interview with Susanna then check it out here, and watch me take a look at the 6LP coloured vinyl set here.

We almost had an a-ha-free week in the UK physical chart last week, but with the three new reissues out that was bound to change yesterday when the new chart was published.

Sure enough, Stay On These Roads enters at no.81 with not much more than a hair’s breadth between Memorial Beach (no. 96) and East of the Sun West of the Moon (no. 99). A tad disappointing perhaps, although the band are rather pre-occupied, busy promoting their new record. Also, I’m sure the issues with the Stay On These Roads booklet didn’t help (see last week’s Saturday Deluxe for more) because some people were complaining of it being hard to get hold of.

Finally Duran Duran‘s Paper Gods is back in the UK’s top 100 physical albums chart, albeit it has scraped back in at no. 94. We can put this down to their appearance on Jools Holland’s BBC TV show Later… last week. On the Tuesday’s live programme they performed Pressure Off and Notorious. The longer broadcast on Friday included What Are The Chances? and Wild Boys. Interestingly, a couple of days later the band appeared on Italian X-Factor. I imagine if they had repeated their 2007 appearance on the UK show then this would have had a bigger impact on Paper Gods in the UK chart.