Once more a post on the mysterious Drinking Electricity. Their first few single releases were on the Pop:Aural label, (including the previously featured ‘Cruising Missiles’ and ‘Shake Some Action’) but by the time of this – their fourth 7” single – the band had parted company with Bob Last and Hilary Morrison’s label and with this release would debut their very own label, Survival Records.
Following on from part 1 in this series posted late last year, here’s a modest follow-up that focuses on a badge set that was available to buy from the official merch staff at Bauhaus gigs from the period of their second reformation in 2005/2006. As well as a good number of live shows, that period of reformation also spawned the ‘Go Away White’ album, as featured on a previous VersionCrazy post in its Japanese CD edition with exclusive track.
Moving on from 2001 to 2008 and the next John Foxx compilation that was to emerge, ‘Glimmer: Best of John Foxx’. The metamatic.com website’s cryptic summary for 2008 states “Interlude. Operation by proxy and semantic extension. Despatched a couple of robot agents to the other side of the world, and hid in Durham Cathedral. Partial manifestation in the cobbled squares of Europe. An interrupted radio broadcast from Shinjuku. Remixed and remastered. Ambushed in Bethnal Green by Dub-terrorist Editions, Ltd armed with sprayguns – fended them off with x-ray vision and an old suit.”
‘Remixed and remastered’ was the order of the day here for the particular items of interest, with ‘Glimmer: Best of John Foxx’ acting as an advance landing party in September for a fuller scale double-disc CD remastering re-issue programme for three of John’s Virgin-era albums following shortly thereafter in October 2008. As for the remixing…more on that later under ‘Additionally of interest..’ below.
Continue reading “John Foxx compilations across the years Part 4”
Bill Nelson has been a firm favourite of mine for a long time now and so, I can’t begin to tell you how welcome a release this CD was when it was announced. I had been a member of the ‘Acquitted By Mirrors’ (and later incarnations) of Bill Nelson’s fan club/information service while they were on the go, so I already had a few of the exclusive fan club EPs that this release is compiled from already, but there were a lot of gaps. So, the prospect of a release that gathered them together was mouthwatering – and I got my order in super-quick, as Bill Nelson releases have a tendency to sell out in record time and consequently sell for inflated sums on the resale market.
It’s all about the versions on VersionCrazy and sometimes you come across releases that you make an assumption on, that they will be pretty much standard fare but – somehow, it turns out that they manage to throw up some weird and wonderful regional variations of interest. One such example is this ‘(The Best Of) New Order’ compilation CD from the band, the first fruits for London Records of their deal to acquire the band after the sad demise of the original Factory Records. I guess it was to be expected that after the band was scooped up by a major label (well, in some territories, since they were already on Qwest/Warner Bros. in the US) they would work that back catalogue hard. ‘(The Best Of) New Order’ was the first such example from this deal with London Records, a compilation first released in November 1994 on CD, cassette, LP and video cassette even. But of interest to this article are the differences between that 1994 edition and the American release that followed in 1995.
The November 1994 edition tracklist on CD goes like this and is notable for including a number of new ’94’ remixes of some of the tracks; (which I have highlighted in bold text) Continue reading “Side by side: New Order: (The Best Of) New Order 1994 EU and 1995 US CDs”
