The third part of this series looking in depth at John Foxx compilations across the years moves on to 2001’s ‘Modern Art’ compilation CD that brought together a mixture of the familiar as well as some previously hard to find mixes and single edits to CD for the first time.
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.
To this day, Kraftwerk remain an act that does things its own unique way and more often that not flies in the face of the norms of the music business. If you expect to be able to find the band’s back catalogue re-issued every few years with a multitude of bonus tracks added, you will be very mistaken. For the most part, the albums come as the album’s were originally released, with no extra tracks such as remixes, alternative versions, etc. In some cases, you simply cannot find official releases at all – e.g. the bands first three albums (‘Kraftwerk’, ‘Kraftwerk 2’, ‘Ralf and Florian’) have never received any official re-release since 1980 and never on CD/digitally. One exception to Kraftwerk’s otherwise strict behaviour however is this CD dating from January 1997, a Japanese CD edition of ‘Computer World’ that contains… hold your breath… a bonus track!
The second part of this series looking at John Foxx’s music as compiled over the years… 1989’s (presumably) self titled promo video clip collection and 1992’s compilation CD, Assembly’.
John Foxx video compilation (Virgin Music Vault, VVC582, 1989)
This odd little release was one in a series of short video compilations of Virgin label catalogue artists issued in 1989, while VHS was still the format of choice. Amongst other acts of interest in the series (at least for me…) were Skids and Magazine. This video was the first time I was able to view again some promo videos I had seen only a handful of times anyway back in the very early ’80s, and some I had never seen before, so it was a welcome purchase, despite the brevity (clocking in around 25 minutes). Being a UK based Top Of The Pops viewer, the videos were less common sights due to the frequent and memorable John Foxx appearances in the TOTP studio, not least for ‘Underpass’, ‘No One Driving’ (the latter with no less than four Yamaha CS80’s for the backing band!) and ‘Europe, After The Rain’. Continue reading “John Foxx compilations across the years Part 2”
Can hardly believe it has taken this long to get round to posting the first in a series of button badge goodness from one of my all time favourite acts, Bauhaus…
This first badge in the selection features an archive photo from a theatre production produced by Oskar Schlemmer, from the original Bauhaus period – I first came across it with its use on the cover of the book ‘Performance: Live Art, 1909 to the Present’, by Roselee Goldberg, from 1979 – the band plundered a detail of this photo for press adverts for the ‘Spirit’ single in 1982 but which wasn’t used on the final (rather disappointing, if I may say) sleeve design. Continue reading “Button Badge Goodness: Bauhaus (Part 1)”