News, Views and Music Issue 186 (Intro)

March 18th:
Dear all, as you might have noticed recently our ‘blogspot’ site (www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk for those who haven’t visited it yet) has had a bit of a makeover. One of the things I keep getting back in feedback from you all is that our site could do with some pictures. Now, it’s still not quite how I envisioned this site in my head but I have at last managed to cut-and-paste some clipart into ‘paint’ and add a bit of background colour to it all. It’s not perfect and I wish I could make the pictures bigger, but at least breaks the text up a little. Let me know what you think!

As a result of all this extra workload I’ve chosen quite a ‘light’ album and top five/ten/twelve/whatever this week so I don’t risk bringing on another bad chronic fatigue spell. As a result the wordcount this week is quite a bit under what we normally write. Don’t worry, that’s not a longterm policy: we’re proud that our reviews are longer and more detailed (who said ‘long-winded’?!) than any other source out there and hope to keep it that way, To make up for it I’m planning to cover the last AAA double-album we haven’t featured yet for next week: The Who’s ‘Tommy’.

In other news: we seem to have flatlined at 88,000 hits – which is still an impressive figure by our standards but well below the 30,000 a week we had a fornight or so back - Cameron’s still annoying the hell out of everyone including his own party and the world’s media are finally catching on to what an unfair, awful, outdated, prejudiced idea the ‘bedroom tax’ is (and yes, technically it’s not a tax, just a change in council housing rates, but it amounts to the same thing). Roll on 2015 when the Coalition will surely break up whatever happens and the Conservatives seem unlikely to ever win again for the rest of the century (assuming labour don’t muck it up again and declare war on an entirely innocent country that is...)

One other thing I’d like to talk about is the 50 year rule on recording rights. That’s all gone a bit quite now, after landmark cases with the likes of Cliff Richard a couple of years back. Now, though, we’re catching up to the AAA years and there are three semi-legal (ie they’re not bootlegs so can be sold in shops and online but aren’t strictly official or authorised) sets coming out this month all containing unreleased material from pre-1963. ‘The Beatles’ collects together all the Tony Sheridan recordings, rehearsals at the Cavern Club, early interviews with the Pete Best line up of the band and the first BBC session for ‘Teenagers Turn’ from the ‘dark period’ between failure at the Decca audition and success at EMI. The Beach Boys set features the first album ‘Surfin’ Safari’ together with over an hour’s worth of outtakes from the sessions: never released officially before, they’re quite common to bootleggers as Capitol leant their tapes out to anyone with a copying machine and weren’t as possessive of their master reels as EMI (most Beach Boys albums of the 60s are out on bootleg in this way). Finally, Janis Joplin’s set is a 1962 tape recording of a live gig back in the days before she discovered rock and roll which has only been released in part (on a few compilations and the ‘Janis’ box set). Her trademark vocals are there already even though Janis is just 17, although she’s not discovered rock and roll yet and is still singing folk tunes that don’t support her tones that well. At this rate expect a whole shedload more AAA releases next year when the ‘1963’ recordings are out of copyright!

Oh yes, in more other news, expect an April Fool’s Day column soon as usual. We’ve had part of it side-loaded to us from our parallel selves in the future and it looks to be quite an eye-opener (have your tickets at the ready on April 1st please...)
In the meantime, as ever we draw your attention to the following link which will provide you entry to all the latest AAA new stories of the week...

http://paper.li/f-1347835090