The AAA Review Of The Year 2025

 

Welcome, dear readers, to another yearly review. Think of it as your time-travelling almanac taking you all the way from ash-filled Pompeii in 79 AD to the mid-1990s heyday of Oasis and The Beatles Anthology to a bar in Prague 2025 for a drink with Roger Waters . Along the way there are more (alas disappointing) Beatle box sets, more (alas disappointing) Neil Young releases and a definite rise in the pricey box sets of underwhelming albums because everything else has been re-released already. I mean, I get it: in the modern day streaming brings in pennies to most of these guys not pounds, so the only way artists can make ‘proper’ money is through over-priced concert tickets or massive box sets released to the faithful. But it really feels as if we’ve reached a tipping point this year, with fans of many bands finally putting their foot down and saying ‘enough is enough’: these record companies have to understand that fans don’t have the money either and making things more expensive each and every year ,means they’re reaching a point where very few can afford this stuff and almost no one new is buying it.    

It’s been a year particularly low on new music with only one album of new material – and the Neil Young record ‘Talkin’ To The Trees’ does feel a bit recycled in any case. It’s very much been Oasis’ year, with the unexpected reunion promised last year not only lasting the course but even adding lots of extended dates: needless to say there’s a tonne of Oasis re-releases in this year (all of them the same as they were thirty years ago though, alas). Otherwise it’s been a particularly busy year for Pink Floyd, it’s always a busy year for the Grateful Dead and Neil Young year after year and everyone else has been a bit quiet. It’s been a particularly sad year for my Moody Blues and Beach Boys readers too, after the unexpected and deeply sad deaths of John Lodge and Brian Wilson, heroes both. As with other turbulent years we turn to The Beatles for comfort as they always make everything better – well, everything but our bank balances. This year even that seems to have gone wrong though: for the first time ever the Beatles, Lennon, McCartney and at least one of the Harrison releases out this year are strictly underwhelming (thank goodness for a late flurry from the late period George albums or I’d be plugging the vinyl re-issue of flipping Ringo’s  1982 album ‘Stop and Smell The Roses’ (the one with Stephen Stills, Ronnie Wood and two more of the fab four) as the closest to a Beatle must buy of the year – I still say it’s his best after all (and a fellow Ringo vinyl re-issue ‘Choose Love’ his fourth best). Even if, with all due reverence to the drummer, that just shows up what a rum bunch the other sets this year are).

And we have needed comfort: An orang-u-tang with grandeur in the White House who promised to end all wars but seems to have made the existing ones worse and kicked off a couple of new ones for good measure, government shutdowns, rising prices, stalled wages, AI taking over our jobs (surely we want robots to do our menial tasks so we can be creative, not have robots be creative so we’re stuck doing menial jobs?), the rise of far-right grifters in the polls the world over, racists who have convictions for domestic assault shouting at people in hotels, the continued rise of covid deaths that almost nobody is talking about…it’s not really been a year filled with much happiness. But there is hope: Trump is slipping (he beat his own record of lowest presidential popularity on record the other day, don’t let him forget about his best friend Geoffrey Epstein), Farage is slipping (I can’t remember the last time a party that wasn’t in power lost ten whole points in the space of a year, don’t let him forget about his racist behaviour as a teen), people are beginning to see through the lies of these charlatans and realise that the 1960s ideal of being nice to each other might actually be a good thing. There’s been a definite lack of hippie utopia in this year’s selection, weirdly for a year dominated by the numbers ‘6-7’ (no, I don’t really get why that took off either). Instead everyone seems to be angry at the state of the world and each other, whether on new releases damning Trump and Musk and Vance and Farrage and all or archive sets from forty odd years ago (The Who have never sounded as punk as they do on parts of the ‘Who Are You?’ box while the emphasis on Oasis’ 1994 beginnings are a welcome reminder how tough they uses to be before 15 years of more polished productions, touring and age made them bloated). That’s coming though: after a year of living dystopia we deserve our utopias. The next few years are going to be good I’m sure of it, we just have to survive whatever it takes to get there. Till then the best way is to turn up your headphones, block out the noise and press play!  

As for me, I know it looks from the outside as if I haven’t done much this year given that there’s been just the one book published (‘Maintenance’, book 8 of ‘Kindred Spirits’ out now folks! rebrand.ly/kz9rh63  or have a look at the sister website here Kindred Spirits ). Behind the scenes, though, there’s been lots going on: the first seven books of my scifi-romance-comedy-action-philosophy series have been re-jigged with new illustrations and bigger print, there’s a 9^th on its way (just awaiting a final draft) and a 10^th in first draft form and I have finally finished my two year project reviewing every single one of the 335 Dr Who TV stories, along with relevant books and audios ready for publication (hopefully) next year as a six-book series (I know it won’t surprise my regular readers that it’s super long and detailed! You can have a read over at the other sister blog ‘Alonsy Alien Archives’ here Alonsy Alien Archives - Dr Who 1963-2024) I will, as always, keep you up to date with everything dear readers, as I know some of you ask what I’m up to now. Till then it’s back to my original love of music and with no further ado here’s the rundown of the best and the worst of what 2024 had to offer for the thirty AAA bands:

New Releases:

1)    Pink Floyd “Live At Pompeii MCMLXXII”

Is this a ‘new release’? I mean, it is a 1972 concert recorded in the ruins of a two thousand year old Ampitheatre that’s been out on video since the 1980s (DVD since the 2000s) and whose soundtrack was first released as part of a pricey box set in 2016. But as far as I’m concerned it counts as ‘new’ because we’ve never had ‘just’ the concert soundtrack before. Because at last Pink Floyd get round to doing the sensible thing and releasing the soundtrack of their stunning concert film (one of my three best concerts ever by anyone in history). In Floyd archive terms it’s as big a bang as the volcano that made the city famous and a soundtrack which I feel as if I’ve been calling for on this site since at least the BC era. For the few fans who don’t know this show was film-maker Adrian Maben’s response to ‘Woodstock’ and the biggest concert audience seen on screen: rather than try to compete and – sensibly realising the Floyd were more about ‘absence’ than ‘presence’ – instead the band play in the ruins of the Pompeii ampitheatre to nobody except a few bemused technicians and immortal Italian ghosts. That’s something that would be a gimmick for most bands but suits the Floyd (you get the sense they would play like this every night, to no one, so committed are they to their music muses). This is a ‘new’ version too, or at least a new remix of it, replacing the 2016 version for the ‘1972:Obfus/Cation’ box set which a lot of fans didin’t like (but I did, even if I prefer both the video mix and this new one). It’s much much clearer: quite how a live concert done in a day fifty years ago can be improved this much without separation of sound goodness knows, but it’s one of the better 21^st century remix jobs around – at times it feels like you’re standing in the middle of Nick Mason’s drumkit!

If you’ve never heard it then you’re in for a treat: this is the Floyd balanced right on the edge of their ‘prog rock arty’ years and their ‘focussed, commercial’ years with the best of both, with tight thrilling renditions of some of their best songs that still have place for outrageous improvisation and daring (the full video features the band recording ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ at Abbey Road, in between musing about the state of music its relationship with technology and requests for apple pies with crusts in the canteen – sadly all missing from the CD). It is for my money the single best performance one of the greatest live bands ever gave, with extended yet perfectly formed versions of all their best material: the tale of connection across universes ‘Echoes’, split into two sections that bookmark the show, is a stunning tour de force of shimmery other-worldly poetry and rock muscle power; ‘Careful With That Axe Eugene’ is haunting and ghostly, with Roger Waters teasing and whispering before suddenly launching into a scream; ‘One Of These Days’ is utterly terrifying as the Floyd shed their theatrical inhibitions to play full throttle rock; ‘Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun’ starts off paranoid crackling with tension and winds up like a war; even the lesser avant garde suite ‘A Saucerful Of Secrets’ is performed with gusto, highlighted by David Gilmour screaming into the wilderness. Only ‘Seamus’ (here re-titled ‘Mademoiselle Nobs’ for some reason) is a – quite literal – dog of a song (and I hope the great-great-great-great-grandchildren of the guest dog – not the original from the record, who was Steve Marriott’s pup – gets a co-writing credit and some royalties as he does most of the work). Though the concert comfortably fits onto a single disc this is a two-disc set thanks to alternate takes of ‘Saucerful’ and ‘Eugene’. They’re not all that different and certainly not as good but so tight was this band in this era that they still sounded great on everything, even the outtakes. The packaging is nice too, even if it’s merely stills from the film.  

As for the film, of course you do miss the stunning visuals on CD: the juxtaposition of the Floyd’s energy and the crumbling ruins; the bubbling mud baths and forgotten statues that suit the music so well; the stunning long tracking shot that makes the Floyd look tiny even when playing at their biggest and loudest  But the music is the true star and it’s about time we had it out officially without having to take the audio off our VHSes and DVDs (which, ahem, other fans have done so I’m told!) It’s been nothing short of a crime that the Floyd’s greatest live  performance has been overlooked compared to lesser shows from the 1980s and 1990s that have been re-released over and over. But then Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither were our collections. The film hasn’t been forgotten either if you haven’t seen it, with re-issues in select cinemas: see it if you can as it’s one of the few music films that really needs to be seen on a big screen and utilises a restored version of the recently discovered original film negative (just stay safe from covid if you do). Needless to say there’s a blu-ray re-issue of it out to coincide with the soundtrack too though it’s nothing new. So head and shoulders above everything else this year I feel like not writing about anything else and just telling you to buy this but, well, let’s move on all the same.

2)    Clarence White “Melodies From A Byrd In Flyte”

Here’s one of the more intriguing ‘record store day’ releases, bundling together a hodgepodge of performances taken from right across Clarence’s all-too brief performing life of 1964 (when he was a bluegrass specialist) to his death in 1972 (when he was a rockstar going back to his roots and The Byrds had just collapsed and regrouped with the founding members leaving him out of a regular job). Divided into ‘acoustic’ and ‘electric’ halves rather than being strictly chronological, it’s the sort of album you have to be fully paid up card carrying fan to get the most out of but which if you are is a great find, the equivalent of highlights from multiple grainy bootlegs gathered together in one place. Let me reiterate: this is the sort of record to make you go ‘ooh Clarence just hit a different note midway through the solo in obscure song ‘Soldier’s Rag’ that I’ve only ever heard on a 1990s box set!’ while everyone else hears a lot of surface noise. There’s so little of Clarence around, though, and he died so tragically young (in a hit and run accident as he was unloading his guitar out of his van) that anything new is welcome and there are an impressive lot of discoveries here that were new to me or, if ot new, have never sounded this good before.

The set starts with Clarence a junior member of the ‘Eric Weissberg Company’ picking out bluegrass tunes on a guitar from a recently unearthed 1963 rehearsal tape while his boss the group was named for plays a banjo lead. Though very much the junior accompanist the nineteen-year-old Clarence is already developing his own recognisable personal style. ‘Fire On The Mountain’ is allegedly from a ‘guitar instruction’ tape and while not released it’s clear that Clarence is one hell of a teacher even as a teenager (was it left unreleased  because it made all the potential students depressed they couldn’t play like Mr White?)  A 1964 rehearsal tape of another bluegrass band Clarence passed through results in the set’s sweetest song, a slower picked instrumental ‘A Fool Such As I’ that’s really lovely, though without the credits I’d be hard placed to know that was a future Byrd playing. A 1967 tape of ‘Soldier’s Joy’ is clearly Clarence, however, playing with another short-lived band in between session dates shortly before The Byrds came a calling. That segues nicely into the part of the set that will interest Byrd collectors most: an unheard rehearsal tape from May 1970 as the Byrds got ready for the studio half of their late-period gem ‘Untitled’. There’s a sumptuous version of the exquisite reincarnation tale ‘Yesterday’s Train’ where The Byrds are locked in so tight it feels they’ve known each other in an earlier life and it’s a welcome discovery, if an odd one to release here given that Gene Parsons is the obvious star (as writer, singer, drummer and harmonica player; Clarence just plays guitar). Clarence did at least co-write ‘Green Apple Quickstep’ and takes the lead on another fun instrumental, although the rest of the latter-day Byrds are lagging a bit behind (perhaps the reason why this song was held over for the next album ‘Byrdmaniax’ rather than released like this in 1970). Parsons then returns for the unreleased instrumental ‘Cripple Creek’ which features him again taking lead on a banjo while Clarence plays the mandolin (and McGuinn plays a guitar). The first side then ends with ‘Alabama Jubilee’, taped in the final days of Clarence’s life, as he tries to pick up where he left off by returning to his bluegrass roots with future Manassas violinist Byron Berline playing some particularly fine fiddle.

The electric side is a tad more ordinary but still interesting. The side starts with a 1967 recording by ‘Nashville West’, the band Clarence and Gene Parsons were in across the mid 1960s, with covers of future Byrd favourites ‘Buckaroo’ and ‘Nashville West’ itself, as well as a new recording I’d not heard them do, Bobbie Gentry’s ‘Ode To Billie Joe’. It’s all a bit ordinary and grounded compared to the full flight of later Byrd shows, but then it is another rehearsal tape. We then switch to yet another extract of the fiery Byrds jam from 1971 titled ‘White’s Lightning’ when extracted on the 1990 ‘Byrds’ box set (but called ‘Byrd Jam’ here) – more extracts have turned up over the years (on the second Byrds box set ‘There Is A Season’ and a Clarence comp) but this is a fourth extract, making me wonder a) just how many hours this jam lasted for and b) if I’ll ever live long enough to collect enough compilations to put the whole thing together.  There’s a second unheard Byrd jam ‘Around The Barn’ taped in 1969 that’s really Clarence and Gene goofing off (the lyrics never get any further than the title) – fun to hear though and far worthier of release than most of the supposedly ‘fun’ novelty songs on the last couple of Byrd LPs! The set then ends with a classic: Clarence as part of a band backing the wonderful Everly Brothers during a break from The Byrds in April 1969. This is the gap between the duo’s better late period albums ‘Roots’ and the brilliantly titled ‘Pass The Chicken And Listen’ when they were flirting with country and rock and their sound suits Clarence’s playing perfectly for the aspirited ‘I’m On My Way Home Again’, a real highlight of both discographies that’s well overdue for release. Gene Parsons is on banjo too, while the recording notes claim that’s Gram Parsons on guitar: surely not? It seems unlikely that the man preening himself into country rock’s next big thing (due to solo albums and The Flying Burrito Brothers), who famously didn’t turn up to his own recording sessions half the time, would hang around as a guitarist in a backing band. If so,  however, it would mark the only recording where both Byrd ‘Parsons’ play together (though it sounds more like Roger McGuinn’s playing to me I have to say). Shockingly the Everlys bypassed this lively version for a really boring cut made without any Byrdian help as one of many flop singles in 1969 (and the duo split before releasing it on record, though there’s no sign of that here with their good-natured joking between takes).All in all a really nice collection of unheard vintage rarities, albeit in sometimes wowy muffled sound and with a few unfocussed jams in there, not to mention a few tracks that have precious little to do with Clarence at all. For Byrd fans starved of product, though, it’s a must hear and the best of it is a tribute to what a fine and groundbreaking player Clarence was on banjo and guitar and what a tragedy his premature death was for everyone in the music business. He should have lived to do another twenty of these compilations (actually there’s at least another set that could be put together already thanks to Clarence’s sessions for the likes of The Monkees and indeed The Byrds before he joined them).

3)    Grateful Dead “Enjoying The Ride”

When other bands release a ‘best of’ compilation they tend to go for one disc – maybe two if they were particularly active during a longer period. Trust the Dead to release a behemoth: twenty-nine shows from seventeen venues spread across sixty discs (seventeen complete shows and twelve ‘highlights’  to pad out the discs), making this the most epic Dead release since ‘Europe 72 and it’s overgrown suitcase. Usually it’s pretty obvious who these limited release shows are for: the committed Deadheads with money to burn and a second home they can fill with box sets. This one is a bit different though: for the casual fan the price tag is a bit too high, the limited edition number of 6000 is that bit stingier than normal and yet a good half of these concerts are famous gigs which every true Deadhead knows better than their own children (naturally named Jack Straw, Black Peter, Bertha and Althea after the songs). Of course if you don’t have these gigs and you aren’t planning to, you know, eat for the next few months then this is indeed the way to hear them, in gorgeous spruced up sound (even the shows that are out officially have never sounded as good as this) and with some gorgeous packaging, featuring extensive sleevenotes and a wooden box with a skull bearing compass points (because this is kind of the ‘I Ching’ of Dead boxes: whatever direction your life is heading in you’ll find a show for you here).

Now before your mortgage your house and buy it a few caveats. You have to wonder, though, why the few remaining shows that haven’t been out before weren’t kept for individual release to a wider market as a way of getting newer Deadheads onboard rather than as a colossus only the lucky few can afford. The weird hodgepodge of styles doesn’t help either: officially this is a collection of ‘gigs at favourite venues’ but if the band had stuck with shows at the same venue across 20-30 years and shown how they’d evolved over time that would have made more sense than unreleased shows from thirty odd different venues. And why not cover the whole trip with a gig from ach year, the way they have with other sets, rather than skip the years till 1969 (which gets two) and a few other notable absences along the way (nothing from 1970, 1974 or 1975 weirdly. There’s nothing from 1982, 1986 or 1988 either mind, but that’s probably for the best). There are some odd points of contention here too: I would never pick the Dead’s comparatively safe three-day run at the Filmore West from June 1969 over the cosmic exploration of their five-day run there in February for instance (though it does contain the set’s biggest and arguably only rarity: the band’s lone performance of ‘Checkin’ Up On My Baby’, with special guest Elvin Bishop jamming along – sadly The Beach Boys crossover part of the show is cut from the April 27^th 1969 Filmore East gig), while by their high standards the choice of shows from 1971-73 are fairly ordinary. Surely, too, only the Deadheads who discovered the band during the 1980s and 1990s would agree with having twelve whole shows from that era (even if some of them, like the Boston Garden show from October 1994, are amongst the better choices of the era officially available so far). The weirdest decision of the lot comes at the start of the run: there are no gigs from 1965-1968 when the Dead were finding their feet, even though there are several from that last year and the release of ‘Anthem Of The Sun’ in particular that knock the spots off anything here.

Still score so highly this year? For the first show. The greatest gig of the whole set – and oen of the best I’ve ever heard the Dead play (and bear in mind that amounts to over 500 shows now) comes at the beginning of this set, with a superb if rather murky sounding gig taped at the Avalon Ballroom on April 5^th 1969, big on Pigpen and blues numbers and thumpy drumming with a particularly explosive second set that’s expressive and emotional, featuring a near-definitive and really fierce ‘That’s It For The Other One’, a ‘Death Don’t Have No Mercy’ that alternates between gasped whispers and screams of feedback and a crazy hazy free-for-all ‘Viola Lee Blues’ that sounds more like the band have been put through the electric chair than the usual life sentence in solitary (goodness knows what was happening that day but I don’t think I’ve ever heard Jerry Garcia’s guitar playing being quite such a direct link to his nervous system, his guitar practically howling through an extended first section of the song). It’s one of the greatest Dead releases in years, perhaps a decade, so why oh why is it relegated to being a ‘bonus’ gig, only available as a cassette ‘bonus’? Please Dead, I’d be ever so grateful if you could release this show separately. Sure the sound is lo-fi but since when did that matter when the music is as great as this?!

There are some other good gigs here too, all from the middle years of the set. The Winterland Arena show from March 20^th 1977 is brilliant in a very different way: it’s a thoughtful, reflective, dare I say it ‘professional’ gig from the year when the Dead were perhaps at their greatest peak as showmen. A Spectrum show from May 1978 is the best gig out from that troubled year so far: Jerry and pianist Keith Godchaux have thrown off their addiction demons long enough to sparkle on the same day (a rarity on that tour) with a particularly thrilling circus ride round ‘Terrapin Station’ back when the song was new enough to be exciting. Despite its reputation as a poor ‘bedding in’ year with the Dead in free-for-all you wouldn’t know that from the Red Rocks, Colorado show of August 1979 either,  with new boy Brent Mydland sounded almost sweet and angelic rather than the gravel-voiced keyboardist of later years. There’s a really nice gig from Hartford Civic Centre on March 14^th 1981, too, with Bob Weir in particularly fine form as he steps into the spotlight to take over from a fading Jerry (who nevertheless gets it together long enough to play some beautiful guitar solos across the set). Full marks, too, for including the July 15^th 1984 gig at Berkley University, California, rather than one of the more obvious and famous earlier shows: this saw the first ‘Dark Star’ for years, during the performance of which a shooting star could be seen in the night skies over the arena: sadly you don’t get to see that on this CD but it is clearly a special night with all the cosmic circles in alignment. A cheeky note, too, for the infamous moment Jerry decided to base ‘Space’ round the phrase from the alien contact in the ‘Close Encounters Of The Third Kind’ film the night of July 15^th 1989 at Deer Creek, Indiana, that’s also gone down in Dead folklore. As for the rest of the later gigs, depending on how you look at it, they are either evidence of fading talent as the Dead struggled through some difficult years or moments of sudden surprising sparkle through the quagmire, depending how many of these shows you own/sat through. Which brings us back again to the question of who this set is for: if you’re enough of a Deadhead to buy this set then you know all that already. So why release it as a ‘best of’ in the first place? $1500/£1330ish is a lot of money to spend after all and this set could have been a lot lot better– and yet, for all its faults, the ‘Avalon’ set alone makes this box indispensible, with those shows from 1978-81 as a nice bonus.

Three CDs’ worth of highlights were released as ‘The Music Never Stopped’ and most of the choices are sensible, covering each of the gigs with at least one track and more often than not the best track into the bargain. At $25 it’s a considerable saving. However you have to ask who this set is for too: every Deadhead I know is a completist who knows that more is, well, more and who sneer at compilations (see below). Be warned as well: the concerts aren’t featured chronologically and the jumping between the very jazzy 1960s Dead to the country-folky early 1970s Dead, the late 1970s more polished sound and the very syth heavy 1980s/1990s twist can be incredibly jarring. 

Other Dead shows release this year include ‘Dave’s Picks Volume 53’ (yet another gig from May 1977, this time from New York’s Palladium on May 4^th that’s pretty good but not the best of the era run by any means, highlighted by a particularly sprightly seventeen minute ‘Scarlet > Fire’ and a noisy twenty-five minute ‘Playin’ In The Band’ separated by –of all things – the sleepy ballad ‘Comes A Time’), ‘Dave’s Picks Volume 54’ (a show at the Baltimore Civic Centre on March 26^th 1973, a better-than-average gig with keyboardist Keith Godchaux on particularly fine form, one of the first ‘Us Blues’es back when it was still called ‘Wave That Flag’, a tearful ‘He’s Gone’ very soon after losing Pipgen, a rare period Phil Lesh lead vocal on a poignant ‘Box Of Rain’ and Bob comparing the show to a ‘roller derby’!), Dave’s Picks Volume 55’ (an up-and-down recording from a rare show in Paris on October 28^th 1990 that’s a bit by numbers but welcome to hear given how comparatively few archive sets are out with final keyboardist Vince Welnick and guest Bruce Horsnby, who has a lot of showcases for his honky tonk sound here. A pretty ‘Cassidy’, a melancholic ‘Candyman’ and yet another ‘Box Of Rain’ are the highlights in a show that has a lot of blues covers in the setlist tonight. This must be one of the most atonal and unlistenable ‘Drums’ around though).

Not forgetting ‘Dave’s Picks 56’, the first two out of four shows from a rare visit to London and the Rainbow Theatre in March 1981. By rights this should probably be the Dead release picked out as the highlight of the year but, well, it came out right near the end of 2025 when I’d already written heaps about the mammoth box set so, well, just bear this in mind if a) you can’t afford the big release (Who can? Even my copy was on loan) and b) you have a soft spot for 1980s Dead. Normally I don’t as a rule: Jerry gets audibly slower and slower across the decade until falling into a diabetic coma and having to re-learn how to play the guitar all over again from scratch, while new boy Brent Mydland adds some distinctly period sounds to a band who are in every other way timeless. But 1981 represented a mini renaissance for the Dead: Brent has had a couple of years to get to grips with the sound, Jerry is perhaps in his last year of being consistently brilliant and Bob Weir is by now practiced at filling in for his old buddy and leading from the front so we effectively get two great band ‘leaders’ in this period (in as much as anyone in the Dead led anything). I’m surprised more shows haven’t been released from this year but this is easily the best so far, especially the second night when the band sparkle pretty much all the way through. Oftentimes the Dead don’t travel that well and play the few foreign shows they did as if they’re suffering from jetlag but here they’re bright and punchy, with more uptempo songs than usual which all neatly run into one another. Even songs that often drag like ‘Peggy-O’ ‘Tennessee Jed’ ‘Ship Of Fools’ and ‘Black Peter’ (songs I admit I often skip on my regular go-to concerts) are played with verve. There’s maybe the best ‘Little Red Rooster’ of the lot (often played too fast or too slow but here just right) with a haunting Garcia guitar solo, a barnstorming ‘Althea’ (then the newest original in the set), Bob Hunter’s tale of warning to his old mate Jerry about his growing addiction that’s played as a cathartic howl rather than a memory and a downright creepy ‘Space’ that’s suitably ‘out of this world’. Not many rarities in the set lists though, bar a surprise encore of ‘Don’t Ease Me In’, a favourite from the start of the Dead’s career fifteen years earlier they weren’t often playing come the 1980s.  Of course there’s always a downside: the first show isn’t bad by any means but it isn’t anywhere near as good as the second, taking a while for the band to warm up who are a little slower and a tad clumsier across the first half,  though it’s worth hearing for a terrific ‘Deal’ alone, played at an absolutely blistering pace. Mostly though maybe they should have just released the second show and made it cheaper? Alternatively, all four shows of the London run are at least decent (the first is the worst) and each are pretty different so, given the amount of four-show Dead sets around, it seems obvious they should have released them all together. The running length also means that a funky ‘US Blues’ from the first night has been cut altogether (will it end up on a box with shows three and four one day?) Oh and be warned for two of Weir’s worst gags yet, one about a frog in a blender and that old gag ‘What do you say to a one-legged hitch-hiker? Hop in (!)’ Overall, though, this is a classic set and perhaps my second favourite of the 1980s in the entire archive series so far (behind the tiny rarity-filled gig that was billed as ‘Formerly The Warlocks’).         

4)    The Who “Live At The Oval 1971”

In 1971 The ‘Orrible ‘Oo’s manager Kit Lambert was keen for his band to be accepted as ‘establishment’ and used his links in posh gentlemen’s clubs to secure his boys gigs at all sorts of unlikely places. In the wake of rock opera ‘Tommy’ being played at the Royal Albert Hall comes their oddest gig yet: Lords cricket ground, part of a run of ‘after shows’ that followed George Harrison’s concerts for ‘Bangla Desh’ in raising money for famine relief. It’s a bit of sticky wicket in many ways: the band never sound fully at ease and it’s a messy show by their standards, played in a venue whose acoustics clearly doesn’t suit the band’s rock sound and its all too clearly recorded unprofessionally on a hand held tape recorder with a sound that’s not always, well, cricket. Even so, there are so few live Who documents from their golden period around that even the worst of them are special and even if this isn’t the best one it’s still special and historically significant: they were the first band ever to play on such hallowed turf and the Bangla Desh shows remain the first ‘true’ charity gigs in rock and roll, where bands knew from the first they weren’t going to get paid (as opposed to a few gigs where they only found later when something went wrong!) The Who play all the old warhorses with their usual panache, but it’s the comparative newbies from ‘Who’s Turn next as Kid Jenson calls it!’ (or so Roger says) that are most interesting to hear and throw a few googlies into the mix: a slightly leaden but heartfelt ‘Love Ain’t For Keeping’, a slowed-down ‘Bargain’, a beautiful ‘Behind Blue Eyes’ (‘This song’s for you who are blind and can’t see me fancy outfit!’ jokes Pete under the bright spotlights), a decidedly angry ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ (introduced by Pete yelling his head off) and a song that didn’t make the album but should have done, a creepy ‘Naked Eye’. Some of the other songs run a bit wide though (especially the selections from ‘Tommy’ weirdly, given that they’d been played more or less continuously for a couple of years by now). It will never replace ‘Live At Leeds’ in fans’ eyes and it’s amazing to think this sloppy unrehearsed band are the same one just months down the line, their ridiculous telepathy gone, but any 1970s Who set has the band knocking you for six and this is all far too good to remain in the vaults all these years. Howzat? Not bad at all, certainly enough here to bowl a few Who maidens over.   

5)    Neil Young “Coastal”

That Darryl Hannah.  Neil only needs to sneeze and she seems to want to whip her camera out to record it, so it’s no surprise that she was along for the ride to capture Neil’s second (ish) tour since (sensibly) pausing for covid (Neil remains the last artist testing and tending to lay either outdoor or smaller indoor gigs. Croz, after all, would still be here if not for covid and as a polio survivor he’s well aware what viruses can do to the body) The documentary film, in arty black and white, is much as you’d expect, with not much happening stretched across a long period of time, punctuated by a few moments on stage when the muse decides to show (but not often enough for them to have filmed it and charged people money for it). I haven’t reviewed Coastal under the DVD section because I’ve still only seen bits of it: the film died a death before even I could get to see it, but I am assured by my fellow fans that the twenty minutes or so that I did see reflects the rest. The resulting soundtrack album is even more perfunctory, yet another modern dodgy Young live set that we don’t really need from another tour that was more about the joy of reconnecting with audiences again rather than any musical worth.

At least this one has some more innaresting choices than usual though, inspired by Neil’s lockdown spent going through the vaults and reconnecting with old songs he hadn’t heard in years for his various ‘Archives’ boxes: ‘Vampire Blues’, the yawned slowie from ‘On The Beach’ has been revived as an angular punk song, and there’s a bunch of songs from the overlooked Crazy Horse album ‘Sleeps With Angels’ and the Pearl Jam collaboration ‘Mirrorball’ that are well worth hearing again live: ‘Prime Of Life’ is now given an a capella opening and played to one grungy guitarline, ‘Throw Your Hatred Down’ is transformed from grunge powerfest to a tearful acoustic ballad with a plea for universal love and kindness, the world’s only grunge sea shanty about abortion ‘Song X’ is now sadder and more thoughtful rather than pure sarcasm – though it has barely any words in this version - and ‘I’m The Ocean’ works particularly well in raggedy acoustic form rather than manic grunge. The only other surprise is Buffalo Springfield’s ‘Expecting To Fly’, now a piano instrumental which doesn’t quite work (or indeed sound anything like the original orchestrated classic). The highlight though is an old friend often played, a sad and sorrowful ‘Comes A Time’, once Neil’s most (only?) upbeat song, about his growing relationship with wife Pegi, now sung as a sighing pained ballad about yesteryear with a real wobble in Neil’s voice. Best to skip the modern stuff though which sounds even worse than on the main records: ‘Don’t Forget Love’ (the emptiest song in Neil’s canon, from 2021’s ‘Barn’ which lasts barely seconds. ‘That’s the whole song right there’ a sheepish Neil confesses to a disbelieving crowd), while ‘Love Earth’ (from 2022’s forgettable ‘World Record’) sounds even tweer (though there’s a fun moment when Neil asks the crowd ‘what’s your favourite planet?’  Mine is Zigorous 3 as you’re asking, Neil!) All in all it’s a smidge better than ‘Road Rocks’ and ‘Noise and Flowers’ and worth hearing for the redemption it gives to Neil’s 1990os catalogue, but pathetic compared to the real gems of the concert Young catalogue ‘Live Rust’ ‘Weld’ and ‘Year Of The Horse’. 

6)    Neil Young “Talkin’ To The Trees”

Welcome to the one lone release of new entirely new material in this entire column. I confess that, even though I’ve reviewed maybe a hundred Neil Young records and should be used to the unpredictability by now, this one took me by surprise. The reviews will tell you that this is angry Neil, that it’s a rant against Trump to equal his notorious diatribes against Nixon and Bush Jnr, with the fire of ‘Ohio’ and ‘Living With War’ and ‘The Monsanto Years’, Neil using his guitar as a rock bludgeon. It certainly sounded angry and bitter on first listen, all open aggressive chords and fiery chaos. But a second listen makes it sound more like ‘On The Beach’, the lost and confused album of 1974 when everyone Neil had believed in had let him down, from his president to his friends and loved ones. It’s Neil at his most troubled and confused, living in a world that really isn’t the way he thought it would be when he was, well, young – it’s an album about things slipping through your fingers, where Neil is more lost and unsure in old age than he ever was as a driven youth, spending his days talking to the trees ‘waiting for the answer’ – and never quite getting one back (the album is surely named for the Clint Eastwood song in ‘Paint Your Wagon’). Then again on a third listen it’s full of lyrics that are the most vulnerable and open that we’ve had since the guitarist nearly died of a brain aneurysm and suddenly started opening up about his mum and dad on ‘Prairie Wind’, full of tales of home and hearth and family love. Somehow all these different emotions come through a strainer as something new: an album that’s angry about feeling disillusioned with memories of how life should have been but which, unlike those past crusading records of old, doesn’t quite know who to shout at and isn’t at all sure it’ll do any good.

It’s an album of contradictions, an emotional record that’s somehow detached, the first time we’ve heard Neil this moved without the fire and passion that makes these songs come alive (give or take parts of ‘Are You Passionate?’, a record that would have been passionate had it not been re-recorded to death). Usually when Neil has something on his mind it comes over loud and proud, but Neil hasn’t quite teased out what he’s feeling yet with so many feelings playing on his mind at once and so they kind of cancel each other out. This record is too depressed to be truly angry as per ‘Living With War’, too restless to be a slow-motion retreat into depression as per ‘On The Beach’, too dark to be a family album like ‘Harvest Moon’ or ‘Prairie Wind’, too light to be a long dark night of the soul as per Neil at his best. So nothing quite feels like it matters, even though it clearly matters a lot to Neil. It’s that meme ‘old man shouts at cloud’, only it’s ‘Neil Young shouts at cloud’ and the old man is taking a look at his life and wondering why he isn’t a lot like he used to be. That goes double for the backing band, with ‘The Chrome Hearts’ really an augmented ‘Promise Of The Real’, the band of youngsters led by Willie Nelson’s son Lucas that Neil’s been alternating with Crazy Horse, with old time pianist Spooner Oldham along for the ride. Messier than the Horse and without the ramshackle charm, they still haven’t played with Neil enough to read his every telepathic move and it sounds as if Young has kept to his ‘first take, only take’ policy to the extreme again here. So that’s songs about feelings Neil doesn’t fully understand yet, played by a band who don’t really know these songs yet either. No wonder it’s messy. On first hearing and being hit by what sounds like electric noise interspersed by the odd recycled sounding acoustic tune, I was ready to throw the record away.

Like many of Neil’s recent efforts, though, this album is a grower and the more you realise that this record of sharp edges and blurred thoughts is a reflection of its creator’s confusion rather than a sloppy error designed to annoy the listener a la ‘Everybody’s Rockin’ or ‘Landing On Water’ the more you begin to admire it. Though the music is to be truthful pretty awful, with no standout melodies and nothing to stay in your head once the record’s over, the lyrics are a pretty powerful if simplistic bunch that have moved away from the more immediate but often one-dimensional politics and love songs of the recent records. It’s kind of inside out compared to normal too: the softer gentler more timid songs tend to be the political ones about the outside world and the more unhinged electric ones are the ones about family – a shock to anyone who’s come to this album from ‘Comes A Time’ ‘Harvest Moon’ or ‘Prairie Wind’ on the one hand or ‘Monsanto’ or ‘Living With War’ on the other. I’m not entirely sure it works as it still feels like it’s the wrong way round even after you get to know the album well (the family songs and indeed the family deserve a lighter, more understanding touch, while if ever there was a time we needed Neil at full throttle taking down our mutual enemies in power the time is now), but at least it’s different and something Neil hasn’t really done before (at least not across a whole album). Even having the two together is new-ish: traditionally Neil likes to keep his concept albums separate, using a whole album to talk about GMO crops then never going near the subject again for instance, but this one is like ‘Freedom’ with blurred boundaries so that what sounds like a ‘family’ song is also about ‘politics’ with verses about nature or cars suddenly turning up. It’s as if everything that’s confusing and wrong about the world is being reflected at home and it’s all part of one vicious cycle. That all means that ‘Talk To The Trees’ at least has a bit more to talk about than recent more one-note albums, all of which have been coasting a little, just repeats of what we’ve had before with the power turned down (including ‘Coastal’ funnily enough) and for all its many faults at least ‘Trees’ has its own identity, even if it’s a confused identity that’s all been muddled together. That all means subtle changes to the myriad styles on offer too, however much The Chrome Hearts play with all the subtlety of a baboon with a baseball bat. Far from the usual forest of similar song you never know from track to track if this one is going to be a mighty oak, a burnt ash or a weeping willow which is kind of fun, even if, of the ten tracks on the album, only one is even close to being a ‘classic’ (lower odds than even ‘Barn’ or ‘World Record’ which had a couple each, while I’ll remain on my hill that 2017’s ‘The Visitors’ is a great record that got a bit lost). 

The record starts off with a one-two punch predominantly about difficulties at home. ‘Family Life’ starts off as a sweet and very Neil song about how the ever mercurial Neil doesn’t know where the muse will take him, whether his songs are long are short, but that he keeps coming back to family regardless as the one reliable thing in his life. There’s a sweet mention of Ben, his son with cerebral palsy who must be in his forties now, greeting Neil with a smile and how proud Neil is of Zeke, his firstborn who’s a decade older and starting over himself, ‘growing tall and strong and free’ with his new girlfriend. But then you realise that Neil’s moved on and stopped being happy and sounds sad. No more than that, he sounds angry. No more than that, he sounds unhinged. Neil’s singing for his grandchildren Ronan and Aaliyah to hear – because Neil can’t tell them directly how he feels, given that he’s been barred access to them by their mum, his daughter Amber. The song tries to switch gears into being a love song to wife Daryl but the bitterness has choked Neil too much for it to sound like one, the song ending with a barbed comment that he’s still really singing to daughter Amber Jean, even though the two aren’t speaking and he knows she’ll never hear it. For those who don’t know the full story Darryl isn’t as new on the scene as Neil liked to make it appear – he’s known her for decades since they met at a protest march when he was still married to Amber’s mum Pegi, possibly as early as the 1980s, while living something of a double life. Amber hasn’t quite forgiven her dad for breaking up the family home yet and, honestly, I don’t entirely blame her. The thing is, though, Neil doesn’t know who to be mad at. Is he really angry at his daughter? Or at himself for being the cause of making her sad? This whole song sounds like him going to Amber ‘well both your brothers understand it so why don’t you?!’ The difference, of course, is that Ben lives in the moment and Zeke is in a similar position in his own life, but Amber inherited her dad’s triple Scorpio genes and isn’t quite ready to forgive and forget just yet. Give it time, Neil, it’s not really her fault. Across different twirls from his guitar ‘Old Black’ Neil seems to change his mind how he feels with every line, the song caught halfway between wanting to continue a bitter feud and looking guiltily in the mirror. Typically for Neil what should be the happiest line (‘When I sing it for my wife, who I love and adore’) is set to the chord progression that sounds the most bitter, the furthest away from the safety of the home key where he started. I still can’t tell if the fact everything is so woefully out of tune is a side effect of Neil’s method of recording or a clever take on the fact that everything in Neil’s life suddenly feels out of tune. The result is jarring at first but maybe the album’s second best song once you get used to it.

‘Dark Mirage’ is an angrier take on the same subject, a grunge blues with a mocking chorus that sounds as if it’s come from the very depths of hell. But once again,who is it laughing at? Who is it trapped in the dark and not seeing clearly? Is it the estranged daughter again, who’s got the wrong end of the stick and ‘can really go low’ (she must have got it from dad), calling Neil out as ‘stealin’ daddy’ but who ‘won’t say what I stole’? Once again Neil boasts ‘I still got my boy!’ and two verses about how well they get on, as if to say ‘see?!? You’re on your own Amber!’ And yet it’s another case of the guilty man who protests his innocence too much. Is the one seeing mirages Neil himself again, who’s been left vulnerable ‘with nowhere to hide’, who sings the entire song with the guilty sound of someone who’s just been caught doing something wrong and who is only pretending to themselves everything is fine? Neil tells us that Pegi ‘had a wish and I want to make that wish come true’ – but it’s typical of this album that after confessing to the darker stuff we never find out what that wish is. There’s a neat bit of grunge busking in the middle that sounds like Neil trying to physically fight his way out of the tight web the Chrome Hearts are building around him, but again this take is almost wilfully painful and raggedy and out of tune. It’s also a little odd hearing such venom, usually reserved for the lowest of the low, unleashed on someone who used to inspire Neil’s prettiest songs (‘Amber Jean’ from ‘A Treasure’ is, well, a treasure) and who doesn’t seem to have done much wrong. I mean, Neil went through exactly this and had a rocky relationship with his own dad (the sports writer Scott Young) who all but abandoned him, his mum and brother for a new life. Neil knows what this feels like but there’s no olive branch, no sense of understanding, just a cackle that at least Neil’s still got his sons, as if they were the only ones that mattered to him anyway.

It sounds as if ‘Trees’ is going to carry on with family politics for the full album, but instead it switches styles for a nature song ‘First Fire Of Winter’. The title suggests warmth in times of coldness, while the melody is almost note for note a straight repeat of ‘Helpless’, the CSNY song from ‘Déjà vu’ about the beauty of a Canadian childhood in nature.  This time though the woods are metaphorical and Neil is helpless not so much at the beauty of nature as its fierceness. He senses a lion out the corner of his eye waiting to pounce, while he admits to having ‘fears of what might happen’ around the bend in a forest that once seemed so safe.  What ought by rights to be a terrifying song though is played gently and placidly, perhaps a little too successfully reflecting Neil’s attempts to calm his loved one’s nerves and promise that ‘I will be there for you when the nightmares end’. Like ‘Dark Mirage’ Neil’s lost in the fog of his own making, but here he sounds less urgent about being lost, taking things one foot at a time and, honestly. Some of the most poignant lyrics on the album alas soon become repetitive, while like most everything else on this record it’s hard to know what Neil means by it all. Is he scared but pretending to sound brave? Or wise enough to know that dangers lurk in the forest so he’s being sensibly cautious? A bit more get up and go might have got this song going, but it’s too similar to ‘Helpless’ to come off without being anywhere near as pretty or heartfelt.

Against all odds ‘Silver Eagle’ is an acoustic version of ‘Motor City’, that ugly 1980s Reaganist tale of how America has to pull its socks up and make the working classes work harder to compete with other countries’ exports (itself half-stolen from Woody Guthrie’s ‘Your Land Is My Land’). It’s much sweeter though, another ‘Long May You Run’ about one of Neil’s beloved vehicles that has run its last mile after decades of faithful service. I’m not sure which vehicle it is, though the mention of ‘Trailways’ suggests it’s the old faithful tour bus that’s travelled round the globe a good few times (and inspired a few earlier songs too). Neil stretches the song out as a metaphor for roads travelled and lost, remembering old friends getting behind the wheel who got off the bus along the way and how he always felt ‘free’ when inside his motor home, reflecting how the bus will always ‘be part of me’ even when rusting on a side road on his ranch. While I much prefer it to the similar and far more cynical ‘Long May You Run’ (a song that never clicked with me), it’s all oddly passionless and static for a Neil ‘car’ song, without the sense of movement or love that the lyrics would imply. It’s also a second song in a row that’s recycled a melody wholesale.

And then just to rub it in we get a second song based around the same borrowed melody! A lot of fans have assumed ‘Let’s Roll Again’ is a sequel to ‘Let’s Roll’, the 9/11 song from ‘Are You Passionate?’ that a lot of fans seem to loathe (perhaps because it plays into the Bush ‘retaliate, even against the wrong people who don’t have weapons of mass destruction’ vibe, even though it’s clearly about the terrorists themselves rather than any country they come from). Mostly this is another car song, at one with the rather flimsy one dimensional songs from ‘Fork In The Road’ about Neil switching from petrol to electric to save the planet (an idea partly abandoned when a stray spark burnt down the barn it was being kept in!) but once again a song on this album won’t stay in its box. As with ‘Motor City’ we get a repeat of that horrible verse about America being beaten by China and should pull its socks up with a cry of how ‘that’s hard to swallow’ (why has Neil gone back to being patriotic all over again? He’s Canadian ‘by the way’, which makes his nationalistic flag beating during a time of Trump when most Americans I know are pretending to be Canadian all the weirder). Neil sounds both defeated (‘get electric – it doesn’t matter’) and as passionate as ever (‘If you’re a fascist get a Tesla’ he cackles, from the days when Elon Musk was still the lackey of Trump rather than another person the president stabbed in the back). ‘Build something useful that people need’ the song concludes, but we never find out what that is: there’s no ‘Rockin’ In the Free World’ verse about how the real people are suffering while our overlords get us to bitch about the minor petty details that would make this song come alive.  For once on this album, too, this switching of gears just doesn’t work as the whole thing is too muddled to understand and having that awful melody played a second time in a row only even more out of tune makes for easily the weakest song on the album.

‘Big Change’ was the album single released ahead of the album and advertised as Neil socking it to Trump big time. On that score it’s a huge flop: there’s nothing in this song directly about the ‘False Trumpet’ (as Nostradamus seems to have called the orange one) and it’s mostly empty sloganeering sounding too doubtful to inspire the listener to anger the way that ‘Ohio’ or most of ‘Monsanto’ and ‘War’ do. Some of this song does indeed take pot shots at what Trump’s done to make America gullible again and ‘looking for a collision’ while dreaming of a successor ‘trying to say something new’ (if Trump gets his wish and changes the constitution to run for a third term that doesn’t stop some old and genuinely popular hands from having a go. I half expected the verse ‘Maybe it’s Obama, though they say that he’s too old’ for past times’ sake given that ‘Living With Wart’ was so early to the Obama train it was the first time I’d heard of him). But it’s the sound of a man (at least temporarily) defeated, with one eye on the newspapers to check he’ll be let back into the country after going on tour, who isn’t quite sure how we get the orange ratbag out of office. The mood is so very different to ‘Already Great’, the Trump baiting tale of taking to the streets from ‘The Visitors’, that it’s hard to believe it was only recorded a few years ago in the Hunchback of Notre Shame’s first term in office. There was a time when CSNY made Nixon quake in his boots but you doubt Trump has even noticed this song (certainly he’s never had any interest in music or any artform – always a bad sign in someone put in a position of power over people, as to like art you need empathy, perhaps the single most important thing a politician can have but so rarely do). It’s a better song in the context of the album than as a standalone single though, sitting right at the heart of its ‘dark mirage’ confusion, with a certainty and directness lacking from the rest of the record. Typically Neil, the most stable and focussed song is really all about the inevitability of change. Neil sounds as if he’s singing through a megaphone as he tries to stir up the troops and it’s the one time on the album he sings as if he means it, with a delicious fiery guitar solo around the halfway point too. However the backing track isn’t quite so sure – this is one of those riffs that’s designed to go round and round in circles, making a u-turn every time it seems to be getting somewhere, while Neil’s lyrics are full of doubt even if his vocals aren’t. ‘It might be great’ he sings. He never sang that tin soldiers ‘might’ be coming for Ohio or that Starbucks ‘might’ be playing fast and loose with famer’s livelihoods did he? It doesn’t help that The Chrome Hearts are at their sloppiest, sounding as if they only heard this song briefly through semaphore and smoke signals before asked to make the one and only take. It’s all just a noise – albeit a noise that stands out on an album that’s otherwise too timid to make much of a one.

The title track is a real weirdo. The melody is another repeat, this time ‘Forever’, the rather good and overlooked finale to ‘The Visitors’ in 2017. Back then it was a tale of sticking out the storm, that Trump’s first term wouldn’t last forever and could be undone, the calm that followed a confusing storm, but here it represents more confusion (as if that hope was another mirage). Neil has been sending out all these messages and making all these records about the dangers of voting for the candy-floss haired turnip, but they don’t seem to have done the slightest bit of good. America has turned right as surely as a faulty Tesla car and though he’s been talking nobody’s been replying or even listening. There’s a namecheck to ‘Prime Of Life’, another overlooked song from ‘Sleeps With Angels’ this time – back then it was a sly song about having the power to change things at any age and how any era is the prime of life, but now Neil’s not so sure: his fanbase is dwindling and the world, especially America, no longer shares the values in so many of his songs. The track moves out from its pity fest beginnings to being a generational song, with a verse ‘thinking about Bob’ (surely Dylan) and how people aren’t listening to him either or writing protest songs anymore. The current generation is too scared, too insecure, writing songs that offend the least amount of people to get played on Spotify rather than say what they mean or standing for anything controversial. Neil’s first response is, as it so often is, to ‘get up’ but then he wonders straight away whether to go back to sleep and hope it’s all a nightmare, figuring it’s time someone else did it. That’s not like Neil at all, but then these are strange murky times, as successfully conjured up in the floaty dreamlike ethereal backing. The thing is, though, this is the same world it always was: Neil starts the song wandering through a market marvelling at the bountiful produce and being struck anew by Earth’s beauty. It’s just the Humans that seem to have turned ugly.

‘Movin’ Ahead’ finally gives us a decent rock and roll riff (played by Spooner over the intro before the familiar electric crunch comes in), but – wouldn’t you know it? – Neil gives the most immediate and inventive sounding song on the record his dumbest and most recycled set of lyrics. Sounding like a ‘Fork In The Road’ B–side via a less sarcastic ‘Tonight’s The Night’, Neil uses the road metaphor to talk about the need to live in the present, to follow your nose and never look back. But once again he sounds too troubled to give such a carefree song the lift and giddy freedom it deserves and instead sounds trapped by his past, as if something is weighing on his mind. The lyrics really don’t say much either: the future is where ‘love is found’ apparently, but whether that’s in a family or a political sense is anyone’s guess. It sure ain’t in this sloppily made song. By the sound of things this might not even be a first take as such but a song made up on the spot, as loose as they come. There’s a nice squeal of feedback at the end though that sounds more ‘real’ than anything we’ve had on this record thus far.

Mercifully, just when you think Neil’s forgotten how to be beautiful, in comes ‘Bottle of Love’, easily the strongest song on the album. Like Amber Jean and David Crosby I’ve had my issues with Daryl’s sudden and violent appearance in Neil’s life (while all the increasingly blurry low-budget concert shows of his films I’ve had to sit through for these reviews haven’t exactly made me warm to her either), but there’s no doubting the depth of the love songs Neil has written for her over the decades. ‘Bottle’ is a shimmering beauty, one that seems as hazy as the rest of the album (possibly another of those pesky mirages) but which is so lovely it draws you to it rather than away. Neil spots his wife across a field, doing all the things he talked about in the last track but never actually did, living in the moment and ignoring all the attacks and guilt to simply enjoy the feel of the sun on her face. Neil’s stricken all over again, sure that he’s found his soulmate because she ‘gets’ the healing power of nature and hears things the rest of the world (even him on some of this album) have drowned out, urging her to ‘go touch the animals’ (though we never find out what they are: it would be very Neil if they were chickens). He stays watching, at a distance, marvelling at the way she’s part Goddess and part little girl, before running to embrace her and the ‘open fields of heaven waiting’ for them both, when all this messy noise of the cruel outside world has been forgotten. Neil quite rightly sings this song with more precision than the rest of this album, though there’s still a delightful wobble of vulnerability on his multi-tracked voice that is still overdubbed quite sloppily, as if we’re getting that sort of haze you get on a sunny day where nothing’s quite real. It’s a lovely interlude, a song that I suspect would sound even better on a future live record with the full whallop of a Crazy Horse who understand it rather than a Chrome Hearts still feeling their way in, but even here as a slight and timid song born to be overlooked it really stands out as a moment of beauty on a record mostly about the ugliness of life.

‘Thankful’ is only a sweep of the broom away from recycling ‘Harvest Moon’ in the opening, before the song goes somewhere slightly different but still somewhat in parallel. The anger and bile of the opening pair of tracks is long gone: rather than be bitter about what’s missing from his life Neil is just thankful for what is still there. Neil knows that growing old is a privilege not many get to enjoy and looking back remembers the laughter more than the crying, the fun rather than the fear, ‘the days of life, the days of birth’. A final verse then pans away from Neil’s ranch to planet Earth as the guitarist, whose been writing ecology songs off and on for decades now, writes not about his fears of the planet dying in the future but his delight that it ever had life at all. While ‘First Fire Of Winter’ stole ‘Helpless’ tune, this song steals it’s ‘feel’, that sense of awe that something wonderful is always happening in nature utterly oblivious to what mankind are doing to wreck the planet and that we’re all part of something bigger. Saving it can wait for another day – for now Neil wants to properly take in what’s left of it and smell the roses before they shrivel up and die. It’s a sweet if slightly twee song, simple even by this album’s standards and even though there are few lyrics even half of those are recycled from other album songs, with a line about ‘heaven’s door’ for instance. Still, it’s a very pretty song, just a smidgeon behind ‘Bottle Of Love’ as the best on the album. 

At ten songs and thirty-seven minutes, with repeated lyrics and recycled melodies throughout, you can see why a lot of fans consider this album ‘slight’. It’s certainly not the album that’s going to sell millions and make a new generation take Neil to their hearts as in days of old. In the man’s great discography full of such powerful and important albums this one barely makes a blip. Nevertheless it’s a step up from the last couple and has a sound all of its own, a sort of ‘collage’ feel where one song blends into another thematically, musically and lyrically. It’s like that wag in the crowd at the start of 1998’s live album ‘Year of the Horse’ who cried ‘they all sound the same’ to get Neil’s reply ‘they’re all one song’, or the ‘filing cabinet’ look of the Neil Young Archives where songs overlap and merge into one another. It’s not entirely successful and at a couple of points this album is just noise, with a backing band who still haven’t quite clicked (and yes, given the comments I got last time I said this, they do indeed sound better live but still don’t sound that good compared to the Horse or CSNY or indeed the majority of Neil’s bands over the years). This time, though, it feels as if it’s muddled on purpose rather than by accident and fully reflects the confusing time in the life of its creator. A middling record in other words.  

7)    Roger Waters “Au Quebec”

Due to a quirk of fate, karma and scheduling across 1987 Roger’s ‘Bleeding Hearts’ solo band and the mortal remains of Pink Floyd were often playing head to head, in concert venues across the same town. Commercially the Gilmour Floyd seemed to win the war with a sold-out stadium tour, a  hit live album and video and one of their biggest sellers in ‘A Momentary Lapse Of Reason’. The committed fans who saw both, though, thought that Roger’s shows were more memorable and powerful: the musicians had more room to improvise, the scale wasn’t quite so relentlessly big and the performances not so lost in a commercial quagmire that only the 1980s could bring. Which is interesting because the record Roger was promoting at the time – the accidental nuclear war making ‘Radio KAOS’ – is maybe the most relentlessly commercial Floyd-related album of them all, all twee synths and soul girl backing singers (while the Floyd themselves were playing some of their most soulful material, albeit with a more polished sheen). The bootlegs of Roger’s tour (mostly from the early dates) aren’t great it has to be said: quadriplegic Billy’s radio phone-I nmessages to the world in a Stephen Hawkings-style voice that kept interrupting the often dodgy new songs were off-putting, the performances messy and Roger’s voice croaky.  However this new ‘official’ (or at least semi-legal as the rights have expired) radio broadcast from a largely unheard show later in the tour’s run is a revelation. Roger is fully in control and having fun re-claiming his songs (including edgier ones like a stunning paranoid ‘Welcome To The Machine’ and  an intense Mother’ that the parent band would never dream of touching), while the musicians have by now connected into a tight little backing band who have found a happy half way house between the punk anger and the OTT theatrical leanings. Jay Strapley especially – who was only ever in this single touring band of Roger’s – is a fine guitarist, re-creating Gilmour’s immaculate guitar solos with an added bluesy howl even if none of the ‘other’ vocalists is a replacement for Dave or Rick. A rarely heard ‘If’ (Roger’s song about wishing he’d been a better friend to Syd Barrett) shines right through the commercial murk, a moment of honest reflective truth in between all the pointed barbs. Even the then-new songs, a thoughtful ‘Powers That Be’ and a catchy ‘Radio Waves’, sound so much better than they ever have before live or on record, their tale of a disabled man saving the world through a computer hack and making both sides of an American-Russian power block think they’re about to die remarkably prescient for a record made 38 years ago (Roger’s solo work, particularly the ‘how did capitalism go so wrong?’ hand-wringing of ‘Amused To Death’ look like bits of fortune-telling these days. Unfortunately). The whole still isn’t quite up to the later and sole ‘official’ Waters live album ‘In The Flesh?’ from twelve years later (which has a better band, better songs and a more focussed feel all round) and there are still a few faux pas here and there (a ‘new wave’ Have A Cigar’ sung by keyboardist Paul Carrack misses the barbed cynicism of the original completely to become radio friendly schlock, while the boom-chikka and very 1980s ‘Wish You Were Here?’ complete with Jools Holland plinkity plonk style piano and saxophone solo is unforgivable). A shame, too, that this double-disc clear vinyl set wasn’t a broadcast of a full show (most dates on the tour ran to thirty songs, not the fourteen here, while ‘Pigs (Three Different Ones)’ has been trimmed to three minutes). Overall, though, this is a nice souvenir of a forgotten era that’s never sounded better and – dare I say it – has a lot more atmosphere and ideas than Floyd’s best-selling ‘Delicate Sound Of Thunder’ live set from the same year.   

 

8)    David Gilmour “Luck and Strange – Live”

With anyone else releasing a live recording or even a few after every studio album would get boring, but given how rare both are for the Pink Floyd guitarist both are welcome, even if they’re a little odd. Last year’s Luck and Strange’ was yet another mid-tier Gilmour album. It gave us two out and out classics full of pathos and intelligence, four slices of nothing, two noisy rockers I will happily never listen to again for the rest of my life, a sleepy instrumental that didn’t go anywhere and a track dad doesn’t even sing on, replaced by his now twenty-three-year-old daughter Romany. As with a lot of Gilmour works, being a decade in gestation meant the guitarist was able to tweak things endlessly for about a decade so they ended up sounding a little flat and over-thought at times. The live album offers a far better way to hear these songs, with a bit of life and some rough edges back in. Rather than simply play the new album through and only then hit the Floyd stuff in the second half as per usual though there’s a clever running order too that merges the two and puts similar songs together. Album highlight ‘The Piper’s Call’ for instance, about Syd Barrett’s fall into insanity comes after a particularly poignant ‘Sorrow’, while the climax comes at the end of the first half where ‘Between Two Points’, a great new song about growing old, is sandwiched between ‘Wish You Were Here’ and ‘High Hopes’. Old bandmate Rick Wright, meanwhile, is remembered both in David’s words (the gorgeous ‘A Boat Lies Waiting’ from ‘Rattle That Lock’) and Rick’s own music (ever popular ‘The Great Gig In The Sky’). Throw in some Floyd rarities we don’t hear too often (‘Marooned’ ‘Fat Old Sun’ Coming Back To Life’) rather than the usual ‘hits’ (or as close the Floyd came) which remain conspicuous by their absence (this is the only Gilmour’s live set without ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’, which would also have gone well with ‘The Piper’s Call’) and you have an album that’s a lot more interesting than I expected. While it can’t match the two Royal Albert Hall gigs from the 1990s and 2000s for inventiveness or sheer enjoyment this record still beats everything else Gilmour’s done since 2007.

9)    Al Jardine “Islands In The Sun”

You have to feel for Al Jardine, who seems to always end up on the ‘wrong’ side of Beach Boys history. All those years being loyal to the Mike version of the band and where did it get him? Kicked out the band for an ‘attitude problem’ (for wondering if the ‘Summer In Paradise’ album needed a few more ‘better’ songs). Al sided with Carl Wilson until the guitarists’ sudden death from lung cancer in 1998, then went back to the parent band only to fall out again over how Carl’s legacy was being treated (Al wanted to do some symphonic shows; the others stopped inviting him to gigs). After the unexpected anniversary reunion of 2012 Al threw his lot in with Brian Wilson’s band, only for Brian’s health to decline sharply so that the tours slowed down and the records dwindled. And now of course Brian is gone to the great surfing rest home in the sky, where I hope he is staying in bed in a cloud and playing boogie-woogie piano and chatting to old friends and his two brothers. Goodness knows he’s earned the rest and happy times in abundance. Only even that timing wasn’t quite right – Brian’s death at the end of June completely overshadowed the release of this EP at the end of May when everyone ignored it. Which is a shame because it should have been big news: it’s the first semi full-length album any of The Beach Boys have released since Brian’s ‘No Pier Pressure’ a full decade ago (given that I still have doubts Brian was actually on the instrumental album ‘At My Piano’, which was new arrangements of old songs anyway). Silly and fluffy summer pop fun, it feels out of place given the melancholy mood in the Beach Boys camp this year, with a title track clearly based on ‘Kokomo’ (no true fan’s favourite Beach Boys song, no matter how many millions of copies it sold) and two out of three supporting tracks similarly fluffy and nostalgic. It’s not a patch on last year’s single ‘Wish’, a moving tale of growing older that acted as a really lovely tribute to Brian (it’s typical luck these releases are the ‘wrong way round’ – had that song been on this EP it would have sold buckets for saying what we all feel). All that said it’s fun in a frivolous sort of way, with just enough Beach Boys trademarks around to make it feel like a further chapter in an ongoing story rather than a cash-in.

The title track sounds at one with the better end of the band’s 1980s discography, a sort of white reggae song about travel that even features Bruce Johnston on harmony vocals to give it an extra frisson of greatness (goodness only knows what Mike Love will say about that ‘betrayal’!) Admittedly that’s the 1980s catalogue not the 1960s and the cheesy ‘goodwill to everyone only with synths’ sounds a bit odd in today’s market, but for a fanbase that’s been so starved of any songs lately it has a catchy appeal and a really sweet ‘postcard’ video that’s very Beach Boys. ‘Highway 101’ is a throwback to the band’s earliest days, more 1950s than anything any of them have done since Beach Boys ‘comeback’ ’15 Big Ones’ in 1976, a Chuck Berry style number about a trip to Mexico that even recycles a few ideas from Leiber and Stoller’s ‘Smokey Joe’s Café’. It’s good fun, but nothing special. The closing ‘Crumple Car’ is much the same, a cover of a surf song from the 1978 film ‘Big Wednesday’ (when surfing was, briefly, ‘in’ again) that already sounded most Beach Boys-ish even before Al gave it a ‘Cottonfields/Sloop John B’ folkie makeover. The most interesting song by far, though, is an outtake from Al’s one full length solo album ‘Postcards From California’ which was started a decade ago and finally finished now. ‘My Plane Leaves Tomorrow (Au Revoir)’ is based on the tune from the old English folk number ‘All My Trials’ which was particularly big in Liverpool, covered by The Searchers on record in 1964 and live by The Beatles, who were annoyed when their rivals beat them to it (though Paul McCartney revived it himself as an anti-Thatcher protest single in the early 1990s). It’s been rewritten as a sad tale of loss, which sounds at one with ‘Wish’ as a tribute to Brian, although given the dating and the plane setting my guess it’s more about the day around Christmas in 1964 when Brian had a nervous breakdown en route to a gig in the seat next to Al’s and was never quite the same again (it’s why he stayed at home making records, with Bruce his on-the-road replacement). Like much of the ‘Postcards’ album it features a special guest: none other than this post’s returning friend Neil Young, who adds lashes of smoky guitar and a shaky vocal. Even unfinished you wonder why it never made the parent album as the presence of such an unexpected big name is a clear selling point and it would have been amongst the better things on the record. It’s easily the best thing here, with an emotion, depth and poignancy missing from the rest. Even so ‘Islands In the Sun’ is a nice little record, with just enough Beach Boys flavour to satisfy fan cravings while still having an identity all of its own.  

10)                    John Lodge “Love Conquers All”(EP)

Talking of heavy losses, the death of the Moody Blues bassist came out of nowhere: even a month before it John was looking great on stage. He was still alive when this Christmassy EP, his last recording, was released – technically at the very end of last year but a fraction too late for last year’s review. It essentially picks up where the last Moodies band album ‘December’ left off back in 2003 with more peace and goodwill to man, not very original but still rather sweet. It’s a lot more personal than that cash-in stocking-filler was though as John celebrates getting to the end of a year after that’s been more difficult than most, with health challenges and difficulties, realising how grateful he is to end the year surrounded by his loved ones and feeling more himself. He ends the song vowing to keep that spirit going forward because it’s not just related to Christmas Day but ‘can be felt at any time at all’. It’s all heartfelt enough but a bit on the twee side, while the melody sounds like the lesser poppier end of the Lodge solo cannon rather than his better, more groundbreaking work as a Moody. More interesting than last year’s single, though, is the EP released at the start of the year to accompany it which sounds a lot more like the classic Moodies. Full marks for the, well, moody steel guitar instrumental opening ‘Sunset Over Cocohatchee Bay’ which is a lovely melancholic scene setter. Closing song ‘Whispering Angels’ (also released as a single in February) is a lovely song too, as John poignantly contemplates mortality with so many loved ones having already crossed the void and realising that the whispering of death is growing louder every day. It’s a troubled, complex song more like the days of old, complete with hints of both Mike Pinder and Ray Thomas in the ‘mellotron flute’ that plays the accompaniment and lines hinting at things the bass player regrets now they’re gone, but like many things Lodge eventually comes down on the happy side of love and forgiveness. It was a lot when released on December 23^rd last year; it’s almost too heartbreaking now. Especially if rumours of a feud with now the sole remaining Moody Justin Hayward (who didn’t want to tour after the death of drummer Graeme) are anything to go by. The EP is then padded out with remixes of John’s other so-so recent singles ‘The Sun Will Shine’ and ‘In These Crazy Times’ which are nice but rather unremarkable. Overall though a nice little collection which showed John was still moving forward with lots left to say right the way up to the end. May he be having fun on his cloud riding seesaws and playing minstrel songs to his legion of fans and rest in music, always.

Re-Issues:

1)    Pentangle “Solomon’s Seal” (Deluxe Edition)

Pentangle’s overlooked and little selling final original LP has come a long way since its days propping up the leg of John Renbourn’s organ in his home studio. Poor-selling and absent from the usual Pentangle re-releases on Atlantic (given that it was the band’s lone release on Reprise) and the fact that the band split soon after without much publicity, plus the absence of any master-tapes for an ‘easy’re-release meant that it became one of the most sought after of all AAA rarities until 2003 (when the guitarist finally got round to fixing up his organ and went ‘oops, so that’s where that went). So what is only the third release in this album’s little life is very welcome (especially as it’s near-contemporary Wings’ ‘Band On The Run’ is in double figures over a similar period), especially looking and sounding as good as this. Now this sixth album really isn’t the best thing Pentangle ever did. It suffers from the same lack of focus and splintering that caused the band to split in the first place and finds them struggling more than usual to find a middle ground between contemporary originals and traditional folk. Yet ‘Solomon’s Seal’ is the very definition of a lost gem and the best of this album ranks amongst the best things the band ever did: Bert Jansch’s tale about the impending split ‘People On The Highway’ is a beautiful song about knowing when to quit, ‘No Love Is Sorrow’ a dark and brooding traditional tale of heartbreak where Bert’s growl and Jacqui McShee’s purity have never made more sense together, not forgetting ‘The Cherry Tree Carol’ one of their prettier traditional folk cover songs the band ever did.

Talking of Cherries, Cherry Red have made a name for themselves the past few years re-issuing all sorts of rare Pentangle product: there’s been a nice box of all the 1980-90s Pentangle reunion albums (very nearly almost as obscure once upon a time as this album) and a set of radio broadcasts. This re-issue continues their excellent re-issue series with their usual beautiful packaging and attention to detail as well as countless extras even I didn’t know existed, taking what was originally a short-ish nine song album and turning it into a thirty-two track double disc set. A lot of the extras have been out before admittedly: the ‘Christian The Lion’ film soundtrack came out on the superlative ‘The Time Has Come’ box set in 2007 and a number of BBC recordings were also on last year’s radio sessions set which, after being impossible to get hold of for decades, now seem to be everywhere. However there are still lots of fascinating new bits and pieces: it turns out album closer ‘Lady Of Carlisle’ (one of the oldest folk songs in existence, which The Grateful Dead turned into ‘Terrapin Station’ and is set in my old home city) was first recorded as the soundtrack to another film which appears here, a documentary about Shell the petrol company (!) and is great to hear, along with a BBC session of the similarly traditional and Northish song ‘Lady Of Northumberland’ that somehow missed the last box set. Most exciting perhaps, given how few concert recordings there are by the original band with Renbourn in tow, are extracts from two shows on Pentangle’s final (original) tour in 1972 which have never been heard before. As with a lot of live Pentangle recordings its more miss than hit, with a lot of rambling and the band are clearly fed up of the whole thing to be honest, while its sadly incomplete (the bootleg tape running out in the middle of a particularly epic ‘Cruel Sister’). The sound quality is fairly ropey too, as you’d expect for a home-made recording from half a century ago. Even so, there are a number of traditional folk tales Pentangle never did on album that practically make this another album in its own right (including Charles Mingus’ wonderfully named ‘The Shoes Of The Fisherman’s We Are Some Jive-Ass Slippers’ and Renbourn’s solo instrumental ‘Sweet Potato’) that are the very definition of buried treasure. Even on the oldies we’ve heard lots of times there are some brilliant Pentangly moments littered across the set where band suddenly find a lot of their old magic (such as a haunting ‘She Moved Through The Fair, which the band won’t do on record until their reunion years in the 1990s and a funky version of jazzy fan favourite ‘Train Song’). ‘Solomon’s Seal’ always deserved a decent break and now at last, after careful negotiations and record company licenses, it gets it’s due reward at last. ‘Solomon’s Seal’ always got the Alan’s Album Archives seal of approval and never more than now.

2)    Brian Wilson “Live At The Roxy”

I wondered what the first Brian Wilson cash in would be after the Beach Boy’s sad death but love and mercifully it’s a good one: rather than yet another flawed band best-of we get a low budget re-issue of a tiny label release from a quarter century ago, again on a tiny label. This concert was the first real big musical surprise of the millennium as, with a push from his wife-manager Melinda, the eldest Wilson brother teamed with a little known Californian band known as ‘The Wondermints’ best known for doing some harmony-laden 1960s covers in their set including some Beach Boys. Most people at the timer went ‘who they?’ and worried that Brian was selling himself short, but the Wondermints were the one thing Brian had never had in his life: a reliable support group who knew he was a genius, respected and loved his music and adored telling him so. With a safe, happy and hardworking band around him – so different to the past thirty-odd years of infighting in The Beach Boys - Brian in turn looked safe and happy in himself for the first time on stage since 1964, the band helping him regain his love for his muse and his music and ushering in a golden fifteen years of a late creative renaissance right when everyone had written Brian off as a music casualty. The tours will mount up in future years, including such highs as a complete rendition of the still-unfinished ‘Smile’ and such lows as that last tour of 2022, when a grumpy and in pain Brian barely joined in at all. This, however, is the pairing’s first gig and in many ways it’s the best, Brian delighting in the sheer joy of a band that isn’t under the spotlight and can play his favourite songs rather than just the hits (although there’s a fair sprinkling of those here too). It’s a revelation to those of us who’d come from the tired Beach Boys live shows of the late 1970s, 1980s and 1990s: the band of multi-instrumentalists nail such tricky and seemingly un-performable songs as ‘The Little Girl I Once Knew’ (complete with sudden, seemingly random pauses), the drop-dead gorgeous ‘Add Some Music To Your Day’, the heartbreaking song of depression and suicide ‘Til I Die’, one of Brian’s prettiest solo songs ‘Lay Down Burden’ the tribute song to younger brother Carl that finally comes into its own without the synth heavy commercial production of 1998’s ‘Imagination’ and ditto ‘Love and Mercy’ the oh so Brian tale of peace and tolerance that ended all of his live shows to come and works so much better as a simple naked piano ballad sigh than a big production number. There are two exclusive songs too: ‘This Isn’t Love’ is (despite the name) a so-so romance song given to the Flintstones for their live action sequel ‘Viva Rock Vegas’ (We’re going to be a movie? Isn’t that cool!’ says Brian, who clearly hasn’t seen what a car crash the movie actually is yet) but which sounds rather better sung by a proper singer than it does by Mark Addy, Stephen Baldwin and Kristen Johnson in the film; also the lovely ballad ‘The First Time’, an unreleased song about love being the only light in dark and difficult times written in the troubled 1980s, a lost gem that never did end up being recorded ‘properly’ in the studio for an album and in many ways the set’s theme song, about how faith and belief and good people can get you to places you’d never be able to manage on your own. It’s a true classic of the Brian Wilson discography that deserved a higher profile. Not everything hits – there’s an awkward introduction to side two when the band got all meta and reference the Bare Naked Ladies song ‘Brian Wilson’ (in which the singer is ‘lying in bed just like Brian Wilson did’), the instrumental title track of ‘Pet Sounds’ has never sounded more like filler and I’ve heard me a better ‘Good Vibrations’ down the years too. It’s still a great gig though, one that was deleted way too quickly the first time round before the Brian Wilson renaissance was in full swing. Having it back out, on vinyl for the first time as a three LP set or now on two CDs, both specially for November’s record store day this year, is a highly welcome re-issue in any form, reminding us of how great Brian’s late career comeback really was.

There are bonus tracks this time around too which build up to the complete show as The Western world finally gets to hear five bonus tracks only ever issued in Japan and, well, they’re more the sort of straightforward recreations of the hits you’d expect from the Beach Boys touring band rather than anything special and not my personal favourite of the hits to boot: ‘Sloop John B’ ‘Barbara Ann’ ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice?’ ‘Fun Fun Fun’ and ‘Help Me Rhonda’. If anything they detract from the depth and brilliance of what came before it singled out and separated like this, though completists everywhere are sure to embrace them. Even more forgettable are six ‘songs’ lifted from the soundtrack of that year’s hard-to-find documentary ‘Brian Wilson On Tour’: while it’s nice to hear the then-still unissued ‘Soul Searchin’ (and the only chance to hear Brian sing this 1990s Beach Boys outtake all the way through rather than Carl) and a goody spin through maybe the silliest Beach Boys song ‘Drive In’, they’re all too insubstantial to be that exciting. Wonky covers of ‘Johnny B Goode’ and ‘Southern California’ as well as a wonky take on first solo album cut ‘Let It Shine’ are more glorified warm-ups than anything that exciting either. A semi-interesting period interview with Brian talking to Alan Boyd in a sort of semi-interested way (i.e. more than grunts and monosyllabic answers but not exactly in detail either) rounds off a bonus disc that’s far less interesting than the main event (the original discs were always a tad lopsided). Even so, the original concert has never sounded so good and with a plethora of new photographs this is a handsome set more than worthy of a place in every Beach Boy fan’s collection. This is, after all, how I want to remember Brian, happy creative and (mostly) comfortable, a long way from the dark places he’s been to – and sadly would end up back in.

3)    Neil Young “Tonight’s The Night”

It’s not just tonight but seemingly every night, as most fan’s reaction to this release will probably be like mine. ‘What. Again?’ For in the past few years we’ve had ‘Tonight’s The Night Live At The Roxy’ (2018) and a plethora of odds and ends from the sessions on ‘Archives II’ (2020), never mind re-issues of the parent album itself as part of the ‘Official Releases’ box set (2014) and on its own (2015). So it’s with some sense of jadedness that many fans will come to this cobbled together version, which is partly the ‘finished’ album, part Archives remix but partly - at long last – a recreation of the original 1973 first version that’s become one of the most notorious of the many unreleased Neil recordings out there. The finished 1975 version of this album is gloriously bleak, from its cryptic comments about friends and drug overdoses (Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and CSNY roadie Bruce Berry who both died in the run up to making it), haunting songs about isolation, despair and loss and the all-black cover where Neil looks as if he hasn’t slept in a week and an augmented Crazy Horse pose for a group shot with captions with the very poignant space and caption where Danny should be. ‘I’m sorry’ runs the sleevenotes ‘you don’t know these people’, but oh you do: Berry and Whitten’s character shine through, along with the despair that both lost their lives too young to drugs and Neil’s very real panic that he might end up the same way, sucked up and spat out by the stardom machine. The album is an Irish wake played ‘live' for dearly departed friends desperate to strip away the falseness of showbiz and show the hidden nasty dark cycle of dependency and drugs and doubt that fuels pretty much all creativity, complete with bum notes, sluggish tempos and cracked vocals. It’s heartbreaking in all the right ways, as Neil turns his pain into some of the best and certainly the most real songs of his career.  But then Neil figured even he couldn’t get away with putting out an album this dark, tjhis depressing, this stones.

Neil was ready to drop the whole album completely until playing the final mix of (till recently unreleased) album ‘Homegrown’ to his friends at a party – a much more upbeat record actually made in 1975 – when the cassette tape of the mix switched over and everyone heard ‘Tonight’s The Night’. Hit by how powerful a record about excess was in the middle of a party everyone told Neil he ought to put that out instead. However the 1975 version was, would you believe, the ‘watered down’ version, diluted when everyone around him complained ‘you can’t put that out as it is!’ So Neil tinkered with it, adding some more songs that were merely depressed rather than suicidal (my own favourite ‘Borrowed Tune’ amongst them), a song of Danny’s from his 1969 heyday to remember him by (the brilliant ‘Downtown’ with its eerie lyrics about drug deals in the middle of the night – lyrics added, it turned out in a surprise twist, by Neil according to later interviews) and a few re-recordings, while the drunken between song stage patter was removed. Well sadly we still don’t quite get that original cassette mix we’ve all been dying to hear: the song patter is still missing for starters. But we do get ‘Walk On’, an angry song about the importance of doing your own thing and ignoring critics cut at the same sessions that would have fitted in nicely on the original but ended up being re-recorded (rather better, it has to be said) for 1974’s ‘On The Beach’ instead, plus the original tougher take of ‘Lookout Joe’ (Tonight’s weakest track, about a Vietnam Vet coming home after risking his life to find out the supposedly ‘better America’ he was fighting for, full of empty hungry lonely people just like him). Perhaps best of all we get yet another looser take of ‘Tonight’s The Night’ itself, more like the shambolic live appearances than the spooky ‘first’ and tighter ‘second’ version that bookended the finished album. There are also two period songs from ‘Archives’ never seriously under consideration for the album but which feel as if they belong here all the same, the folkie tale of loneliness ‘Wonderin’ that – against all odds – became an uptempo doo wop song and the highlight of 1983’s Rockabilly album ‘Everybody’s Rockin’ and one of the greatest of all originally-unreleased 1970s Neil tracks ‘Everybody’s Alone’, a haunted ballad about not wanting to reach out for help because pain is so universal to the Human condition it’s hard to know who to ask. There’s also a cover of fellow Canadian Joni Mitchell’s ‘Raised On Robbery’; nice to hear, but Joni was always more of a ‘head’ writer than a ‘heart’ one and its lyrical tale of a dysfunctional mess doesn’t really fit the mood. Perhaps the best surprise of all is the ‘Speakin’ Out Jam’ named after the second track on the album where words aren’t enough to explain how bleak the mood is, so Neil gets quiet and lets the musicians play (especially Nils Lofgren who plays a blinding guitar solo while Neil tinkers on a piano he hasn’t fully learnt to play yet).

So all in all it’s not as exciting as the ‘proper’ original album would have been and not as relentlessly powerful as the finished version. Like many a Neil archive release this also doesn’t have the impact it would have done had it been released like this first, rather than with a sneak preview of so many of these songs on ‘Archives II’. But it does offer insight into the making of one what I still consider Neil’s masterpiece (give or take ‘Trans’) and for the two alternate takes alone is worth buying; more so if you couldn’t afford the ‘Archives’  behemoth as this set now includes two of the four or five best things on it. 

4)    Neil Young “Original Recordings 1992-1995”

The long-running series of high-resolution re-issues continues with one of the best collections in the series, from Neil’s creative renaissance in the 1990s. ‘Harvest Moon’ is one of Neil’s best albums, mature thoughtful and almost all acoustic, celebrating his and wife Pegi’s tenth wedding anniversary with memories of how they got together and the first rainclouds of how they’ll part. Only a daft song everyone thinks is about Elvis (but is really about a family pet called ‘King’) stops this being his most consistent studio LP. ‘Unplugged’ is simultaneously one of the best and most inventive MTV Unplugged records of all time and a bit disappointing compared to other tours where Neil re-invented himself. He plays it a bit safe, though it’s worth owning for the jaw-dropping pipe organ version of ‘Like A Hurricane’, a chance to hear ‘Transformer Man’ as a ‘normal’ song without the vocoders and the set’s one ‘new’ song, the thoughtful ballad for a friend ‘Stringman’ (actually from the mid 1970s and quite possibly about Stephen Stills). ‘Sleeps With Angels’ is perhaps the most under-rated album in Neil’s back catalogue, a gutsy daring nihilistic take on what it means to be ‘rusting’ in middle age, inspired by Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain quoting Neil’s own ‘Rust Never Sleeps’ lyric in his suicide note and featuring Crazy Horse doing what they do best, being Earthy raw and ‘real’. Most fans reckon the ‘golden era’ ended there but I’d put it after ‘Mirrorball’, an unfocussed primal grunge collaboration with then-hotshots Pearl Jam that’s more outwardly thinking than normal and features some great stream-of-consciousness writing on everything from the gulf war to abortion, highlighted by the superb mocking ‘Scenery’ (‘Home of the brave!’ has never sounded so sinister). If you don’t know these albums or only know one or two they’re well worth getting, though it’s a shame that as per usual in this series there are no bonus tracks, not even a B-side.  

5)    ‘George Harrison’/Somewhere In England/Gone Troppo/Cloud Nine/Brainwashed

These five long awaited digipak re-issues slipped out quietly this year, compared to the hoo-hah surrounding Anthology IV, the Lennon and McCartney sets and even ‘Let It Roll – The Best Of George Harrison’ (see below). But they’re easily the highlight of this Beatlemaniac’s year. It ‘s been two decades since these albums were re-mastered and re-released in the wake of George’s death and as none were big sellers they’ve been hard to find since then. Goodness knows why: despite being the first release on Warner Brothers 1979’s ‘George Harrison’ is the ‘dark horse’ of the Beatle’s entire catalogue, easily his most consistent album where every song is a gem. Recorded in the wake of his marriage to Olivia and the birth of son Dhani, it’s the one record where George sounds happy and carefree with his most romantic love songs (‘Your Love Is Forever’ beats even ‘Something’ in my book), full of warm lazy family songs made for outdoor picnics. Other masterpieces include ‘Faster’ (tribute to F1 driver Nicki Lauda), ‘Not Guilty’ (an outtake from ‘The White Album’ played with the warm chuckle of a distant memory rather than the paranoid agony of the original) and ‘Here Comes The Moon’, a beautiful ‘sister’ song to ‘Here Comes The Sun’ every bit as beautiful. If you like George and don’t know this album buy it, you won’t regret it!

The other records are patchier but the best moments are still great: ’33 and 1/3^rd’ from 1976 finds George midway between the depression of his Patti Boyd divorce years and his Hello Olivia love years and mixes snarky humour (‘This Song’ about being sued by the Chiffons’ ‘He’s So Fine’ and it’s supposed similarity to ‘My Sweet Lord’), manic humour (the autobiographical in a Monty Python style ‘Crackerbox Palace’ where you don’t have to be mad to be Human but it helps) and two ‘All Things Must Pass’ style pieces of wisdom ‘It’s What You Value’ (about drummer Jim Gordon asking for a car rather than wages and everyone else getting jealous even though their wage amounted to more) and ‘See Yourself’ (about how we can see other people’s faults and be blind to our own). ‘Somewhere In England’ (1981) was rejected by Warner Brothers twice with George digging his heels in and keeping his precious (and uncommercial) Hoagy Carmichael covers and sticking in a couple of mocking modern songs that ironically they loved (to be fair ‘Blood From A Clone’ is hilarious!) The best song though is very George with ‘Life Itself’ starting out another romantic ballad and moving into a song about God, full of warmth and gratitude. ‘Gone Troppo’ (1983) is famous as the first album George worked on that failed to make the charts – mostly because he was having too good a time gardening to bother to promote it. The album is quite a lazy self-indulgent set for the most part, but I still say the opening one-two punch of ‘Wake Up My Love’ and That’s The Way It Goes’ might just be the strongest opening song pairing in the Beatle discography, an angry tale about losing faith followed by a resigned shrug that bad times are inevitable. ‘Cloud Nine’ (1987) was the big commercial comeback that spawned two hit singles in ‘When We Were Fab’ and Rudy Clark cover ‘Got My Mind Set On You’, but its Jeff Lynne production and 1980s synths mean it’s very of its time and therefore less timeless than George’s other work. Most of the album is shallow and surface level and arguably his weakest ‘normal’ album, though ‘Just For Today’ is a heartfelt song about depression that really hits home and third (flop) single ‘This Is Love’ is a lot catchier and more memorable than the two better known tracks. After that came the Travelling Wilburys years and just the one unfinished record, 2002’s posthumous ‘Brainwashed’. Though not the masterpiece it was hailed as on release, with way too many filler songs for an album fourteen years on the making, the best of it is as good as anything else George wrote, especially the troubled ‘Stuck Inside A Cloud’ and the closing title track, a very Harrisonesque switch between the material and spiritual worlds. Thankfully all these re-issues have the same bonus tracks as last time (though, alas, no new extras even though there are lots in the vaults. Are they being saved for a future box set?) and some gorgeous packaging featuring photographs, essays and lyrics. Not what they could have been perhaps, both as albums and as re-issues, but better than all the other Beatle stuff out in 2025. George would have been furious at the Anthology mess, scorned the Lennon and McCartney re-releases and probably not been too hot on his own best of either but, released quietly and careful and made with love and attention rather than fanfare, this is the ‘real’ George to a tee.

6)    Bill Wyman “Treasury”

The Stones bassist celebrated his 89^th birthday on October 24^th with the release of a whopping seven disc box set containing all of his ‘rock and roll’ records (i.e. everything that isn’t by his jazz Band ‘The Rhythm Kings’), with each of his original six ‘mainstream’ studio albums plus 1990s outtakes set ‘Stuff’ (only released in Japan originally) given a generous helping hand of hitherto unheard extras (mostly demo recordings with some unedited recordings, 12” mixes and non-album recordings in there too) and an entire bonus disc of extras with multiple unreleased songs. Forget what the music is actually like for a moment: this is how you do box sets. There’s a tonne of unreleased footage here, most of it fascinating, all of it worthy of release, with some gorgeous packaging yet none of the superfluous 7” vinyl singles/coasters/garden gnomes that other bands seem to consider ‘essential’ to sell box sets. Like the bass player himself it’s no frills and functional yet covers more ground than you might imagine, at a very reasonable price. Many Stones fans are probably working out where to spend their gift vouchers right now. Here’s the bad news though: some of these albums are a bit…weird and have almost nothing in common with Bill’s parent band. Where the Stones rocked and rolled Bill’s songs ducked and dived, an alternate world of quirky B-sides about, well sex more often than not (anyone who thinks The Stones pushed the envelope have never heard ‘Peanut Butter Time’). It’s rather a waste of the excellent backing musicians – Ronnie Wood, Dire Straits’ Guy Fletcher, Dr John, Leon Russell and Manassas’ Dallas Taylor and Joe Lala amongst them. None of it is up to ‘In Another Land’ (the only Wyman song to make it to a Stones album, ‘Satanic Majesties’) or even ‘Downtown Suzie’ (which made it to Stones outtake set ‘Metamorphosis’) but the best of it is still well worth listening to, such as Bill’s one legit hit single the tongue-in-cheek ‘Si Si Je Suis En Rock Star’, a beautiful synth-laden version of Ray Davies’ giveaway song ‘This Strange Effect’ and the deadpan sarcasm of ‘It’s A Wonder’. The self-titled ‘Bill Wyman’ from 1982 is the best of the discs I would say, even with the period synths, but ‘Stuff’ is pretty decent for an outtakes set and the two later albums ‘Back To Basics’ from 2015 and ‘Drive My Car’ from 2024 are worth hearing too, with Bill’s older deeper voice really suiting him. I would try those songs out before plumping for the full set though, even at a pretty decent price, as Bill’s reedy deliver probably isn’t what many fans are expecting. It is a shame too that Wyman’s hard-to-find 1980s film soundtrack album ‘Green Ice’ isn’t here for copyright reasons but, heck, practically everything else is. If ever you wanted to find out what these records are like or you enjoyed one and want the others then, well, they’ve never sounded or looked better.

7)    The Who “Who Are You?” (Deluxe Edition)

The Who’s 50^th-ish anniversary deluxe series has been asleep for a while now – and I for one am most annoyed they missed my second favourite ‘Who By Numbers’ for which we know a lot of extras exist just from Pete’s own ‘Scoop’ demos series – but it returns in a colossal way for their 1978 album and the biggest set yet. ‘Who Are You’ was the 1978 follow up to that album and the original last hurrah, the final album with Keith Moon and recorded at a similarly confused/defiant stage in their careers when the band asked ‘is this it?’ The timing makes sense: The Who went on an epic ‘farewell tour’ this year and while they’ve been promising this is the very last one honest to goodness yes really since 1982 there really was a sense of finality about this one. Roger Daltrey’s voice is just beginning to go, Pete Townshend’s hearing went some time ago (he blames the time Keith Moon exploded his drum kit live on The Smothers Brothers show in 1967!) and both of them are in their 80s now, having failed to keep their promise by dying before they got old. So returning now to the album that spelled the end and has a similar ‘we made it, but not in one piece’ vibe does make a lot more sense than the more desperate and primal ‘Who By Numbers’, to the ‘first’ end. 

‘Who Are You’ was always a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster, cobbled together from Pete Townshend and John Entwistle leftovers after a three year recording hiatus (nothing now but a long time to go quiet in the 1970s) and pieced together during painful extended sessions that ended with Roger punching producer Glynn Johns and which made it painfully clear that  Keith Moon (who died three weeks after release) was struggling badly. It has a mixed reputation with fans this one: on release many were disappointed with the sort of ersatz old Who sound and the fact that so many songs started off punk and angry and basic but got overwhelmed with overdubs and strings and the sort of synths that screamed ‘late 1970s’. The Who are caught halfway between the ‘punk’ and the ‘godfather’ and not sure whether to go middle-aged and sophisticated or young and spiky, caught between the very real anger and raw emotions at the state of the band and the world and the fact the band had grown apart and couldn’t rock the way they once could. The title track especially has become a fan favourite, one last defiant moment of youthful energy and sarcasm even if it’s based on the moment Pete turned thirty and got thrown out a club of youngsters because nobody there knew who he was. However it’s Pete’s attempts to find a new sound (the wonderfully sarcastic ‘New Song’ and the creepy ‘Music Must Change’) and John Entwistle’s unprecedented three tracks that always caught my ear (especially the pretty ‘905’, which returns to the tale of test tubes and genetic selection that was ‘I’m A Boy’). The band worked hard to get this record ‘right’, with endless overdubs added to cover up the percussive hole where Keith’s full onslaught had been reduced to a trickle. But he’s still gamely trying, as indeed are the whole band, who return to their old roar enough times to catch the ear on an album caught right in the middle between punk and prog, cynicism and destruction played out against very 1970s synthesisers and high concept songs about existentialism.

The deluxe edition, released on Halloween, continues the ‘trick or treat’ theme. The big talking point are the Shepperton rehearsals where The Who met up for the first real time in two years (since the last album sessions, give or take a flurry of live shows at the end of 1977 after taking most of the year and almost all of 1976 off) to rehearse some footage for their documentary ‘The Kids Are Alright’. It’s the very last footage we have of the original line-up and the last time the four were together in the same room. The documentary makers were colossal Who fans and hoarded everything so we’ve long known this material exists without any of it ever being bootlegged. The trouble is while it’s historically important it’s musically poor and if you’ve ever heard the fun but ragged spin on ‘Barbara Ann’ heard in the film (suggested by teenage director Jeff Stein when put on the spot to nominate a song to rehearse: the band had only ever played it once, twelve years before, for an EP and basically busk their way through it!) then you’ll know what to expect: bum notes, missed cues, endless mistakes and a tempo that speeds up and slows down depending on how tired Keith is during any given moment. This is the band in its dying gasps who are recording purely to blow away the cobwebs and without any intention of ever releasing it, playing their simplest material and none of it terribly well. There are multiple surprise covers/jams including The Beatles’ ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ ‘Spoonful’ ‘Smokestack Lightning’ and an unexpected stab at ‘Run Run Run’ from their second album ‘A Quick One’ (not exactly a live regular). It’s messy, dispiriting and the band suddenly sound bloated, fat and middle aged. Keith is slow and sluggish, a million miles away from the whirlwind of old, while the greatest rock and roll band in the world bar none (sorry other pretenders to the crown like The Rolling Stones – and Led Zeppelin? Laughable! -) Pete misses his own synth cues to work out where to play guitar (on the worst ‘Who Are You?’ going, less a statement of intent and more a plea for help) and The Who are reduced to an average pub band. A group that used to read each other like a book are now helplessly miming in semaphore at each other and hoping it will all come together eventually, but they’ve run out of time before it ever can, something that’s incredibly sad. Some of this disc is downright torturous, the band sinking like a stone where they used to float so effortlessly. Even so, fans have been a bit too harsh on what are clearly recordings made for fun and rehearsal and there are some bright spots, such as an unexpected reggae version of ‘The Kids Are Alright’ (with Pete introducing Roger as ‘Peaceful Perc, whose come all the way from…Shepherd’s Bush!’), a rough go on the Looney Tunes theme tune ‘The Merry Go Round Broke Down’ (!) and a spiritedly ragged ‘Bell Boy’ that features one last great Moony performance (‘Nearly’ laughs Roger at song’s end when they collapse right at song’s end). This is the noisiest, least focussed, primally raw The Who had been since their 1965 debut and it’s a shame in many ways they couldn’t have harnessed that sound for a more streamlined punk studio album at one with other contemporary releases in 1978. Yet, like a football team with the odds against them, you cheer them on as they stumble blindly and when they get it together and score a goal out of nowhere (as per a haunting ‘Drowned’ or a properly stomping ‘Shakin’ All Over’) it feels like even more  of a victory than the days of old because you know how hard they fought for it. Even so, what’s historically significant (the last recordings with Moony) are, not to put too fine a point on it, pretty awful from a music point of view.

That’s the big selling point of this new deluxe set (not least because so much visual footage exists, featured here on a blu-ray disc) and while it’s great to have it out at last it’s arguably the weakest thing here. The rest, though, is way more interesting than it seems from the outside. The concert (in front of an invited audience of Who fans) is so much tighter than the rehearsals it’s hard to believe it’s the same band, never mind the same band weeks later. . Surely all fans by now realise just how great this last show with Keith is, included in part in ‘Kids Are Alright’ film and soundtrack CD, with career high versions of ‘Baba O’Riley’ and ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’; if not here’s your chance to hear them again, in subtly different mixes and with more band chat before and after (plus a shakier ‘Fooled’ that’s great until Keith runs out of steam in the middle). They’re by far the best: the rest can be a bit sluggish: you can feel Keith slowing down like a clockwork toy during a sluggish ‘My Wife’ and he only rallies again for that final ending of ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’. But what an ending! It’s also great that we’ve been given the chance to hear it at last, however flawed, so we too can be flies on the wall for the big goodbye, rather than sticking it in the vaults for another half century. 

The studio recordings too have their share of surprises, even if I’m sorry that there aren’t more alternate takes and mixes (given how many times The Who re-recorded this stuff to better cater for Moony’s struggles). There are some though and it’s a joy in sets like these of hearing old friends make their slow waddle from being complete strangers to the songs we know backwards and you get that sense a lot across this album. ‘Who Are You’ itself, for instance, crops up a lot across this set and each times it’s a little different. It starts off as nothing more than a basic jam and the title line, played in murky sound in 1976, moves onto a chorus and a first verse played in early rehearsals as one last defiant roar of identity that’s as nihilistic and angry as they come. Then Pete hacks out the song into a demo, softening its blows to be more of personal statement of identity. Then  it’s given back to the band for a ‘John and Cyrano’ mix that’s a tad slow as the band play catch up and try to get the notes right rather than throw it around, but still sounds pretty great. Only slowly does it begin to take on the identity we know and love – a cut verse here, an instrumental breakout here – before a ‘nearly’ take with a ‘lost’ second verse that got dropped (a pretty revealing one too that’s more ‘By Numbers’ self-loathing than ‘Who Are You’ statement of intent: ‘I checked out my reflection jumping with a cheap guitar, I must have lost my direction ‘cause I ended up a superstar, one nighters at the ballroom elected by the human race, you can learn from my mistakes but you won’t sit in the class again, well who are you?’) which got replaced by the one that runs ‘I took the tube back into town…’) There’s also a nifty streamlined single edit that cuts a lot of the instrumental break before The Who revert back to basics in a gloriously punk version played at Shepperton (‘That’s all we can remember of a song we’re working on’ admits Pete to the fan audience. ‘When the record comes out you’ll hear that it sounds nothing like that’ laughs Roger as it collapses. ‘That version was better!’ Pete adds) and a rather pompous version played live at the Pontiac with Kenney Jones (good) and horns (bad) in 1979.

That’s quite the journey and there are similar ones for all the album songs which all get alternate mixes or takes (bar ‘Music Must Change’ regrettably, the ones I was most dying to hear given that the final version’s ‘rhythm track’ is a last minute replacement and the engineer walking round the studio in squeaky shoes! It’s also a bit weird the Townshend demo of the song that’s been kicking around for years –and was released on ‘The Lifehouse Chronicles’ - isn’t here). There are however lots of little moments of brilliance scattered across this set that are a revelation to those of you who know the album well: the set highlight by far is the Pete guide vocal for ‘New Song’ where he’s clearly having a whale of a time right on the borderline between existential angst and laughing at himself on a song that was after all written from a guitarist songwriter’s point of view (Roger always sounded a little too po-faced, as if he didn’t get the joke and besides, his hairline was indeed ‘superstar’ still back in 1978). Second best is the ‘underdubbed’ version of ‘Love Is Coming Down’ before the syrupy strings and polished ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ were added. I wouldn’t say this version sounds like a Who song still but it does sound more like Townshend trying to write a song for a Daltrey solo album and Roger sings this tale of anxious teen dating with mature skill and dexterity (there’s also a fun bit of chatter at the start where The Who sit around asking what’s on telly – ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’ according to Pete!)  There’s a neat ‘Music Must Change’ too, heard in a later Kenney Jones-era rehearsal for The Who’s upcoming tour that’s really cooking, spooky and impressionistic, until it breaks down right near the end. Elsewhere an early ‘Sister Disco’ has a full guitar part that got cut in favour of synths (still doesn’t sound like disco, though). Also, if you didn’t catch the last CD re-issue too then head straight to two brilliant outtakes: an unused wistful Townshend ballad about loneliness ‘No Road Romance’ (his own take on ‘Back On The Road’ perhaps?) and the brilliant Moon ‘n’ John demo version of what will become one of Pete’s all-time best solo songs ‘Empty Glass’. Both would have been great additions to what, at nine tracks, was always quite a short album.

There are six Entwistle demos including his earthy vocals back in place for the gloriously cynical album cut ‘Had Enough’, some very different lyrics for an even more synth heavy ‘905’ (‘I’m dating 503 who is just like me!’) and the quirky prostitute love song ‘Trick Of The Light’ that always suited his  earthy voice more than Roger, not to mention the beautiful unused John song, sweet ballad ‘Back On The Road’ (one of the AAA songs of the year when it was released for the first time on ‘The Ox Anthology’ a couple of years back) that’s one of the best things the bassist ever wrote. There’s a couple of never before heard Entwistle songs too: ‘Wild Horses’ which is a cross between the Stones song of the same name and The Osmonds’ ‘Crazy Horses’ (!) with its comedy oompah riff and quirky lyrics and ‘Good Time Coming’, a typical Entwistle bas heavy rocker that sounds like a happier ‘Music Must Change’ but one that laughs at punks rather than befriends them (was Pete listening and inspired to write his own?) We’ve talked a lot over the past Who deluxe sets at how professional Pete’s demos were, with the guitarist busy ‘play-acting’ at simpler styles of  his fellow bandmates, but John’s are very much the same, with a pretty decent go at Townshend’s guitar and Moony’s drums, along with multiple bass lines and lots of synths. Highly impressive.

Then again there’s a lot of stuff not really worth your time: even as big a fan as I can’t hear too much difference in ‘Love Coming Down’ without the strings or a ‘lost guitar’ mix of ‘Sister Disco’ (it has an outro that runs maybe ten seconds longer), ‘Guitar and Pen’ with a Pete guide vocal again isn’t as different as you might think (Pete is clearly trying to sound like Roger rather than being himself this time) and there are various multiple mixes not up to the final versions and various single edits that prove bigger (or at least longer) is better. The disc dedicated to the later Kenny Jones rehearsals/tours aren’t in truth that much far ahead of the Moony years, but they do result in a stunning ‘Music Must Change’ (a song that always worked better live) that’s on the verge of collapse throughout, spinning out for a ‘Rabbit Bundrick’ swirling organ solo that adds a touch of magic and mystery and a ‘Sister Disco’ featured in the ‘Maximum R and B’ film that’s much livelier on its feet than the record and a delight to own on CD at long last after having to make do with a cassette dub of the film soundtrack I made years ago. There’s also a disc of original mixes done by producer Glynn Johns (for everything bar ‘Music Must Change’, re-done after the brawl saw him quit) that Roger demanded be re-done because they didn’t cast his voice in a very good light. The singer has a point: Glynn’s mix separates the band and has them sound less like the usual Wholigans in the middle of a brawl and more like pensioners across the street banging brooms on their ceilings because their neighbours are making too much noise. ‘New Song’ and ‘Guitar and Pen’ are especially poor, with Roger’s voice sounding thin on its own rather than shouting through the noise. There are a few differences worth seeking out, mind – ‘905’ gains an extra synth lick, there’s a ‘double drum’ opening to ‘Trick Of The Light’ that works rather well and that song also has a couple of stray Roger lines that got lost in the final mix (A theatrical ‘Now let me tell you…’ leading into the middle eight ‘what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this’ and a cringeworthy yell of ‘playtime!’) You also get to hear that Roger was ‘right’ about the strings added to ‘Had Enough’ (the point where the vocalist had enough and got into a fight with the producer that they were added without the band’s permission and they weren’t rock and roll enough (he’s right: the song works better without them).  Interesting to hear after all this time, though.

The same mixed feeling goes for a difficult full concert from the Pontiac in 1979 (plus two ‘bonus tracks’ at the Spectrum added as the tour went on, ‘Dancing In The Street’ and ‘The Real Me’, both amongst the best things here that make you wish they’d released that show instead) the first official release of a full concert from a doomed and unhappy tour with new drummer Kenney Jones on board. You can see why – the band are disarray without Keith and still finding their feet and while Kenney was perfect for The Small Faces he struggles to fill Keith’s boots. It would be unfair to blame it all on him though: Pete is clearly not well (as you can see in the only song previously released, the ‘Music Must Change’ from ’30 Years’ where he’s visibly sweating and gets lost in the guitar solo) and Roger is struggling to ‘dance’ now the drumbeats beneath him have turned to rocks. The Who are having a miserable time all round and Roger frequently takes time out to mock the poor sound engineer between songs (he does this all tour judging by the bootlegs!) Then again Roger got out thee wrong side of the bed all day: ‘It’s a shame we have to play in such a khazi’ snarls Roger before eerily asking the audience to move back from a crush and ‘stay safe because we’d never forgive ourselves if something happened’ mere weeks before the deaths of eleven fans in a similar crush at a gig in Cincinnati about a month later. A few songs in and Roger introduces ‘John and his eight string bass’ with a snarl ‘’Which can get incredibly loud on stage!’ he adds – and not in a jovial banter type way.  A few after that a few fans start getting rowdy. ‘There’s no need to fight’ Roger roars ‘we’ve already won’. ‘Yeah – and lost’ sighs Pete. Pete is back to making music a part time job fitted in between his drinking, John is in debt and Roger unhappy at the new boy while all four are clearly struggling to hear themselves think never mind play. It doesn’t make for the most melodic or complex of Who gigs but the angrier, darker vibe suits some of the songs, especially a noisy ‘Punk and The Godfather’, a heartfelt and fragile ‘Behind Blue Eyes’, a funky ‘Magic Bus’ and a compact, snappy ‘My Generation’ played like The Sex Pistols in stark contrast to the more ‘epic’ extended versions played across most of the 1970s. Pete also brightens up one of the worst of the many ‘I Can’t Explains’ around (the only song The Who played on every tour) with a brilliantly defiant angst-ridden solo. ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ is a particularly interesting case and maybe the best live recording here: it’s meant to be a song of triumph, of seeing through the people who harm you and us with a coda gut-punch that maybe it isn’t going to be that simple after all. But this version is one of defeat, with Pete slashing his guitar tunelessly in a cacophony of noise like he’s just joined The Sex Pistols and Roger’s infamous scream a howl of pain more than triumph, the song ending in a barrage of extended noise the likes of which The Who hadn’t played since the mid-1960s. Every generation gets the version of this song they deserve: the 2025 one feels just perfect in a world of anti-vaxx pseudo-science and the rise of far-right dictators across the globe despite every precedent from the history books that it all goes wrong. The ‘new’ songs from ‘Who Are You’ not often played if at all past this tour are also great to hear: ‘Trick Of the Light’ is surprisingly faithful to the album version, while the title track is already a set highlight, an incredibly noisy ‘Sister Disco’ practically heavy metal and a nine minute ‘Music Must Change’ spooky and intense. There’s even an exclusive, of a sort: a noisy Townshend jam seemingly made up on the spot with the lines ‘It takes a fool like me – a fool like you’ sung over and over. The melody is a little like the one for pretty David Gilmour ballad co-write ‘All Lovers Are Deranged’ but played to the crunching riff of ‘How Can You Do It Alone?’ (a song it segues into which will appear with very different lyrics on next album ‘Face Dances’ and features a new rant for the kids buying girlie magazine verse ‘I’ve never seen anything so fucked up! What he needed was really cheap – what he really needed was you and me!’ In this day of AI and incels it sounds like a piece of time travelling). Just don’t come to this show for note-perfect renditions of other live favourites like ‘Boris The Spider’ or ‘See Me Feel Me’ played a quadzillion times better elsewhere, while an out of tune and horn-drenched ‘I Can See For Miles’ has never sounded, well, foggier.  

You really won’t feel like playing much of this set too often, but it’s interesting and unlike many box sets out at the moment (looking at you, Beatles and Pink Floyd!) the vast majority of it really is properly new to fans. All in all one of the band’s better deluxe sets, with a lot more unheard material than ever before, deluxe packaging made with care and a far more affordable price than, well, any of the other deluxe entries on this list this year. While this isn’t my favourite Who album by any means and the extras haven’t helped me to change my mind about that fact the way the very best re-issues do, nevertheless it’s a lot better than the ‘super deluxe’ Who sets from a few years back that were rehashing the old stuff for a half dozen extra forgettable tracks. This is almost all new and helps reveal who the Who were in 1978, even when the whole point of the original album was that they weren’t sure themselves anymore. If you like this album then you’ll love it; if you still have mixed feelings it probably won’t change your mind; if you hate it then, well, better luck next time I’m afraid.

8)    The Rolling Stones “Black and Blue” (Deluxe)

While I’m grateful the Stones’ deluxe series has started back up again after a three year gap (what happened to the ‘It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll’ album?!) I  must admit I was wary of this set. You see, ‘Black and Blue’ is my least favourite studio Stones album, recorded in their most difficult and unstable period: the album where Keith is at his most addicted and strung out on heroin (before the much publicised court case where the Canadian president no less helped get him off in 1978) and where Mick Taylor has finally cracked under the pressure and abandoned the band who instead treat these sessions as ;ess of a cohesive album and more as a sort of glorified ‘audition piece’ (Ronnie Wood joins in time to appear on the cover, but is only actually on a quarter of the album tracks). Mick Jagger, meanwhile, is getting fed up of the whole thing and absenting himself as much as possible. From the ugly cover (a suddenly aged Stones in close up, with Charlie Watts given an unfortunate ‘skinhead’ look) to the despicable advertising campaign (a tied up woman with bruises looking visibly distressed despite announcing ‘I’m black and blue with the Rolling Stones and I like it!’ This was in 1976 people, not that long ago!) to the sloppy cod white reggae and the high percentage of ballads, this album is one seemingly designed to make you uncomfortable.

Not for the first time in this range, though, the deluxe edition make the original album sound like a far better record than it ever has before. I don’t generally bother mentioning remastering because the differences are minimal and depend what equipment you play them on anyway, but the sound (remixed by Steve Wilson) is audibly crisp and clear and toughens everything up, with a real groove in places despite being drenched by layers of horn overdubs and Billy Preston’s sleepy synths. It can’t give the songs another layer of meaning mind and these remain the emptiest set of songs the Stones ever put together, but then they were never meant to be thoughtful– what they do do is ‘dance’ with a slinky groove that’s infectious rather than murky and hard to hear.  Opener ‘Hot Stuff’ for instance up my rankings from ‘worst Stones song ever’ to at least a mid tier table simply because the groove is so darn good, becoming a fab sexy nonsense song rather than a failed attempt to conjure up a cockney Caribbean. ‘Hand Of Fate’ sounds like an urgent song of karma rather than a sleepwalking tale of crossing your fingers and hoping for the best.  ‘Hey Negrita’ has a delightful sly purr about it rather than just being a lazy chat up line spread out into a song via filler (and note, the Ono-Lennon estate, that the Stones can still safely use the title without backlash!) The tale of family life ‘Fool To Cry’ is also cute and sweet rather than the a song so boring Keith famously once went to sleep in it (!)

The packaging is detailed and chock full of unseen photographs. The bonus concert  at Earl’s Court (spread rather unevenly across two CDs and then repeated again across one blu-ray disc) has Ronnie firmly embedded in the band and while the Stones aren’t approaching ‘Some Girls’ levels of punkish finesse yet the new songs sound a quadzillion light years better here, played by a band who know them well and are enthusiastic to be there, rather than one noodling around waiting for inspiration to strike that never quite comes. Rock and rolling even the ballads, never mind the reggae songs, tightens everything up while  Mick Jagger is firmly front and centre, rather than flying in at the last minute to overdub vocals between holidays in the sun. While I’ve always been sceptical of Ronnie Wood joining the band when there were so many better players around (a lot of them on this album’s sessions) there's no denying these songs have so much more swagger with him in the band and playing on stage.  Now this is all relative of course: by the standards of the self-proclaimed ‘greatest rock and roll band in the world’ it’s still a tad sloppy and slow, with the renditions of the hits almost all heard better elsewhere on other 1970s shows (go for the deluxe ‘Sticky Fingers’ to hear the band at their live best!) while Billy (not at his best either in this era) takes up valuable space by singing two of his lesser songs with everyone bar the rhythm section leaving the stage. However it’s nice to have and the newer songs especially are at their best here.

 The blu-ray (though not the CDs sadly) also add a second oddity, the brief ‘Les Rolling Stones Aux Abattoirs, Paris Juin 1976’, a forty-five minute long mini TV concert that was one of the first TV appearances with Ronnie in tow. The show was only ever officially screened in France but has become something of a bootlegger’s favourite since (while some tracks ended up on 1977’s concert set ‘Love You Live’). Not the best show the band ever played (Keith is visibly struggling at times and I’m not sure about the reggaefied ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’!) but it sometimes comes alive (such as a cracking version of ‘Star Star’ that’s the best they ever played and a closing jam through ‘Street Fighting Man’ where Keith suddenly seems to wake up just in time for the closing credits!) and all in all it makes a nice extra, especially being able to watch it in pristine quality after so many decades of watching it through grime and blur!   

The studio outtakes are more revealing yet and once again in the band’s ‘deluxe’ range shows that the band a) had a lot more songs in reserve than we ever realised and b) weren’t always the best judges of their own material given how much better most of it is. Although admittedly this time round there are only two tracks that would actually qualify as ‘songs’ and which sound un-mistakenly Stonesy.  ‘I Love You, Ladies’ hits a sweet but slinky and sexy groove played to a typical album session Billy Preston synth lick. It’s a different, more complete take to the one out on bootlegs for years and is a little like ‘Some Girls’ in its list of qualities of different girls, but more heartfelt (and sexy!) and less misogynistic or tongue-in-cheek. It ends in a ‘Fool To Cry/Miss You’ peal of falsetto ‘oohs’. Charlie, suffering his own dependency problems and playing at halftime across most of the album, wakes up long enough to play a fierce attack in the middle here that pummels this sweet song into something more interesting. This is also the only semi-finished song released so far from the brief period when Jeff Beck was being considered as second guitarist, not that you hear him much bar a brief solo in the middle. Like many things in the Stones deluxe series it makes you wonder why it got passed over for so many records. ‘Shame Shame Shame’ is even better, with a delightful retro groove that features Mick’s falsetto giving way to his rock and roll preening on an early disco number where he’s going to forget his romantic problems by dancing the night away. Daft it may be, but it’s also deft and more nattily constructed than a lot of the tracks that made the final album with a highly catchy chorus that’s more commercial than any of the singles they did put out from this sorry record. Sensibly it’s the re-issue’s lead single fifty years on. Admittedly I could have lived without hearing most of the four ‘jams’, which (even more than the Stones-backed Nicky Hopkins album ‘Jamming With Edward’) are the Stones equivalent of the ‘Apple Jam’ on George Harrison’s ‘All Things Must Pass’ that nobody except me ever seems to play, though even those have a bit more life to them than most of the record, with more chance to hear Jeff Beck’s style of playing fitting in with the band (indeed ‘Freeway Jam’ was later turned into a more streamlined instrumental by Beck on his solo LP ‘Blow By Blow’ released just a few weeks before ‘Black and Blue’, so at least he got something out of it). All apart from the most Stonesy moment, the ‘Chuck Berry Jam’, where it’s Harvey Mandel playing some brilliant notes on a riff that sounds a little like Berry’s ‘No Particular Place To Go’, taped at the same sessions as ‘Hot Stuff’ and ‘Memory Motel’ (and at about ten times the speed). All welcome extras just to hear the rhythm section and guest guitarists, even with Mick Jagger absent and Keith Richards out of it.

There’s far more still sitting in the vaults that could have been released though which prevents this deluxe reissue being the masterpiece it might have been: ‘Act Together’ is a sweet ‘Memory Motel’ style synth ballad that suddenly hits a rockier groove midway through, the slinky Stones by numbers rocker affectionately nicknamed ‘Cellophane Trousers’ by fans (!), a silly improvised riff song ‘Come On Sugar, a further jam with guest star Eric Clapton on ‘Carnival To Rio’ (better than any of the four jams included here!) and easily the best of the Stones’ period reggae tracks ‘I Got A Letter’. Not to mention early versions of later Stones songs that started life here before ending up on ‘Tattoo You’ like ‘Start Me Up’ and ‘Slave’. Though good, this set could yet have been great! In other words, this will never be my favourite Stones album or my favourite Stones re-issue but it’s one heck of a lot more interesting than I was expecting it to be and for the first time ‘Black and Blue’ has left me wanting more rather than feeling as if I’ve just been beaten up and had my money stolen!

9)    Godley and Crème “Parts Of The Process - The Complete Works”

It probably won’t surprise you, dear reader, that I am something of a completist. Compilations are all very well and have their place as an appetiser, but if you really connect with a band and want to get to know them properly then you need, say, their 17th best-selling album or their collection of B-sides, the lesser seen places where an artist has more room to be themselves without the record company breathing down their necks and asking for a hit. There’s one major exception to that fact though: a little of former 10cc musicians Godley-Crème’s avant garde weirdness goes a long way. There are, it’s true, some stunning moments across this set and I don’t just mean the bigger singles: ‘Freeze Frame’ is one of my most beloved albums and every song out the eight is a gem however wordy (the Dylan meets Yoko hybrid ‘An Englishman In New York’), weird (‘I Pity Inanimate Objects’, a take on fate and destiny sung by a synthesised toaster that sounds like it’s blown a gasket!), commercial (‘Mmmmmugshots!’), confusing (‘Brazilia’ is 10cc’s ‘Revolution 9, a bizarre rummage through the sound effects library that yet somehow still makes sense) or sad (‘Get Well Soon’, where a stricken patient nearly dies but is brought back to life through the power of music via his portable radio, which promptly dies when he passes the point of living). Even away from their masterpiece there are moments of greatness littered across this set that sparkle as greatly as any 10cc album track: the sleepy paean to early rises ‘5 O’Clock In The Morning’ shows that 10cc’s biggest pair of weirdoes were also fully capable of melody and beauty,  ‘Art School Canteen’ a beautiful slab of autobiography as Godley and Crème meet and try and get out of doing work while pretending they’re ‘artists’ but not sure if they’re really just pretentious and as such the true birth of everything else in this set, plus the twin flop singles the snarling ‘Wide Boy’ and the breathtakingly gorgeous ‘Golden Boy’, two songs of jealousy way better than the better known hits ‘Cry’ ‘Wedding Bells’ or ‘Under My Thumb’ in my book. Throw in the best of scary cold war ending apocalyptic harmonica ‘n’ soul singers finale LP ‘Goodbye Blue Sky’ (’10,000 Angels’ and ‘The Last Page Of History’, set on a judgement day that feels like it’s getting closer every day) – an album that sounds utterly unlike anything else ever made - are as great as anything I own.

The rest though? It’s mostly nonsense and I say that as a fan. Three albums of the most OTT prog rock concept album in history ‘Consquences’ is at least two and a half too many split between unlistenable ‘gizmo’ instrumentals, unfunny Dudley Moore ‘comic’ interludes and songs that badly miss Eric Stewart and Graham Gouldman’s soft edges when Kev and Lol land their often awkward angular musical blows. Follow-up ‘L’ is worse, as the duo ‘relearn’ everything like a hyperactive toddler on prescription medicine asking ’what does this button do?’ ‘Ismism’ is their best-selling album and easily their most commercial, but it’s awkward blend of savage humour, theatrical stylings and radio-friendly pop is too much for this fan to stomach too often, while ‘Birds Of Prey’ is a sleepy, patchy set forgettable the second the CD stops playing and ‘The History Mix’ might be groundbreaking as an early ‘sampling’ record, but also sounds as though it was made by a drunk running through the vault with scissors, both repetitive and random. Had the best of these songs been placed on a single album (alas even the best Godley-Crème set so far ‘Images’ is a patchy set itself) then I’d have been happy; forking out £70 – though a huge saving on buying these six albums separately – is simply not worth it for a discography this patchy.

Which is a shame because the completist in me is still enticed. After all, unlike some other lesser box sets (including the 10cc ‘complete’ set, which wasn’t – not quite) it really does feature everything, including some exquisite packaging, ‘Consquences’ in its rare entire triple album form across three pretty full discs (not sure you’d ever want it like that, but at least it’s there and at not much more than that album triple disc was last time it was out on CD complete anyway) and three whole discs of rarities: nothing unreleased but almost all of it genuinely rare, from B-sides that have never been on CD before (the tongue-in-cheek primal tale of lust ‘Babies’ is the best, along with ‘HEAVEN’ B-side ‘Rhino Rhino’, a true and funny tale about a rhino that was accidentally left to wander out of its pen and create havoc and ‘Rhinocide’ in the surrounding countryside) to extended 12” mixes of songs that work a lot better than most bands’ 12” mixes do (forget the ‘History’ mix, generally Godley-Crème were masters of repetition: ‘Golden Boy’ is particularly beautiful in 5 minute form, seesawing between singalong joy and utter despair). The duo also missed a trick by not doing what everyone else (including 10cc) are doing with their box sets: a DVD/blu-ray disc rounding up all their magnificent music videos (as with the music, everyone knows ‘Cry’ and ‘Wedding Bells’ but the promos for ‘Wide Boy’ and ‘Golden Boy’ are better and more inventive still, while the weird-ass clip for ‘An Englishman In New York’, with its working automaton robots, virtually invented AI!) In the final conclusion: these albums have never looked better, sounded brighter or made more sense. Although that is, in many ways, a relative measure. My advice: sample it first, buy ‘Freeze Frame’ if you want to know what all the fuss is about and if you do have enough money spare or buy it cheap be prepared to keep the ‘skip’ button handy!

 

10)              The Monkees “Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones LTD” (Super Deluxe)

Three long years after the ‘Headquarters’ we finally get the ‘last’ super deluxe box set from Rhino and fans have been cockahoop on my timeline. On the one hand I can kind of see why: ‘Pisces’ (named for the band’s star collective signs: Davy is a fellow Capricorn born the same day as Mike, December 30th) has always been one of The Monkees’ most beloved albums, this set finally fills a gap on the shelves between ‘Headquarters’ and ‘The Birds, The Bees and The Monkees’ (a deluxe set released as long ago as 2010) and it marks the first time this album been out on vinyl for a generation – which given that the Monkees is one of those bands that keeps picking up new fans all the time is all big news. It also happens to be one of my favourite Monkee albums too, the crossover point when the band were still mostly writing and playing by themselves but had gone back to cherry-picking their favourite material by other artists and bringing in special guests to speed up the recording process and give themselves a tighter yet still authentic sound. But here’s the downside: the reason this album was put to the back of the pile is that it’s already been catered for so well. The 1990s Rhino single CD re-release was jam-packed with incredible rarities: alternate takes (‘The Door Into Summer’ is gorgeous in either version!), different mixes (‘Daily Nightly’ sounds like a completely different song!) and original edits than ran much longer (‘Star Collector’ seems silly and frivolous at four  minutes but it’s a positive freakout at nearly six!) Then a plain ol’ deluxe edition in 2007 added some sensible extras, most of them from the soundtrack of the Monkees TV show’s second season recorded at more or less the same time, with a beautiful version of Spanish Christmas carol ‘Riu Chiu’ and a jaw-dropping live performance by Micky Dolenz on the tongue-twisting jazz suicide B-side (no, really – the narrator throws himself into the river to drown himself then instantly regrets it) ‘Goin’ Down’. The problem is we got all our Christmas presents early and even adding two disc’s worth of extras (all the other Monkee deluxe sets ran to three CDs) doesn’t honestly add much.

Sure there are remixes galore, but the one for the main album is, well, controversial: again I don’t often comment on re-mastering and remixes because they aren’t usually all that different, just clearer, but while this mix is certainly clearer it also feels very different to the album I’ve known and loved all these decades. It might be better once I get used to it, the way an old friend does when you see them with a new haircut, but it also feels wrong and unnecessary given how good the old one already was (we want things clearer, not changed). The ‘alternate mixes’ meanwhile don’t sound very different to each other at all so they might as well not have bothered. There are nevertheless a handful of interesting extras: Harry Nilsson’s demo for unreleased song ‘The Story Of Rock ‘n’ Roll’ (which actually makes more sense on ‘Headquarters’ given that’s where the band got furthest with recording a version, but still), two ‘new’ takes of Peter Tork’s much re-recorded romantic cover ballad ‘Come On In’ with a guesting Stephen Stills adding some laidback blues bass (first released on outtakes set ‘Missing Links II’ in 1998) that alas only got as far as backing tracks, a cooking backing track for ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday’ with a slightly longer reverb finale that smokes and might well be the best performance The Monkees (plus producer Chip Douglas on bass and session drummer ‘Fast’ Eddie Hoh living up to his nickname) ever gave, there are eight minutes of the vocal recording session for ‘Words’, the otherwise unheard ‘I Don’t Know Yet’ (a noisy rockish song that sounds like a jam but has Micky singing…something a little off-mike) and a brief two minute return to the sort of band jam The Monkees used as warm-up sessions during ‘Headquarters’. All are nice to hear, once, but don’t make the collector’s heart go pit-a-pat. Well, not at that price anyway.

There’s a whole host of stuff out on bootlegs that could and should have been here too though: Harry Nilsson’s sly demo for ‘Cuddly Toy’ (this tale, actually about a groupie who hung about with Hell’s Angels and got raped, is sung with far more sarcasm and far less innocence!),  the slightly slower and reverbless but otherwise pretty darn close to the finished version Carole King demo for ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday’, the ‘first’ version of ‘A Man Without A Dream’ before the ‘Instant Replay’ re-recording with Peter on piano (though we get a nice Carole King demo I’d not heard before), the second version of ‘I’ll Be Back Upon My Feet’ (after the TV soundtrack version and before the ‘Birds, Bees’ one, perhaps left out because Mike walked out the sessions rather than play on it because he thought irt was stupid – and he’s not wrong!), Goffin and King’s ‘Yours Until Tomorrow’, Chip Douglas’ ‘Hawaiian Song’, two abandoned versions of the gorgeous ‘Door Into Summer’ by Monkee auditionee and sometime stand-in Bill Martin and various unreleased Mike Nesmith songs that never got past demo stage (there’s even a pre-fame flop single version of ‘Don’t Call On Me’ doing the rounds that’s drop-dead gorgeous from about four years before the version on this record). I would love to hear the session tape for the nightclub ‘atmosphere’ that bookends ‘Call’ too (the closest the Monkees get to their zany humour on a record post ‘Gonna Buy Me a Dog’!) – the tape obviously exists as it was recorded the same day as ‘Special Announcement’ which is here – we get a ‘session excerpt’ for that ‘joke’ track too but it’s mostly The Monkees being dogs barking. Uhh, groovy. We also know that the takes of ‘She Hangs Out’ ‘Cuddly Toy’ and ‘Star Collector’ were all edited for the final album; ‘Star Collector’ is there in full (as per the last two re-issues) but why not the others? Are they missing?

By any other standards this would still be a good haul, but by other Monkee deluxe re-issues (‘Birds, Bees’ ‘Head’ and ‘Monkees Present’ being the best) it’s slim pickings. Certainly after the three year delay when we thought the re-issue series had stopped and another agonising wait on top (when the announcement was made about a month too early!) it’s a bit underwhelming. It’s also a shame, given how many repeats and remixes of the album we get across these four discs, that they couldn’t re-programme it to its original intended running order (switched at the 11^th hour to keep ‘Daydream Believer’ over for the ‘Birds, Bees’ album with ‘Goin Down’ as the flipside and without ‘Love Is Only Sleeping, originally intended as the A-side with ‘Daydream’ on the back, but left as an album track after second thoughts) which, for this fan at least, works far far better than the finished version (as it is hearing Peter Tork’s fake ‘Special Announcement’ outtake testing your hifi sounds wrong in the middle of a disc. Also if you can tell me what’s different about the ‘alternate mix’ of this spoken word thirty-seven second track do let me know). I’m torn: I’m really glad they filled a hole in the collection, but I can’t see me playing this version that often when the other two exist which were a lot cheaper and had everything you could really want already. There’s just something in the ‘stars’ about this re-issue I guess, with a lot of hype built up over the intervening years. I would far prefer a much needed re-issue of final original album ‘Changes’ – which, sadly, Monkees archivist Andrew Sandoval says won’t happen because the session tapes are lost (doesn’t mean they can’t clear it up from a high quality record though, while outtakes have cropped up on the 1990s CD re-issue and ‘Missing Links’, while a reel containing three ‘lost’ songs was discovered a decade or so back and still hasn’t been officially heard, while if you open up the sessions to include the stuff Micky and Davy did for Bell records shortly after you’d have a cracking two disc set I reckon…)

11)              The Small Faces “Autumn Stone” (Deluxe Edition)

‘The Autumn Stone’ (working title ‘1882’ after the keystone in an old chapel Marriott was renovating into a cottage – I’ve often wondered if it was cursed!) is one of a handful of AAA albums that ‘got away’. While not quite The Beach Boys ‘Smile’, it is for my money the single best Small Face album despite being abandoned, unfinished, unloved and turned into a part ‘greatest hits’ compilation to make some quick dosh by the Immediate record label about to go into administration. It should have been fantastic (and so nearly was): The Small Faces had been riding a high making only their third ‘proper’ album, spoof concept LP ‘Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake’ about the disappearance of the scintillating moon and dangly and had just scored their biggest hit to date with ‘Lazy Sunday'. Only that ribald cockney knees up, never intended as a single but released because of Immediate cash flow issues, brought up a ghost of the past. The Small Faces had long had an ‘image problem’. They played and sang like blues wailers and wrote songs as tough as anyone, but being an early 1960s band who’d been forced to cover silly songs and with a collective height of less than twenty feet and baby faces (they were all so young for real, barely into their twenties here!) they’d been long seen as cute pop idols not to be taken seriously. A number of extraordinarily meaty singles (‘All Or Nothing’ ‘Tin Soldier’) had dispelled that idea to some extent – but then ‘Lazy Sunday’ brought it all back up again. Steve Marriott for one had had enough of being screamed at during shows and wanted to steer the band in a tougher sound, of the sort he’d try out in his next band ‘Humble Pie’. The rest of the band weren’t so sure, resulting in creative difference clashes across this record which was tense and fraught with problems, so unlike the joy of ‘Ogden’s’. Managerial and record label problems meant that, despite having a #1 single and album, The Small Faces were also still broke and forced on endless package tours scratching out a living. Matters came to a head on New Year’s Eve 1968 and a show at Paris when Steve Marriott threw down his guitar and yelled ‘I quit’ – even though the managers quickly waived a contract and forced the band to complete the tour the writing was on the wall and the band never recovered. They went their separate ways maybe one-thirds into making this next LP. Immediate promptly turned it into a ‘mourning’ album, stuck out every even vaguely finished sounding track, fleshed it out with some non-album singles, some other outtakes they’d found in the vaults and a mini three-song live-show of an earlier gig at Newcastle City Hall and threw the thing out as a short-running double LP. It was all done as quickly as possible before the record label went under (as it did a few months later): the band weren’t ever consulted and some of the mastering is horrendous (the original live show sounds like being dipped in a working cement mixer while being eaten by lions. Well, I say ‘original’. Immediate thought there weren’t enough screams and added some on haphazardly direct to the original master tapes that have been a pain to remove ever since). A few re-masterings for compilations and two really impressive box sets have tidied things up here and there but, by and large, ‘The Autumn Stone’ is still a pale shadow of what it should have been, long overlooked despite featuring a handful of the best things the band ever ever did.  

Drummer Kenney Jones, alas nowadays the last Small Face alive, has taken on the job of overseeing the band’s back catalogue and has been the drive behind all sorts of juicy releases the past few years, from lo-fi but fascinating early shows to re-issues of all the original albums with bonus tracks. He’s never tackled ‘The Autumn Stone’ though – till now. What was once a short running double vinyl is now a lengthy three CD set and where the packaging was once cheap and cheerful (they even ‘forgot’ to add The Small Faces’ name to the original front cover, which seems an odd move for a record label that needed to market every penny it could get!) it’s now as luxurious as any deluxe set on the market. All the different versions of ‘The Autumn Stone’ are there but put together in a more pleasing way than before so that, for instance, the non-album singles from years gone by are mostly together (though the then-‘new’ songs are weirdly split across discs three and four) and the live songs (plus a couple that have been on compilations but never made the original album) are all separated at the end. All these songs sound better to an extent (not least the ones that were originally mastered at the ‘wrong’ speed!) though most have already been improved many a time down the years (even the live show now sounds pretty decent, the equal of any 1960s concert recording) and the new running order flows together nicely. Almost all relevant tracks from across a plethora of other Small Faces releases are sensibly gathered together in one place too, including two extra live tracks only released in Germany (in the 1960s at least) and a first dummy run at ‘Wham Bam Thank You Mam’ titled ‘Me You and Us Too’ (though ‘Pig’s Trotter’, a rather more forgettable instrumental/backing track from these sessions that cropped up in the 1980s, is missing). It’s the best this compilation has ever sounded and flows much better now.

Alas though, despite promises of all sorts of juicy extras the remixes are nothing special; three ‘acoustic’ mixes taken from the ‘Immediate Years’ box set plus two new ones for ‘Red Balloon’ and ‘Autumn Stone’ itself, which are nice to hear but don’t add anything much and were of course never intended by the band to be heard this way (‘Stone’ is a particular cheat, really, given that it’s virtually an acoustic performance anyway). The much ballyhooed unheard song ’Olympic Jam’ turns out to be an unedited version of ‘Time Takes Time’ , a spirited instrumental that’s been padding out compilations since the 1990s (and already outstayed its welcome a bit at two and a half minutes as it was!) There’s nothing else here that’s new and while much of it sounds better you have to question why you would want to spend so much money on a three disc set with so many repeats and which can for the most part be heard just as well elsewhere. Lovely as it is to look at, important a part of the discography as it is, nice as it undoubtedly has been to have this record back out again properly, you’re not actually missing all that much if you own most of all of the earlier Small Faces re-issues (especially the superlative and near-complete two-disc ‘Darlings Of Whapping Wharf Laundrette’ compilation). Let’s face it this was never a ‘Smile’ abandoned just an overdub or two short of completion but a record that hadn’t got as far as the end of side one and there’s simply not enough here that isn’t padding. All that said, if you don’t know this album at all you’re in for a treat and key songs like the title track ‘Red Balloon’ ‘Don’t Burst My Bubble’ ‘Wham Bam Thank You Mam’ and especially ‘Call It Something Nice’ (Ronnie Lane’s take on the impending split, sung as a rare duet with Marriott and full of sympathy and hurt in equal doses) have never sounded better. The packaging, too, is exquisite (in the vinyl edition anyway), beautifully illustrated with unseen photographs (including the band in childhood, with Ronnie as a pirate!) plus keyboardist Mac’ MacLagan’s hand-drawn sketches from the period.  Had the band been treated with this much care and respect in 1968 they might never have split up at all. 

 

12)              Jefferson Starship “Spitfire”/Hot Tuna “America’s Choice”

Two unexpected Jefferson-related entries in Rhino’s latest ‘Quadio’ batch of blu-ray re-issues, taking 1970s albums originally released in the short-lived quadrasonic sound system and re-mastering them for modern technology. Many fans are disappointed it’s not the better-selling ‘Red Octopus’ or the better received ‘Dragonfly’ but I for one have always been fond of the Starship’s third album, a catch-all record that grooves with rockabilly before taking off into outer space and only goes wrong for the empty pop songs buried away at the end. Inevitably it’s Paul Kantner’s scifi production epics that sound best in the new mix, with ‘Dance To The Dragon’ a sprightly tale of Americana in a post-Nixon age, the gorgeous song suite ‘Ozymandias’ with its pioneering synths and thunder sound effects and out of world beeps never sounding better and career highlight prog epic ‘St Charles’ that unfurls layer by layer like a lotus flower all sounding particularly good. Marty’s romantic ballads and Grace’s piano tales of self-analysis don’t sound particularly better or any different however, while it would take a lot more than higher fidelity to make drummer Johnny Barbata’s cameo on ‘Big City’ or empty pop trash ‘Love Lovely Love’ sound good. No bonus tracks either, even though surely there are some (the band were recording for their own label and seem the sort to hoard everything). Still, if you’re an Airplane fan and never tried the Starship era this eclectic album is a good place to start and some of it at least has never sounded better. That albums covers 3/6ths of the ‘core’ Jefferson Airplane; another two members, Jorma and Jack, went on to found the bluesier and more down-to-Earth Hot Tuna for a run of under-rated 1970s records that showcase just how amazing Jorma Kaukanen’s songwriting was. I wouldn’t say this fifth album from 1974 was one of my favourites of theirs and there’s even less here necessarily improved by the blue-ray remixing from the old quadraphonic. Nevertheless any Tuna record is welcome to have out again and ‘Serpent Of Dreams’ in particular is one of Jorma’s best songs, a multi-layered opaque electric track about the 1960s generation growing from boys into men (and girls into women) and going out into the world to ‘shape their own destiny’. Once again if you’re an Airplane fan curious what a third of the band got up to next it’s well worth a listen (though its predecessor ‘Phosphorescent Rat’ that’s probably the best place to start).

13)              Pete Townshend “The Complete Studio Albums”

The logical extension to the individual vinyl Townshend solo album re-issue frenzy of 2023-2024, this colossus box set gathers together all six of Pete’s solo albums for CD, along with his much-loved collaboration with Ronnie Lane ‘Rough Mix’ (which for some reason got left off the 2023 platform). It’s a beautiful set indeed, with lovely re-creations of the original albums in miniature form, new packaging with unseen photographs and a typically wry Townshend interview that forms the basis of some excellent sleeve notes. Some of the music, too, is sublime: Pete’s debut solo album fundraiser ‘Who Came First’ mixes Meher Baba spiritualisms with demos for then-unreleased Who tracks from ‘Lifehouse’ to make for a confusing but uplifting whole, ‘Empty Glass’ is a stunning psycho-analytical work mixing songs considered ‘too personal’ for The Who’s most personal album ‘Who By Numbers’ with two catchy hit singles, while the best of ‘Rough Mix’ (spiritual plea ’Keep Me Turning’ and the catchy ‘My Baby Gives It Away’ that stomps like early Stones, not least because Charlie Watts is on drums), ‘Chinese Cowboys’ (addiction song ‘The Sea Refuses No River’) ‘White Coty’ (the urgent tale of brotherhood ‘Give Blood’) and ‘Psychoderelict’ (Pete’s greatest love song, for new wife Rachel, the age gap tale of worry ‘Now and Then’ about having no control over who you love) are as inspired and indeed inspirational  as music ever gets. However, oddly for a writer used to filling whole albums (give or take the odd comedy Entwistle interlude) Pete never really found consistency on any of these records: ‘Empty Glass’ comes closest, but all these records have some duff song somewhere and the Ted Hughes adaptation ‘Iron Man’ particularly is a colossal slog to sit through, one of the least musical albums by a true musical genius you can have the misery of sitting through. Most regrettably of all the bonus tracks offered up to fans on previous versions (including the vinyl sets, weirdly) are all missing, with the exception of an ‘alternate’ ‘Psychoderelict’ without the jarring between-track phonecalls from a music publisher to her aging rockstar client. Whether the result is worth £80 of your money depends on how many of these beauties you already own and how much the new packaging will persuade you to part with your money. Honestly though, as lovely as it all looks and sounds, if you’re on a budget ‘The Pete Townshend Anthology’ already includes about 80% of what you really need for a fraction of the price.   

14)              Dire Straits “Brothers In Arms 40^th Anniversary Edition”

Mark Knopfler has always had mixed feelings about by far and away his biggest seller. ‘Brothers In Arms’ was so big – the best selling CD well into the 1990s– that it became too much for him and he all but broke up the band, after an eight year extended ‘gap year’ and one final album. Forty years on and ‘Brothers’ has rather more of a mixed reputation: most big fans I know tends to skip the hit singles that litter side one (ditto for me the slow title track about the Falklands War) and head straight to the middle where the true gems are: the atmospheric extended groovy Grateful Dead-ish ‘Ride Across The River’, the CSNYish protest tale of corruption and power ‘The Man’s Too Strong’ and the gorgeous tale of support and encouragement ‘Why Worry?’ The album’s lure is too big to ignore forever, though and the album hasn’t been out in anything other than straightforward re-issues before, so this timely anniversary version with a bonus live disc – from a gig in San Antonio, part of the 1985 world tour and the only live era of the band that’s never been heard on record before, not least because it brings back unhappy memories of mega stadiums - is quite a big deal. Unfortunately it’s not that good: the band replaced drummer Terry Williams on the record with session drummer Omar Hakim, yet still tried to get their bandmate to play these songs on tour that he couldn’t manage in the studio. You can see why: though he sounds great on the 1983 tour he’s a bit too frenetic for these more laidback languid songs. You have to say too that none of the performances of the usual hit material is up to the earlier performances on official live set  ‘Alchemy’ or the later ones from other official live set ‘On The Night’. Mark, already weary this far through the tour, often falls into a nasty habit of ‘speak singing; his songs too, as if to save energy.  However there are some real gems here, particular the songs only ever played on this tour: ‘Ride Across The River’ hits a nicely slinky groove that feels as if it could last forever (Terry is much more of a groove reggae drummer than a rock and roll one and this song’s congas and steel drums suit him far more) and the album’s most obscure song ‘One World’ has a sharpness missing from the record that’s the difference between a band who heard the song for the first time in rehearsal that day and one who’ve toured it all over the world. It’s fun to hear early stabs at ‘Money For Nothing’ and ‘Brothers In Arms’ too back when they clearly still meant a lot to Knopfler rather than songs he’s sung so many times he’s on automatic pilot. It’s a raw ‘Expresso Love’ from ‘Makin Movies’ that’s the set’s most swinging take though, closely followed by a lovely sleepy version of Mark’s film soundtrack hit ‘Going Home – Theme From Local Hero’. Overall not a must-have purchase then, but this set fills a hole in the discography rather nicely and Dire Straits fans are so starved of product now since Mark moved on to concentrate on solo albums thirty years ago that we’ll take anything.

15)              Davy Jones “Music and Memories”

Rather overshadowed by being announced the same week that ‘Pisces Aquarius’ set finally (finally!) made it to the shops, nevertheless this 7A Records fan label has done another sterling service for Monkee fans struggling to track down every last valuable featuring their idols. After re-issuing Davy’s self-titled 1971 album on CD for the first time a couple of years back they’ve followed it up with the singer’s even harder-to-find run of flop singles recorded for MGM between 1972 and 1973 when the Monkees’ reputation was at its lowest. None of these are all that great and it’s rather a lost era for Davy who was trying hard to distance himself from his Monkees teenybop image, even though that’s all the record companies and managers seemed to want from him. The compromise seems to have been to make him into another Leo Sayer or Peter Skellern, a romantic balladeer who sings soft empty rock ballads which really don’t suit him. It sounds, indeed, not unlike the first solo album of Roger Daltrey’s from the same year where the rock singer ‘discovered’ Leo and sang a load of his songs. Davy still sounds great though, even on such dross as novelty music hall song ‘Rubberene’ (about an inflatable doll he takes with him everywhere!) and the drippy ‘You’re A Lady’ (which really is by Skellern and continues ‘I’m a man – you know you’re supposed to understand!’) Only Gilbert O’Sullivan’s ‘Who Was It?’ really works as a song and that’s a relative measure compared to how bad the others are because it’s one of Gilbert (real name Ray)’s worst. Still, it’s saved Monkee collectors literally hundreds of pounds to find out these songs aren’t that good and that’s still an important service, of a sort.

Far more entertaining are the songs Davy sang from the rare-as-Texas-prairie-chicken-in-woolhats stage cast recording of Harry Nilsson’s ‘The Point’ (released in 1976, also on MGM), a very ‘Head’ like postmodern tale of hypocrisy and belonging (the ‘joke’ is that poor Davy playing the character Oblio, living on a planet full of people with triangular shaped things coming out of their heads that make them look like hippie Teletubbies, doesn’t have one and is thus ‘pointless’). Micky turns up as the baddy and the best song, the strident ‘Gotta Get Up’, features the two together in a sort of good cop bad cop routine. Other songs include ‘Me and My Arrow’ (sort of a more upbeat ‘A String For My Kite’), sweet ballad ‘Think About Your Troubles’ (where Davy gets to sing in his lower more natural voice for maybe the first time since ‘The Monkees Present’ in 1969!), soft funk sea shanty ‘A Blanket For Sail’ (if you ever wondered what The Monkees would sound like singing ‘Row Row Row Your Boat’ this is pretty darn close!) and the rather sweet bubblegum pop of ‘Are You Sleeping?’ Could have lived without the awkward oompah of ‘POV Waltz’ though. Nilsson’s star was in the ascendency in 1976 while Davy and Micky’s were at their lowest in the year of punk, so it was quite a kind gesture from the man who wouldn’t have had a career without The Monkees to stretch out a hand of friendship. They’re both really good too though and more than do his songs justice – especially Micky, so it’s a shame his solo recordings from the same show aren’t here. Though far from being a Harry Nilsson fan I always thought that ‘The Point’ was his best work even before I knew who The Monkees were (courtesy of my dad’s extensive Nilsson collection) – it’s the best fit for his unique mix of childlike cynicism of how the world works, given that Oblio is meant to be lost in a world that he thinks is nice but is really quite awful.  Fans of ‘Cuddly Toy’, Nilsson’s first song with The Monkees, will especially like it.

The short ten track collection then concludes with mono versions of two of Davy’s solo tracks and a Japanese version of ‘You’re A Lady’ cut especially for the one country still loyal to The Monkees in 1972 (though most Japanese fans I know say the translation and pronunciation are so off the wall they hadn’t realised it was actually in their language and not English!) All in all this is far from the best thing 7A have put out and arguably the weakest so far, but it’s a next logical step in caretaking rare and out of print Monkee solo stuff and as ever with the label it’s beautifully packaged and done with love and care.

16)              Paul McCartney/Wings “Venus and Mars”

Like parents, musicians definitely have ‘favourite children’. ‘Band On The Run’ can’t celebrate a single birthday without getting another deluxe reissue/remix/revised version while some better albums in the Wings catalogue are left to languish without a re-issue at all. In yet another bit of procrastination while we wait for the ‘London Town’ archives set we all long for we get a re-issue of Wings’ second most famous album ‘Venus and Mars’, in souped up re-mastered vinyl format for its 50^th birthday. It is, if you don’t own it already, a minor gem in the McCartney songbook even though few of its songs ever joined the upper echelons of Beatle stardom: ‘Rock Show’ is funky, deliberately written to sound good played live in stadiums (and name-checks a few of them for good measure too), ‘Love In Song’ is one of Paul’s prettiest ever ballads burning with a passion and emotion actually quite rare in his post-Beatles work, ‘Letting Go’ – his first flop single but something of a fan favourite – is a throbbing pulsating emotional masterwork full of tight rich chords and drama, while ‘Magneto and Titanium Man’ is Macca at his funnest, a Marvel superhero match-up film in miniature forty years ahead of the trend, while the haunted relationship-gone-wrong ‘Call Me Back Again’ is the closest he’s come to post-Beatle soul. Of course Macca can’t bring himself to make the perfect LP so we still get the chaos of the unlikeliest Beatles cover ever (the ‘Crossroads’ TV theme!) and the most patronising song of his entire career ‘Treat Her Gently’ (‘Treat her kind, she doesn’t even know her own mind…’) which is so far away from Eleanor Rigby’s take on old age that it’s hard to believe it’s by the same man. In many ways it isn’t of course: by 1975 Macca has been through the post-Beatle blues and is now a cuddly elder statesman of rock, a tag the polished sound of ‘Venus and Mars’ never quite shrugs off. There’s still lots here to love if you’ve never heard it before though and its better than yet another edition of ‘Band On The Run’ or yet another coloured vinyl edition of ‘McCartney III’, that’s for sure. Still no deluxe ‘London Town’ though.

17)              Cat Stevens “Saturnight”

Easily the most obscure of Cat’s original run of albums from the 1960s and 1970s is this live set, recorded on what became known as his ‘Bamboo’ tour of the far East in 1974. It was a big deal at the time: Western musicians had been known to play Japan but tended to ay the bigger venues once and tag it onto the end of their world tours, whereas Cat ended up playing fifty dates there across several months. It was, in the days before Japan had fully cottoned on to all Western culture, commercial suicide but then Cat had his eye on bigger things: this is the year he nearly drowned in the sea and asked to be rescued by God, promising to do ‘his work’ if he was saved. Cat will keep changing his mind what ‘his work’ entails but, for now at least, is busy doing good and putting his money where his mouth is. Cat became a UNICEF goodwill ambassador spreading hope across the world and when it was suggested he put a live album out decided to give all his royalties to the charity (one of many contractual reasons why this album wasn’t released anywhere in the West and why it hasn’t been re-issued till now). Overshadowed by the bigger all-singing all-dancing with a few magicians thrown in ‘Doves’ tour of 1975 (out as ‘Majicat’ in the 2000s) this gig gets forgotten. It certainly has a lot of rough edges, being taken from a smaller number of dates by a band who are still getting to grips with the material and some particularly noisy drumming through even the quietest of songs. The slower more thoughtful tracks (and let’s face it, with Cat that’s most of them) tend to get a bit lost in all the noise, but the rockers more suited to life on stage work well. Highlights include the surprisingly juvenile ‘Another Saturday Night’, the Sam Cooke cover fresh from being released as a single just before this tour (hence the truncated album title), a ‘Sitting’ that starts off quiet and suddenly explodes, a closing anguished ‘Bitterblue’ and some then brand-new songs from ‘Buddha and the Chocolate Box’ that sound good without all the extra paraphernalia and production trappings. Is it some great lost masterpiece? Not a chance. Is it worthy of  a re-release after fifty years in limbo? You bet.

18)              Cat Stevens “Back To Earth”

Cat’s taken an interesting approach to re-issuing his back catalogue for vinyl lovers: the best-selling albums, then the worst-selling albums, with most of the middle-selling (and dare I say it best) albums left for another time. Here is his poorest-selling record from his original run, which though it wasn’t announced as such was a less than fond contract-filling farewell to the music business that Catty didn’t promote at all, given that his head was already in his new discovery of the Islamist faith. It’s a peculiar, bitty, scrappy album: for the most part Cat has stopped thinking about music as a spiritual quest so writes his emptiest songs, happy to give record label Island what they want if they get off his back quicker, with a commercial sheen that sounded alien and out of touch a year after punk came along (and even more so now that the synth sounds in particular are so out of date). Many critics were scathing at the time with the idea that someone could be out of touch that they considered an album with such glossy production to be ‘Back to Earth’ but the title wasn’t meant in a rootsy way: it’s Cat, his head full of God, having to fulfil his last obligations in the ‘real world’ before leaving for the spiritual one his heart calls out to, sometimes with affection but mostly with disgust (the noisy ’New York Times’, about the state of gun crime in the state two years before John Lennon’s murder, is as disillusioned about humanity as Cat ever gets, while two filler instrumentals are Cat at his laziest too). Occasionally, though,  nuggets of pure Cat spiritual brilliance will peek through seemingly despite himself: ‘Father’ is one of his most under-rated songs of all, a walk with an elder that hops about between verses whether it’s his real dad or God the father he’s confessing his sins to in a religious lyric less bombastic than most, while the record starts and ends poignantly: minor hit single ‘Just Another Night’ is a sweet goodbye from a star to fans who regrets that he can’t bring us along for the next part of the ride after being so close for so long (‘’I was dying, but for you it was just another night’ he sighs as Cat takes the stage weeks after a near-drowning experience where he prayed for God to save him and promised to do his bidding) while ‘Never’ is a gorgeous bittersweet goodbye that admits, wherever he goes and whatever he does, he’ll never feel such love as he did when he was a rockstar and gives us some last doses of philosophy to live by till he meets with us again. These three moments raise ‘Back To Earth’ considerably and while this record isn’t consistent enough to be a long lost classic it’s more than worthy of another appraisal, especially after years of being the hardest Cat album to track down on vinyl and unreleased in that format for the past 47 years. 

19)              Cat Stevens aka Yusuf “Tell ‘Em I’m Gone”

Cat lost control of his heyday catalogue some time ago but the rights to his ‘comeback’ era revert back to him after a few years and now after eleven years it’s the time of his third album to be re-issued on George Harrison’s ‘Dark Horse’ record label though Cat’s friendship with son Dhani. This bluesy covers plus a few originals ‘in the style of’ is a bit of an oddball. At times it’s almost wilfully obtuse and unlikeable, full of spiky songs about being misunderstood and having a chip on your shoulder, along with what a drag it is to be the highest profile Brit who converted to a religion that is literally named for ‘Peace’ while everyone thinks you’re a shifty terrorist. It’s more interesting in retrospect though, both because it’s the first time Cat really looks back at his past (and paving his way for this years’ autobiography) and partly because it helps him get some stuff out of his system before going back to the sweeter, ore likeable stuff. Opener ‘I Was Raised In Babylon’ is the strongest and most ‘complete’ song here by far, picking up where ‘Back To Earth’ left off by showing how lonely and dark that spiritual quest was, Cat feeling as if he’s been born in the wrong place. ‘Editing Floor Blues’ and ‘Cat and Dog Trap’ meanwhile hit out at the media who keep messing up his quotes and trying to make him look bad when he’s just trying to live his best life. It’s the versions of ‘take This Hammer’ (with new words!) and ‘You Are My Sunshine’ that make for the strangest moments though. Arguably the weakest of Cat’s five comeback records in the 21^st century, but not without worth.

20)              Cat Stevens “On The Road To Find Out: Greatest Hits”

Cat hasn’t released a new record this year but he has released an autobiography, the cleverly titled ‘On The Road To Find Out’ which came out in September and is very Cat, a real mixture of revealing and guarded that answers some questions and raises a whole lot more. Inevitably there’s yet another best-of to go with it, with the same title and cover, this time a two-disc set. This one is less cleverly titled: we’ve already had a box set of the same name back in 1999 that did everything so well this set tries to do in half the space, while the ‘greatest hits’ title doesn’t really make any sense given that even semi-committed fans won’t know half the tracks here. I have real trouble with two disc compilations because they always fall between two stools: if you’re a newcomer who only wants songs you’ve heard of then you’ll never play the second lesser known half and if you’re a collector who wants a career overview then there simply isn’t enough room. There are also some very questionable choices and omissions: it starts off well with all the hits (whether for Cat or covered by someone else like ‘here Comes My baby’ and ‘First Cut Is The Deepest’) from the early ‘Decca’ years and a sensible sprinkling from the early ‘bearded’ albums on ‘Island Records’. But then something weird happens: rather than celebrated fan favourites like ‘Hard Headed Woman’ ‘The Wind’ or ‘Rubylove’ we get such oddities as the deeply unfunny flop single ‘Banapple Gas’, Sam Cooke cover and flop single ‘Another Saturday Night’ and the rather gormless ‘Last Love Song’. Cat then promptly retires six songs into the second disc leading to twelve oddly chosen ‘comeback’ songs and a four song mini concert that sounds deeply out of place (and repeats a few songs from disc one!) There are some truly great things across Cat/Yusuf’s five 21^st century albums that would make a fine standalone CD some day but none of them are here – instead we get the clumsy blues of ‘Gold Digger’, the defensive ‘Dying To Live’ and the overly trying to be hip flop single ‘Heaven/Where True Love Goes’. The whole of the second disc comes close to being unlistenable, with only the sweet folkie idealism of ‘Maybe There’s A World’ standing out. Collectors will at least get a live version of Beatles cover ‘Here Comes The Sun’ which is nice but not the most groundbreaking of re-arrangements and the ‘Back To Earth’ outtake from 1978 ‘Butterfly’ released on the deluxe edition of that record, a tale of looking for a lost love which is almost certainly about God. That’s really not enough reason to buy this set though, especially as the packaging is on the flimsy side - there are many many better Cat compilations out there (that box set of the same name will do for a start).

21)              Oasis “The Complete Studio Album Collection”

Well against all odds Oasis’ first tour in sixteen years not only went ahead but was something of a triumph, with – and I can’t quite believe this either - both Gallagher brothers still speaking to each other by the end of it. Yes they’ve sounded a bit rough in places, the setlist is all tried and tested fan favourites, the new drummer (the 5^th?!) isn’t quite up to speed yet, the ticketing was a colossal p.r. disaster and Noel for one didn’t seem to be enjoying himself much at all for the first half (this sudden reunion makes so much more sense when you learn about his expensive divorce last year…) but mostly it’s been a triumph. It’s been great to see the mix of band members old and new – we never thought we’d get to see band founder Bonehead playing with later era members Gem and Andy – and some of Liam’s banter from the stage has been priceless (a different animal cameo every night – in Australia it was Ringo the Dingo!) It’s not al been about the money either: Liam’s been pushing to forgive and forget the feud that broke up the band in 2009 across a string of superlative solo albums that show he’s matured and grown wiser, while Noel finally caved in after two things: a chance meeting with Paul McCartney who joked the question that’s long plagued him ‘so when are you guys getting back together?’ and who then spoke of how sad it was that he never got back together with John but they’d felt they had plenty of time to do that which wasn’t to be and the news that founder member Bonehead was poorly with tonsil cancer (he took a few dates off at the end of tour for an op). So, despite the cynicism of the press and the undoubted money everyone’s been raking in, it was for the right reasons too. I love the fact that these shows have been done not just for old hands but for new fans who were born too late to see the band in concert but have helped keep the band alive, as they admit every night on stage.

One of the things that concerns me most, though, are the merch shops that have sprung up at every gig, full of over-priced trainers and T-shirts (though at least they’ve got the second ‘proper’ Oasis logo back rather than that weird swirly thing they used at the end) which seems more like a ‘Bur’ move than a working class Oasis one. Inevitably some old friends from the discography have been reissued to go in them and made it to the mainstream shops too. ‘The Complete Albums’ is the more important one because we’ve never had them all out together before. Indeed, given that Oasis were a CD-era band, the vast majority of these records have never been out on vinyl before (and given how long most of the albums run they’re all double vinyl sets). They’re a more interesting and solid bunch than Oasis are often given credit for: everyone knows the first two albums are colossuses of their era but ‘Be Here Now’ has some decent stuff on it too (especially the snarling self-hating ‘Fade In out’, so different to the usual ‘mad fer it’ Oasis confidence), ‘Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants’ and ‘Heathen Chemistry’ are both deeply under-rated (the psychedelic ‘Who Feels Love?’ might be my favourite Oasis single and early Liam song ‘Born On A Different Cloud’ a real overlooked gem) while ‘Don’t Believe The Truth’ has some great Andy Bell songs and even finale ‘Dig Out Your Soul’ isn’t that bad, just patchy (people always say there was no life left in the band by 2009 but the singles ‘Shock Of the Ligthtning’ and ‘Falling Down’ suggest otherwise). Sensibly superb B-side compilation ‘The Masterplan’ is here too – less sensibly, given the colossal price, there’s no similar disc mopping up the rest of the almost-as-good flipsides. This would have been the perfect opportunity for a ‘Masterplan volume two’ featuring such gems as ‘Idler’s Dream’ and ‘Let’s All Make Believe’, but alas it wasn’t to be. Maybe next tour? Oddly enough live record ‘familiar To Millions’ isn’t a part of the set either, though it did come out separately later. A shame the outside box is so ugly and boring too, a plain back box despite the colourful music inside. Still, long overdue and a lot better than casual fans or naysayers might assume. 

22)              Oasis “What’s The Story? (Morning Glory)” (30^th Anniversary Edition)

The re-issues for the early singles and ‘Definitely Maybe’ have been out for a while, before the tour in fact, but now we get a whole plethora of other selections on vinyl for the first time, all of them on two wax discs to compensate for the extra running time and all on coloured ‘splatterdiscs’ that look as if you’ve tipped your dinner down them.  ‘Morning Glory’ is the most interesting by a smidegeon and while it’s been out on vinyl in other countries before (including a handsome set in Portugal a decade back and a recent German edition) this is the first time vinyl fans can buy it in the UK. If you’re new to the Oasis carnival then you’re in for a treat: while ‘Definitely’ pips it by sheer willpower and bravado, this second more polished and reflective album is a cracker too. Not that it starts particularly well: fans cringe at the Gary Glitter quoting opening ‘Hello’ nowadays (especially given what real name Paul Gadd was probably spending his sudden influx of royalties on before his fall from grace five years later) and ‘Roll With It’ is generally reckoned to be Oasis’ weakest single (by some margin if you ask me). Everything else though is terrific: philosophical single ‘Some Might Say’, the earliest ‘sad’ Oasis song that isn’t ‘Sad Song’ ‘Hey Now’, the sly Small Faces music hall of ‘She’s Electric’, the squeal of feedback and adrenalin that is the title track, the prog rock of ‘Champagne Supernova’ and especially the folk lyricism of one of my very favourite Oasis songs ‘Cast No Shadow’ are all first class. What’s notable is how different every song is, both to the raw energy of ‘Definitely Maybe’ and each other. The effect is like moving through a band’s evolution at incredible speed (like, say, The Beatles from 1965 to 1969) and sounds pretty punchy in its new format. Fans get the bonus of five selections (all album songs) from the thrilling period ‘Unplugged’ performance where Liam dropped out at the last minute and left Noel to sing all the songs while the younger brother made faces from the gallery. It’s a welcome bonus with a very different feel to the album and in better sound than I’ve heard it thus far. You do have to question the sense of whoever heard this album and thought ‘gee I know what colour works well with it: bright peach’ though. The £55 asking price from a band that, much like The Beatles, used to offer good value for predominantly working class fans also prompts me to look back with a modicum of anger.      

23)              Oasis “Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants” (25^th Anniversary Edition)

The first three Oasis albums all celebrated their quarter-century birthdays by getting deluxe three CD re-issue treatments; album number four gets two over-pricey re-issues on vinyl – a measure, in so many ways, of how this rebuilding post-split album has always been treated by Oasis fans, overlooked and under-promoted. It’s still a decent if patchy record though, building on the promise of the best (newest) songs from the schizophrenia of ‘Be Here Now’, with Noel reflecting on the 7 stages of fame with brilliant songs of depression (‘Where Did It All Go Wrong?’) paranoia (‘Gas Panic!’), disbelief (‘Sunday Morning Call’, Noel’s least favourite of his own songs) and denial (‘Go Let It Out’ ignores everything that’s happened since the band’s heyday by pretending it’s the peak of Britpop all over again) as well as one last bloom of beauty and balance in under-rated single ‘Who Feels Love?’ Only the songs of anger (‘Put Yer Money Where Yer Mouth Is’ and ‘I Can See A Liar’) really let the sound down by returning to the band’s early sound, but from the perspective of a rich millionaire whose forgotten what it was like to really suffer. Fame has killed many a promising career but few as much as Noel’s, a songwriter who connected to his fanbase through his honesty and rweflection of them and who had nothing to go on but memories once he was giving in mansions and taking high quality drugs. Most fans nominate Liam’s first song ‘Little James’ (about his newly adopted stepson) as the album’s weakest song but, a dodgy lyric or two aside, it’s a lovely parallel to elder bro Noel’s pieces, a rockstar who’s never had to think about anyone else but himself before discovering the joys of family life (nearly a decade younger than his hero John Lennon did). It would have been nice if we’d a proper CD re-issue to go along with it, preferably one up to the other three really good sets with a cornucopia of rarities, remixes and demos, but even a disc of period B-sides (the stunning ‘Let’s All Make Believe’ – another tale of disbelief; the pretty but pretty depressed ‘As Long As They’ve Got Cigarettes In Hell’ depression–  and a song given to Paul Weller for his covers album ‘One Way Road’ – acceptance, at last) would have been worthy. Instead fans are basically paying £50 for a vinyl pressing that hasn’t been remixed and this time looks like it’s been dipped in blueberry yoghurt. The joy, of course, is that the original came out in an era when record companies had stopped pressing vinyl so you can finally add to your Oasis collection; for the rest of us, though,  you’re better off waiting for a future inevitable comprehensive CD version or saving your money up for reunion concert tickets. Still a better purchase than the oasis trainers, though.

24)              Oasis “Familiar To Millions” (25^th Anniversary Edition)

The Oasis gravy train keeps on rolling with yet another historical re-issue to mark their return. This one is more interesting than most in this list though, both because it’s rarer and because again it marks the first time this live set (still the only to find official release as an audio set as opposed to the multiple videos and DVDs out there) has been released on vinyl. It’s not the best set Oasis ever played by any means and has gone down in history as being a painful gig, with new boys Andy Bell and Gem Archer still learning the ropes while the Gallaghers are both in foul moods. Fans have long wondered why they released this show as their sole live document: the fact is simply record company politics, to fill in the gap between albums four and five. I’m still fond of this gig, though, as it’s more dangerous than most, the anger constantly spilling over into feedback and mayhem so that you never quite know what’s coming next. It even spills out into the loved up songs like ‘Who Feels Love?’ sung by Liam with a constant sneer, whole already troubled songs like ‘Gas Panic!’ sound positively tortured. There’s a tonne of surprises too, including a blistering cover of The Beatles’ ‘Helter Skelter’ that goes some way to proving the old adage that it was the first ever heavy metal song and a cover of Neil Young’s ‘Hey Hey My My’ that’s dark and edgy, the lines about wanting to burn out rather than fade away taking on new meaning as Oasis stumble through one of their dark hours of the soul (though Neil was 12 when this song came out, despite his protests he ‘wasn’t born!’)  It almost certainly isn’t the happy go lucky live souvenir new fans might be expecting and though the hits are all played they all suffer from being thrown away somewhat, the band’s heart not in them tonight. It’s nice to have this set out again though whatever the reason, especially as the easiest way to buy it till now was a pared down ‘highlights’ set that was nothing of the sort and cut out most of the juiciest moments.  In the midst of this year’s occasionally nauseating love-fest it’s less than familiar and a salutary reminder of how dark and edgy this band could be.  

25)              Oasis “Time Flies…”

Of course if you want just the best known Oasis and can’t afford the complete albums box you might want to settle for ‘Time Flies’, the first ever Oasis compilation released in the wake of their split. It’s a collection of singles rather than the more interesting ‘Stop The Clocks’ comp so there’s a lot of famous songs missing that people are always surprised weren’t singles, most of them played at the gigs: ‘Champagne Supernova’ ‘Acquiesce’ ‘Half The World Away’ and ‘The Masterplan’ to name but four. I still think the decision to mix the running order up so things are ‘thematic’ rather than ‘chronological’ is a bad move too – there’s something wrong about hearing, say, the sly middle-aged self-doubting workshy ‘The Importance Of Being Idle’ straight after the youthful swagger of ‘Some Might Say’ or the innocence of ‘Whatever’ stuck in the middle of a run of the dark final singles. The packaging too is drab, a plain shot of an audience that could be anywhere and even though the vinyl edition of this re-issue features some limited edition prints it’s still a very ugly looking album. Not bad then, but could have been a lot better. 

26)              Oasis “Definitely Maybe” (Singles Box Set)

OK guys, this is getting silly now. Yet another Oasis cash-in for the tour and for Christmas is this super-duper thirty-one-year anniversary vinyl edition of the four singles from ‘Definitely Maybe’, complete with bonus tracks, in a replica ‘cigarette’ box set (which would have been more fun if they’d made the sequel ‘alcohol’ to fit the song lyrics, but never mind). My best friend from high school had this original set on CD and it was his pride and joy and I could see why: not since The Beatles, Hollies and Kinks had there been a band this great at writing flipsides and the majority of them were missing on CD for years. It’s a great chance to hear a pre-record label Oasis (sounding more like The Stone Roses for now, with a more laidback feel and Liam slurring his words rather than attacking) with songs like the retro ‘Take Me Away’, the very Kinks-like sweet acoustic tale of childhood dreaming and what happens when your mates grow up before you do ‘D’Yer Wanna Be A Spaceman?’, a fun acoustic twist on Definitely Maybe’s ‘Up In The Sky’ and a powerhouse take on The Beatles’ ‘I Am The Walrus’ (the only one to make ‘Masterplan’) all important and neglected pieces of the Oasis puzzle. This is their first outing on vinyl for the most part, so for that alone this set is welcome. However I’d have loved to see these releases EP length and a true replica of the CD single releases, with room for ‘bonus’ B-sides of ‘I Will Believe’, the demo for ‘Columbia’, ‘Alive’, a live ‘Bring It On Down’, a live ‘Supersonic’, ‘Cloudburst’,  ‘Listen Up’ and ‘Fade Away’ on there too. After all, at £63, this set is pricey enough for them to have bothered with a bit of extra re-mastering work. The fag end of this year’s re-issue frenzy in more ways than just the cover.

27)              Liam Gallagher “As You Were”

Liam’s also sneaked a vinyl zoetrope of his first solo album out as an exclusive for Record Store Day in November, to remind fans what he was up to during Oasis’ split. Though it seems way too soon for a re-appraisal (this album only came out in 2017) and the picture disc is lots of little monochrome shots of Liam that look really weird revolving on your turntable (the original was a full size black and white portrait, with free pens to colour it in!) , nevertheless this is a welcome record. Out of the five Liam solo sets (one with John Squire), four Noels and two Beady Eyes it’s my second favourite, after the superlative first Eye effort ‘Different Gear, Still Speeding’. In this era Liam is still reeling from the collapse of his band and the end of his fourteen year marriage/relationship with Nicole Appleton and turns in some of his most reflective self-questioning songs, the closest either Gallagher brother has come to their own ‘Lennon/Plastic Ono Band’ self analysis album. What’s impressive is that alongside the expected anger and digs at both ex and bro (‘You Better Run’ ‘Greedy Soul’ and the gloriously dismissive and bitter rant ‘I’ll Get By’, Liam’s best rocker in over a decade) there were some really lovely reflective moments where Liam realises he’s sometimes his own worst enemy and digs deep into his psyche. ‘China Town’ is the killer cut, Liam realising he’s no longer at the forefront of the music business but on the outskirts of town, bemused by the current trends now he’s no longer setting them and still plodding his own ground even though no one is listening, closely followed by the humble and desperate plea to either ex or brother ‘Come Back To Me’ and the heartfelt apology ‘For What It’s Worth’. There’s also the first sign of things getting better as we follow Liam’s earliest steps towards finding love again, with manager Debbie (now his wife) on the pretty and pretty loved up ‘When I’m Need’, a latter-day ‘Songbird’. Not every song is great (‘Wall Of Glass’ was a rotten choice of single) and it’s a real shame there are no bonus tracks as they were better than the album on the whole (the pulsating dance trance rocker ’It Doesn’t Have To Be That Way!’, the most Oasisy moment ‘All My People’ and the playful but heartfelt song of brotherly hurt ‘I Never Wanna Be Like You!’) Mostly though this is a classic more Oasis fans should have heard the first time round and better than anything Oasis were doing in their final years together.

28)              Grateful Dead “Blues For Allah” (Angel’s Share)

So far every year since 2017 we’ve had at least one, sometimes two, 50^th anniversary releases as we track the evolution of the Dead’s discography via deluxe double-disc albums with added period live recordings and ‘Angel’s Choice’ (a reference to the dregs left over in whisky distillation) sets of every surviving listenable outtake in chronological order so fans can listen to each album take shape. This one is slightly different though as ‘Allah’ was a slightly different album: recorded in a more free-form jazzy way as the Dead reconnected after eighteen months apart. As a result there are less demos and fewer rehearsals, with a bunch of jamming sessions instead as the band try and reconnect with how they used to work together. Even compared to normal this set is not for the fainthearted or casual fan: there are only fifteen tracks here and less than half are of songs recognisable from the album. For a good half hour it feels as if there’s nothing substantial going on here at all with multiple tracks simply named ‘Jam’ and given the studio date (and indeed the closest to an ‘actual’ recognisable song is the ‘3/5/75 Rehearsal’ (which turns out to be the starting point for a track from a whole other Dead album while the most, uh, ‘interesting’ is the atonal ‘Surf Jam’ purely because it sounds so un-Dead-like, as if The Beach Boys have washed up on a beach full of acid). Between them the fifteen songs come with just one sung lyric between them  For the committed Deadhead though it’s fascinating seeing the band slowly knock off the rough edges and go from being friends who only kept in touch a little to telepathic musicians who can read each other’s thoughts. The album itself is hit and miss, but when it’s good it’s excellent: the opening medley ‘Help Is On The Way > Slipknot > Franklin’s Tower’  is one of the most thrilling passages in their catalogue and ‘The Music Never Stopped’ one of my favourite Bob Weir songs. None of these  sound quite as strong here: there are multiple stabs at an instrumental ‘Help Is On The Way’ played either too slow or too fast, there’s a droopy ‘Franklin’s Tower’ played at less than half speed with lots of lyrics missing, while ‘Music’ is a fast-paced noodling jam session through the song’s chord changes that has a long way to go before being the graceful beauty of the finished product. Far from never stopping, the music feels hard to come by here, as the Dead haven’t quite locked in together yet and are still speaking different languages to each other. Elsewhere there’s an instrumental plodding reggae song that’s vaguely like what will become ‘Crazy Fingers’ but really sounds more like Mose Allison’s ‘Walkin’ Blues’ (which the Dead will indeed cover on stage in the 1980s/90s) and a pretty close to the original just slightly messier ‘King Solomon’s Marbles’, plus a plodding preview of future Jerry solo song (often performed live by The Dead) ‘They Love Each Other’. Best of all is an early slower instrumental stab at future Weir solo song ‘Lazy Lightning > Supplication’ – a pale limp beast compared to future Dead live performances but nevertheless cutting a fine groove here.

For reasons I don’t quite understand rather than follow the flow of the sessions (in purely chronological order) like the other sets, so you can hear the Dead slowly connect over the course of a few days, streaming platforms all feature the songs out of sequence (presumably to avoid repetition, but they’ve never worried about such a thing before and there’s only ‘Help > Slipknot’ heard more than once anyway). There’s noticeably less talking here too, perhaps because the band are still getting to know each other; Jerry interrupts ‘Sand Castles’ to comment it’s ‘far out’ and Bob suggests ideas for a ‘compressor’ type sound and ideas for Billy Kreutzmann to play on the drums (a lot of which he will indeed copy) is as much as we get for band insight this time around, the highlight of many previous discs. The result is arguably the weakest of all the Angel’s Shares so far, especially since two of these tracks (the rather aimless jams ‘Distorto’ and ‘Proto 18 Proper’) have been out before as bonus tracks on the 2010s re-issue of ‘Allah’, while I’ve got goodness knows how many disc’s worth of outtakes from the sessions (including a really cooking ‘Help > Slipknot > Franklin’s even more exciting than the finished version) far more worthy of release that these leftovers. Yet somehow this is one of the most revealing too. After all you are hearing the songs come together from nothing, rather than Jerry or Bobby (or latterly Phil Lesh) presenting the others with a demo and watching them work on it: a lot of these other jams could have been potential Dead songs, while it’s interesting to hear which bits they pick and choose to work on and turn into tunes. It’s also fascinating as a historical document: as presented to the world in 1975 the break was seamless: in the studio not so much. More than anything else it’s incredibly brave and adventurous for an album by a band in their eighth year making a comeback, jazzier than their other studio albums and full of twists and turns so that you never quite know where it’s going next. The fact it ends with an excursion into the desert filled by the sound effects of English crickets and a Muslim chant is just the tip of an iceberg full of surprises; if there are less surprises in the behind-the-scenes footage than other albums, well, maybe it’s best this most magic of albums hangs onto its secrets a bit longer.   

There is also the usual ‘50^th anniversary’ edition of the album, though frustratingly it’s a standalone re-issue this time (on weirdly coloured vinyl) without the ‘bonus concert’ of other earlier editions, given how few gigs the band were laying round this time.

29)              Grateful Dead “Greatest Hits”

The joke used to be that you could never have a Grateful Dead best of, because that would just consist of a double album run through of two songs and that would send the sort of people who usually buy these sort of sampler record running for the hills. Trying to condense a band with this many twists and turns, who did their best stuff in extended form on concert stage rather than in the studio, is something of a hiding to nothing. However this is the fourth attempt now: ‘Long Strange Trip’ in the 1970s is still the best courtesy of being a longer double LP, while ‘The Arista Years’ was limited to a lesser time period and 2003’s ‘Very Best Of the Grateful Dead’ was a worthy attempt to have a bash over two hours but lost out from record company politics and treating three very varying era more or less equally. This one disc hour version is the most basic yet but maybe gets closest to the essence of the Dead in what would, for other bands, be a normal length sampler (although, technically speaking, only one of them ‘Touch Of Gray’ was ever a hit and then a minor one). This is the Dead’s poppier side, with their most family friendly songs, most of them taken from their three most commercial albums ‘Workingman’s Dead’ (1970) ‘American Beauty’ (1970) and ‘In The Dark’ (1987) , plus a trio of sensible extras: ‘Scarlet Begonias’ (1974) ‘Fire On The Mountain’ (1979) and ‘Estimated Prophet’ (1977). At only forty minutes and nine songs it really sells the band short and there are other equally valid songs missing (the ‘single’ version of ‘Dark Star’, debut single ‘The Golden Road To Unlimited Devotion’ and ‘Here Comes Sunshine’ amongst many others, not to mention the weird and wonderful run from 1968 and 1969). Hopefully it will serve as an introductory gateway to a few new fans put off by the 300 album plus discography though and help create another generation of Deadheads. A shame about the hideous cover mind, which is sure to put even semi-curious newbies off: yet another ‘skulls ‘n’ roses’ variation but the worst one out of several hundred versions, a skull inside a silhouette with flowers.     

30)              The Kinks “Journey III”

Given the gap since Journey II and the fact that the klassik Kinks era had been so komprehensively kovered on the first two volumes we wondered if that was it, but no – instead this third volume is promised to be the last, which is a shame. Not because these compilations are particularly thrilling (the idea of sequencing songs by ‘ideas’ and ‘themes’ rather than eras hasn’t really paid off, especially this third set which only has a seven year period to cover anyway) but because the story ends in 1984 when The Kinks leave Arista, leaving their hard-to-find 1986-1993 era, much of it missing on CD and rarely reissued, behind once again. What we do get is a rather basic twelve song reduction of six albums on disc one and a fifteen song unheard gig from The Royal Albert Hall at the band’s end in 1993 that’s not too different from the ‘To The Bone’ live CD from 1992/1994 anyhow. It’s a bit of a wasted opportunity to take a proper look at an era that doesn’t get enough love from fans – for every gem here present and correct (‘Sleepwalker’ ‘Rock and Roll Fantasy’ ‘Misfits’ ‘Wish I Could Fly Like Superman’ and ‘Living on A Thin Line’) there are plenty of classics that are missing including some key singles: ‘Predictable’ ‘State Of Confusion’ and ‘Don’t Forget To Dance’ among them, plus wonderful under-rated gems like ‘Life Goes On’ ‘Yoyo’ ‘Property’ and ‘Summer’s Gone’. The concert is most interesting for a trio of songs from ‘Phobia’ that were only ever played live by either Davies brother on this tour and is hard enough to find in studio form anyway these days, spirited versions of ‘stuck in a lift holiday romance’ song ‘Only A Dream’, thoughtful IRA song ‘The Informer’ and the song of mourning after the death of the Davies’ mum Peggy ‘Scattered’, which a lot of fans adore but never did much for me. As for the rest of the live show it features a moving version of ‘Celluloid Heroes’ and a grungy take on ‘Til’ The End Of The Day’, but equally you can see why it’s been in the vaults thirty years without anyone exactly clamouring for its release. It all has almost nothing to do with the original vision of these as ‘themed’ compilations, without any attempt to include a narrative and compared to what could have been is a colossal waste. Such is the width and depth of The Kinks Katalogue, though, that even this half-hearted set is a decent way of finding out more about this era for those who became fans in the fifteen plus years since these albums got their pretty nifty last re-issues on CD and if this is the only way to keep some of these gems on katalogue for now then I’m all for it. Even so, the true Kinks journey is way more powerful, more poignant and more fascinating than any of these three ‘Journey’ volumes would suggest.  

31)              Pink Floyd “Wish You Were Here” (Super Deluxe)

In a year that felt more than ever as if we were living through the hardest-to-find Floyd album ‘The Final Cut’ (with another long list of rightwing grifters to add to the Fletcher Memorial Home for incurable tyrants and dictators and fascists lining up cattle trucks for their next victims) instead Pink Floyd chicken out and give us yet another version of their perrennial album from 1975. This re-release is less ‘shine on you crazy diamond’ and more ‘dull echo of coal’ as a box set we fans paid £150odd for twelve years ago is back again with four recordings they miraculously found down the back of Syd Barratt’s sofa or something. This is, remember, only a four track album to begin with! They’re a mixed bag: the best are two ‘new’ demos for ‘Welcome To The Machine’, here still titled ‘The Machine Song’, which has more synthesiser noises and less lyrics. For my money it’s always sounded better sung with the barbed cynicism of composer Roger Waters singing rather than with Roger and Dave Gilmour singing dissonant harmonies. Another minor gem is a first take of ‘Wish You Were Here’ itself which, surprisingly perhaps given the ridiculous lengthy process that went into making this album, is pretty similar all round to the finished product, while a ‘new mix’ of ‘Shine On’ (with the two halves stuck together for the first time) highlights unheard parts you can’t hear too well in the mix but sounds oddly wrong, as if they’ve shone a spotlight on all the ‘wrong’ things, while the join in the middle is clumsy indeed.  Otherwise you get most of the same things as last time: the title track with a longer burst of Stephane Grapelli’s violin solo (mostly hidden by the wind sound effects on the final master), ‘Wine Glasses’ from abandoned LP ‘Household Objects’ (fun but flimsy) and a version of ‘Have A Cigar’ with Roger and Dave singing rather than guest Roy Harper, plus 2/3rds of the Wembley live debuts from 1974. Don’t throw your old box set away either: this later 50^th anniversary edition is, bizarrely, less complete than the ‘Immersion’ set from 2011 and doesn’t have ‘Raving and Drooling’ (aka ‘Sheep’, the best bit). Wish that song was here? You and me both, especially at that price! Alas still no sign of Nick Mason’s deliberately awful ‘Christmas Song’ which he tricked Gilmour into singing to break up tension during the album sessions and since a bootlegger’s favourite!

Watch out too for multiple editions of the 50^th set – even the pretty pricey versions don’t contain everything, just the great big fat one that for some reason includes CDs, blu-ray and vinyl as well as a 7” vinyl of ‘Cigar’ and ‘Machine’ only ever previously released in Japan. Do get the ‘full’ set if you can though, as the blu-ray features a little heralded ‘extra’ that to true Floyd fanatics might well be the most interesting thing here: a lo-fi sixteen track bootleg recorded at LA’s Sports Arena in April 1975 and which marks the first time any of the band’s tour that year has been released. Caught halfway between ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ ‘WYWH’ and ‘Animals’ to come it’s a revealing snapshot of a band in transition, with the whole of the 1973 album still in the setlist, the two halves of ‘Diamond’ separated rather crudely by ‘Cigar’ and with early versions of both ‘Sheep’ and ‘Dogs’ in there too, plus a final unexpected encore of a rather dull ‘Echoes’.  It’s a middling gig maybe not up to the Wembley one the year before and in far murkier sound, but nevertheless worth a listen. You’d think that on this concept album about isolation and abandonment the Floyd would realise that less is more, while the irony that half the album (‘Machine’ and ‘Cigar’) are a dig at the relentless march of money-grubbing capitalism ruining our relationships isn’t lost on me either. Yes it’s all beautifully packaged (with less extras this time round but more substantial ones, like a hardback book, a reproduction ‘comic book’ tour brochure and a poster for their 1976 Knebworth gig for some reason) so no marbles or drinks coasters this time around then, but it still feels like style over substance.  Overall, this re-issue is perhaps most notable for the endless marketing, which seems somehow odd for an album all about ‘absence’; it was everywhere, even advertised to people who don’t like music, with an official (and not very good) poem by poet laureate  Simon Armitage not even the weirdest thing done to plug it. Let’s hope the next 50^th anniversary set – presumably ‘Animals’ in 2017 – is better, not least because it’s a surprise that one hasn’t had a box set re-issue yet.

32)              George Harrison “Living In The Material World” (Vinyl Zoetrope)

Also getting in on the vinyl craze is Beatle George with the release of his fifth solo album (or his second ‘proper’) back out on vinyl for the first time in half a century for Record Store Day in November. The good news: last year’s CD re-release  was our ‘re-issue of the year’ and the sound quality is so improved it sounds like an entirely new record. Here’s the bad news though: there are none oft year’s generally excellent CD bonus tracks, it’s a limited edition of 7600 for some reason, it’s ridiculously pricey and it’s another those ‘Zoetrope’ reprinting where you get to see the album cover printed on the disc going round and round in a spiral. What was moderately entertaining for ‘Wonderwall’ ‘Electronic Sound’ and ‘All Things Must Pass’ just looks ridiculous given this album sports one of the ugliest album covers in the history of rock: a hand palm in wavy orange accompanied by some Hare Krishna symbols. Sadly there’s no recreation of the originals’ rather fetching gatefold sleeve with ‘Friar Park lawn party’ either (possibly because of the scandal surrounding drummer Jim Gordon, in prison for killing his mum during a schizophrenic episode).   

33)              George Harrison “Let It Roll – The Best Of”

No 50^th anniversary ‘Dark Horse’ this year sadly (is George’s estate going to stick at ‘All Things Must Pass’ and ‘Material World’?) but we do at least get the 2009 compilation out on vinyl for the first time. Curated by George’s widow Olivia, it’s a real mix of the obvious hits and her own personal favourites, which aren’t necessarily those shared by the fanbase with a couple of live Beatle tunes in there from the ‘Bangla Desh’ show that take up valuable space where classic solo Harrisongs should be. It’s not all it ought to be, from the low key white packaging to the inclusion of such questionable songs as ‘Lethal Weapon’ soundtrack song ‘Cheer Down’ (not one of George’s better ideas, a reminder to stay grounded and sad when excited), the set’s one exclusive oddity the Bob Dylan cover ‘I Don’t Want To Do It’ or so many songs (the ‘wrong’ ones) from posthumous album ‘Brainwashed’ (Seriously? ‘Any Road’ and ‘Marwa Blues’ over ‘Stuck Inside A Cloud’, the song George himself thought his best in years?!) I also long for the day when we can have a solo compilation that covers the whole of george’s actual solo career without adding in bits from the Beatle days (with a few live songs from the ‘Concert For Bangladesh’ that get in the way a bit). However there are lots of gems here too: ‘Isn’t It A Pity?’ ‘Blow Away’ and the title track are all first rate and sound great nestled amongst more obvious songs like ‘My Sweet Lord’ ‘Give Me Love (Give Me Peace On Earth)’ and ‘When We Was Fab’. If you don’t own any George yet and want some vinyl without being able to afford the pricey ‘All Things’ set then this is a decent cut price alternative. I suspect, though, that the definitive George compilation (full of true fan gems like ‘Beware Of Darkness’ ‘The Day The World Gets Round’ ‘Dark Horse’ ‘Crackerbox Palace’ ‘Your Love Is Forever’ ‘Life Itself’ ‘Wake Up My Love’ ‘That’s The Way It Goes’ and ‘Just For Today’) still hasn’t been released yet.   

34)              John Lennon “Power To The People”

I’m one of the few fans this box set is aimed for and I’ve been hoping for something like it for a long time. I seem to be the only person who quite likes ‘Sometime In New York City’, the political rabble-rousing album the Ono-Lennons made about their new adopted home, which is naïve and muddled but has some moments of true genius on it (especially from Yoko). It’s a mixed record that always gets overlooked because it’s so different to Lennon’s other more personal records and so stuck in one particular time (New York in 1972), but it’s a valuable time capsule which, if you tap into the immediate pre-Watergate era in which it was created, is an incredibly brave album. Lennon could have spent the rest of his days re-writing ‘Imagine’ and delivering utopias with strings and honey but he’s appalled at the state of the world and uses his influence to call out monsters long before most of the rest of the world had cottoned on: Nixon, policemen, the corrupt justice system and even his home of England for beating up the Irish. Though it’s a hit-and-miss affair, with a near unlistenable second disc of improvised live concerts (clearly inspired by George Harrison’s ‘Apple Jam’ only with weirder special guests like Frank Zappa) I have always preferred this record’s honest raw power and guts over the commercial sheen heard on ‘Imagine’ or ‘Double Fantasy’.  I‘m also rather fond of the ‘One To One’ benefit concerts that raised money for handicapped children (which gets a bit lost a year after ‘George’s ‘Bangladesh’ gigs and thirteen before ‘Live Aid’ but was a key charity gig that raised $1.5million, a lot back then). These are the only full length shows Lennon ever played as a solo act and the closest the average fan would think of as a ‘normal’ show he ever gave as a solo performer (as opposed to playing rock and roll oldies, dropping in on Elton John or jamming with Frank Zappa). Lennon is in fine if nervy form, though backing band Elephant’s Memory are - by their own admission - a bunch of punks who don’t believe in rehearsal (they’re very like the early Wings from the same year, only playing in a big concert hall to a giant crowd rather than working their way up through playing tiny universities).

I’ve been calling for a decent re-release of both of these long out of print projects for decades now and putting both of them, the two biggest projects of John’s life in 1972, together in one box makes perfect sense. Especially as we’re getting both ‘One To One’ shows (the afternoon and evening ones) together for the first time rather than an amalgam of the two as it was during it’s only other official release (as ‘Live In New York City’ in 1986). Yoko’s tracks are included too, the way they should always have been (a punkish ‘Don’t Worry Kyoko’ for Yoko’s missing child – the reason the Ono-Lennons are in New York in the first place - is particularly daring and strong, though sadly they rather mess up one of the best Yoko songs ever ‘Move On Fast’ by, ironically, slowing it down). This is also the first release of Yoko’s near-rap improvised ‘Law and Order’ when, over a rock and roll groove, she intones a statement by a’ well known politician that you know of’, taking the mickey out of the words of threat and fear that so closely mirror tricky Dicky’s when it’s clear that he’s the enemy with his talk of sending armed forces to stop the ‘turmoil’ of ‘students rebelling and rioting’ (even two years before Watergate). The twist is that these words that everyone casually accepts must be Nixon’s are actually by Hitler!  The fact that modern listeners will no doubt be thinking of Trump and his similar spiel gives this ‘song’ another twist. The fact that this neatly cross-fades into a ragged ‘Give Peace A Chance’ is incredibly powerful and far more moving than the original version, which just faded up on the crowd chant and back down again. That’s why you need to hear shows like this complete, especially from pioneers like John and indeed Yoko. It’s that song’s successor though, Lennon’s punkish howl through ‘Cold Turkey’ – complete with embarrassing false start on the first night – that brings the house down. The definitive version for my money though is still the December 1969 ‘Lyceum’ version, once part of the second ‘live jam’ side of the ‘Sometime’ album and now part of the ‘Live Jam 1’ disc, which for some weird reason has been separated from ‘Live Jam 2’ despite the fact both should fit on one disc no problem timewise. In short, this box set should be all my birthdays and Christmasses come at once.

Instead it feels like a slap in the face with a shaved fish, as in every other respect ‘Power To The People’ (named after a song that isn’t on this set and was released the year before!) is a lesson in not how to do a re-issue or a pricey box set as nearly ever ball gets dropped, fumbled and kicked into the long grass along the way. Unforgivably they (and by ‘they’ I mean the record companies Mercury/Universal here, given Sean Lennon’s desperate attempts to distance himself online and tell us how his and his mum’s views have been ignored) have tampered with history on this, the most ‘history lesson’ of all Beatle LPs, tweaking Lennon’s live vocals and digitally altering them. Sure other bands do it to live records (even in the 1970s ‘Wings Over America’ was heavily dubbed in the studio) but John was the sort of artist who believed in being rough and raw. He even jokes early on in the first set ‘welcome to the rehearsal’  – the live and often atonal half of the original ‘NYC’ album attests to how much he believed in the raw power of raw music. Even on a studio recording session included in this very set he’s telling the engineers off for making his vocal too ‘clean’ which ‘I foocking hate’. Sure people can change their mind – ‘Double Fantasy’ suggested a whole different way of recording with gloss and a bit of honey – but John isn’t here to ask and no way would Yoko have approved taking away the raw edges and changing her husband’s wishes. Personally I’d so much rather hear the original, albeit flawed and occasionally off-mike real thing, rather than an AI concoction. That’s all incredibly un-Lennon.

Worse still, this set cuts the record’s standout song ‘Woman Is The Nigger Of The World’ from both studio and live albums which is ludicrous: what impressionable youth of the day who might be offended by the ‘N’ word is going to pay for a pricey box set like this, as opposed to a hardened collector whose heard it already and wants to hear it again in sparklier more modern technology? If they’d cut it solely from streaming services where they can’t put up a warning I’d understand it more but nope – it’s missing from the box as well. For anyone who doesn’t know, this song isn’t what you think it is from the title: it’s an incredibly modern take on minorities and a pro-feminist statement decades ahead of its time, not a racist one from a century earlier, as anyone would know if they’d actually listened to it (you could never find a less racist band than The Beatles: just ask any of the black rock and roll musicians who started earning proper money for the first time when The Beatles praised them in interviews or copied their songs, or Billy Preston: the only non-Beatle credited on a Beatle single and treated as an equal). Wiping this song from history risks hurting Lennon’s reputation, not helping it, because if all future re-issues follow suit this song is going to be dismissed as dated from its title, when it still has so much it could teach people. Not to mention the fact that it is clearly the single greatest song John wrote in 1972, a howl of urgent rock and roll, the genre that used to be so masculine but now used to order men to look at themselves and how they treat their women (‘we make her paint her face and dance!’)  This is not the way to handle history, however nervy the record companies might feel and there were so many alternatives available: they could, after all, have added some asterisks in the song name or added a sticker on the front explaining it’s ‘historical significance and how it’s not there to offend’ or bring in a leading figure in racial and sexual politics to explain why it’s such an important song it shouldn’t be censored somewhere ein the sleevenotes (thus challenging any reviewer who points it out) or added it as an exclusive downloadable extra for fans after explaining in the box why they can’t just put the song out there again, or simply not drawing attention to it at all. Hearing the track ‘New York City’ moved to be the de facto opening track just feels wrong, for so many reasons.

But then has anybody actually listened to any of the ‘Sometime’ record? This would have been the perfect opportunity to look at the bigger issues Lennon raises on the songs – and the very funky ‘newspaper’ cover, months before Jethro Tull spoofed it on ‘Thick As A Brick’- and talk about what happened next after the album’s release (and the small influence the pressure of the record might have had on the powers that be, back when presidents and prime ministers took rock stars and their following seriously). They could and should have drawn attention to the hard-fought for peace in Northern Ireland, what happened next to John Sinclair ‘in the stir for breathing air’ (who had a second career as a beat poet in the 1990s, which Lennon would doubtless have supported) and Angela Davis (a student jailed for peaceful protest who went back to her degree part-time, fitted around her activism). For this was a political statement, not just another Lennon album, and it’s sorry to see it treated as just another product with packaging that seems to think this is the follow-up to ‘Imagine’ and only that, rather than a creative political pioneer putting his career on the line for causes he deeply believed in. They even censor the (clearly faked) image of Chairman Mao and Richard Nixon dancing together naked that illustrated the lyrics to one of my favourite Yoko songs ‘We’re All Water’ (had Lennon been alive no doubt he would have used the heads of Trump and Putin, but those days of bravery are over now alas). We need more of that now, of musicians speaking their mind rather than finding a Lennon re-issue awkward and pretending it’s just a bunch of songs, the absolute opposite of what its creator would have wanted. Instead we get a replica of a One to One ticket and a bunch of photos, without even a mention of what was in 1972 the album’s now censored lead single. Lennon wasn’t some twerp in a forgotten boy band, he was one of the most important artists of the 20^th century and there are enough fans who ‘get’ that legacy to not have to resort to whitewashing history and diluting track listings.

There are some useful extras mind, as there are in all the Lennon deluxe sets, many of which have been out before but are good to have gathered in one place where it feels like they belong: the trio of songs from a John Sinclair rally (first released on the ‘Lennon Anthology’ box set of 1999, itself out of print) and a benefit show for Attica State (and yes John does indeed play his ‘Sinclair’ song at the first and ‘Attica State’ at the second – they’re heartfelt if ragged versions both). The rawer demos and early takes from the ‘Evolution’ mixes are all preferable to the cleaner finished versions, even with the usual difficulties of these sets that you can’t separate the takes out as they’re all incomplete and jumbled together, with very few versions getting all the way to the end. There’s a quartet of jam sessions in a hotel with Phil Ochs of all people that have never been bootlegged too that, while never intended for public consumption, are interesting to hear - once at least (though Lennon keeps his mouth shut for the most part and covers his guests’ songs rather than his own you can still hear his distinctive guitar playing). There are the usual discs of ‘elemental’ and ‘evolution’ remixes of the album too, cataloguing the songs (albeit not ‘Woman…’ and with only four studio tracks in ‘elemental’ mixes, two of them Yokos) taking shaped and sometimes pulling individual instruments out of the mix. Best of all is ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’, a song I always considered the runt of the Lennon discography trying to pack centuries of pain in Ireland into three minutes, now heard unedited and turned from a three minute summary to a nearly eight minus of punk expression as John and Yoko compete howling out their pain and Elephant’s Memory get funky. Rather than pathetically fade away, the song ends up a bar brawl of mutual stalemate pain and suffering that collapses in on itself quite brilliantly, cathartically releasing all that pain from centuries of English oppression. It might just be the revelation of all the Lennon deluxe boxes so far, utterly magnificent.

Even more than the music, though, you learn a lot about John and Yoko as people with some cracks beginning to show in their relationship a year/eighteen months before the ‘lost weekend’ (such as Yoko’s pleas that she can’t hear herself sing which are backed up by the drummer while John argues with her. ‘You see it’s not my ears – or my ego’ Yoko pleads in vain as other musicians back her up. ‘It just sounds barmy’ says John about his wife’x contribution as he breaks off from ‘Luck Of The Irish’ to sing in Scottish and Yoko asks ‘In what way?’ in a severe way as if she’s holding a rolling pin’. Or Yoko wanting to do another take of the same song as she was singing flat and John joking ‘they’ll fix it later kiddo!’ as if he knows that’s as close as they’re going to get. The ‘male chauvinist pig engineer’ quip and John’s sarcastic’ right on sister’ that kick-starts the song ‘Sisters O Sisters’, incidentally, actually comes from the session tapes for ‘Luck Of The Irish’ and is Yoko’s jest to the engineer asking her to sing a bit louder!

However while there’s quantity (93 ‘unreleased’ tracks, though the majority of those are ‘remixes’ and one half of the live show not heard before) there isn’t as much quality as usual, with far less revelations than there were with the superb ‘Plastic Ono Band’, okay ‘Imagine’ or surprisingly revealing ‘Mind Games’ boxes.  Mostly this is because Elephant’s Memory simply aren’t very good (they’re a punk band four years early, only a very large bloated one with a horn section). Pulling out the individual tracks and putting them under a microscope merely shows up the holes in the sound and the waywardness of the tempos. This is also yet another product they’ve over-sold to us, with a ‘bonus’ disc of Lennon ‘studio jams’ that are borderline unlistenable (sixteen rock and roll oldies, none of them designed for public consumption and there simply to loosen the players up a bit – not that they need it, Elephant’s Memory being the dictionary definition of ‘loose’), a whole disc of ‘home jams’ which are lo-fi snatches of 1950s songs not considered good enough for the Lost Lennon Tapes and no less than three blu-ray discs of the One To One shows, the complete afternoon and evening shows and an amalgam of both (as if the sort of fans going to buy this don’t own the highlights set from thirty years anyway). These performances could all, by the way, have fitted snugly onto one disc, perhaps with a ‘highlights’ running order programmable from the other two.

Most of all, though, I’m not a fan of the new ‘New York City’ mixes which still have that ugly commercial ‘sheen’ that always sounded bad but never quite as bad as this.It’s all just wrong for this album, with a good three-quarters of the set unlistenable and the remaining quarter sounding far better in the ‘original’ versions from the 1970s (the studio set) and the 1980s (the live set). My advice is to dig out the 2009 Lennon birthday mix as it’s the best of the bunch so far and has ‘Woman…’ at the start where it belongs. Box sets are meant to make records seem bigger and better, not smaller and more redundant. Oh and the packaging on the outside is lousy: rather than the clever newspaper gimmick of the studio album (which could have been extended) or the terrific shot of a clearly scared yet determined Lennon on stage at the One to One shows (as used on the 1986 disc) we get an ugly shot of John and Yoko’s heads superimposed on top of each other (taken from the period singles of five heads merging from one to the other, as recycled on the inside packaging, but which doesn’t work as well without the ‘transition’ heads).

There’s also something deeply wrong about naming the set ‘Power To The People’, Lennon’s big political statement about how the working classes hold all the power, and then charging such an eye-watering amount that only rich Beatlenuts can afford it. In these troubled times we need a reminder of when music was both controversial and political and when musicians spoke from their heart about how ordinary people are treated and putting their money where their mouth is to help. We also need a reminder of the days when they did everything ‘for the people’, including keeping the costs down. They could have done the same with this set, perhaps even raising money for the same One to One charity as in 1972, but no, those days are gone sadly. Instead this is taking power away from the people and giving it to the record companies. The people have no power and Beatle deluxe re-issues aren’t helping. The result is a box set nobody (not even me!) wants or needs, what should have been an exercise in lean fiery songs about political oppression sanitised to the point where they lose all meaning and common sense. It all ends up a regrettably timid and tame rendering of one of the bravest musicians that ever lived’s second bravest record (after the self-own of ‘Plastic Ono Band’). Lennon, who I suspect would have had raised eyebrows about quite a lot of the way his legacy has been handled since his death, would have positively loathed this monstrosity, half of which he wouldn’t have wanted released and half of the rest he would never have wanted to have been released like this. 

35)               “Wings”

In a bad year for Beatlefans the people over at MPL have fallen into all the traps the Lennon estate didn’t. ‘Wings’ is a quick cut and paste attempt at delivering a new CD/two CD/3LP length compilation of the Wings years to go in tandem with the new documentary, but it’s utterly pointless given that both shorter (‘Wings Greatest’) and longer (‘Wingspan’) and, quite frankly, better versions exist. Mostly it’s the same old hits back round again with a few extra tracks that seem to have been chosen entirely at random, so you get lesser tracks like ‘Arrow Through Me’ ‘She’s My Baby’ ‘I’ve Had Enough’ ‘Love Is Strange’ ‘Wildlife’ and ‘Mamunia’ there instead of the real fan favourite gems from the Wings years like ‘Little Lamb-Dragonfly’ ‘Love In Song’ ‘Beware My Love’ ‘Don’t Let It Bring You Down’ ‘Winter Rose’ and ‘Daytime Nighttime Suffering’. Infuriatingly there are six songs from the recently reissued ‘Band On The Run’ there too(an album that only runs to nine to begin with) the album most recently re-mastered and sounding identical. Still no ‘Give Ireland Back To The Irish’ either talking of the Lennon box – it’s as if Macca wants us to forget that Wings were ever once seen as a progressive band rather than a cosy mumsy one. Paul has always been a poor judge of his own best material and really needs to leave his compilations to someone else to put together. The two disc set is a bit closer to the ‘real’ Wings than the single set, with a bit more rom for character, but even that one pales compared to ‘Wingspan’ without the same chronology and sense of progression across the 1970s as instead we zigzag across all the years. This is also very much the ‘Paul McCartney’ of ‘Wings’ selection too with no attempt, even on the longer version, to show Wings off as a band: there’s nothing by Jimmy McCulloch, Joe English or even Linda here, even though the best of their songs (and vocals) are as good as anything by Macca: ‘Medicine Jar’ ‘Must Do Something About It’ (where Joe sings Paul) and ‘Oriental Nightfish (recorded by a three-piece Wings under the pseudonym ‘Suzy and the Red Stripes’) all deserve a place. There is one token Denny Laine song and while I personally rate ‘Deliver Your Children’ (from ‘London Town’) as one of the best things here most fans would surely have gone with ‘No Words’ or ‘Time To Hide’ (especially the storming one off ‘Wings Over America’, a cracking live record ignored here completely).

The songs really don’t flow into each other at all like this in either the single or the double disc versions, as if they’ve been put together at random: forget ‘Speed Of Sound’ side three crawls to a standstill with ‘My Love’ and ‘Call Me Back Again’ back to back, perhaps the two slowest songs in the Wings catalogue, while ending on ‘Goodnight Tonight’ is stupid (the whole point of the song is being unable to say goodbye). There’s just the one semi-rarity in ‘Soilly’ (the ‘One Hand Clapping’ version out last year) and while it’s a good rendition the ‘Wings Over America’ one is better still. As for the packaging it’s terrible, tiny photos we’ve seen many times before covered in a hideous neon logo and it even gets things wrong: it promises to feature ‘every line-up’ in the publicity yet skips Geoff Briton (who plays on that very version of ‘Soilly’). At least it’s one better than ‘Pure McCartney’ I suppose, given that it skips all those terrible songs from the 2000s and 2010s. Still a disaster though and a poor substitute for the deluxe ‘London Town’ and ‘Back To The Egg’ sets that have been promised as ‘coming soon’ for nearly a decade now (honestly if you want a true Wings sampler ‘London Town’ remains the one to go for, with a bit of everything so you can see if you want to dive deeper or not). A most frustrating lost opportunity to make people re-appraise Wings as the fun and rather thoughtful little band they were and instead makes them out as popsters playing things safe. A waste of your time, my time, potential new fans’ time who’ll surely be put off for life after this monstrosity. Oh and in case you’re wondering this is yet another random vinyl where the record label decided it was a gonna be in colour and randomly went ‘yeah…green’ (as my childhood synaesthesia will attest, nothing about Wings is ‘Green’. Orange or Blue with a dash of Red and Brown I’d say).    

36)              The Beatles “Anthology I-IV”

Back in the 1960s The Beatles were popular partly because they did so much for their fans. Gone were the stardom days of the 1950s when idols were idle and did as little as possible – the fab four were always touring, made sure their records were affordable, did special Christmas flexidiscs for members of their fanclub at no extra price and made sure they never forgot where they came from and how long they used to have to save to buy records of their own. Something went wrong though around the time of the ‘Anthology’ project in the mid 1990s when they realised how much money could be made if they ignored their scruples. It was a project mostly done for the moolah after all (Ringo had only recently overcome an alcohol addiction that had left him unable to support his poor-selling solo albums and George was involved in a big court case over Handmade Films and needed cash quickly) but surprised the remaining ‘Threetles’ by how well it went down with fans who delighted in the chance to peek into the vaults at some of the fab four’s leftover gems. There are were and always will be a lot of complaints levelled at how sanitised Anthology was, how it skipped over the difficult bits (the sacking of Pete Best, the death of Brian Epstein, the breakup, Allen Klein), especially in the book that cut and pasted Lennon quotes out of context and pretended that they were all good friends all the time, honest. Never mind the two nauseating ‘reunion’ records that went with it, Paul George and Ringo overdubbing some of John’s unfinished demos that somehow came out sounding more like ELO thanks to Jeff Lynne’s period production. It was, most fans agree, a lost opportunity to tell the real story and release the real gems in the vaults, though even the biggest collector found something to enjoy: the multimedia Anthology project did provide us with some fascinating bits of music we didn’t know were out there, some nice little titbits in the story we’d not heard before, finally gave Pete Best some decent money for his role in the band’s early days and gave us a couple of extra songs into the bargain. What’s more, while the videos of the TV series cost a packet and the three double-disc volumes cost the equivalent of the entire official Beatles catalogue on CD, they weren’t so dear you had to mortgage your house to hear them.

These days, alas, that’s no longer true: at first it was announced that ‘Anthology IV’ was only available with ‘re-mastered’ (but not terribly different) editions of Anthologies I, II and III for an eye-watering £200. Which might just about be worth it if you’re a vinyl enthusiast (the original Anthologies never came out on vinyl) but makes absolutely no sense on CD where the old editions sold so well you can still get them for a tenner each sounding very much the same. There are no new sleevenotes, no deluxe packaging and no attempt to lavish the care and attention on these sets that, say, the McCartney Archive project and Lennon and Harrison deluxe editions have been getting. The TV series, once a genuinely big event, has been re-issued on Disney+ for no other reason than to plug the record, with a self-indulgent ‘extra’ episode about the making of the TV series, especially the three songs. Oh and after enough time had gone by that every Beatle fan paid that obscene amount of money to ‘exclusively’ hear three tracks? Apple released it as a standalone set anyway for Christmas, claiming they’d bowed to ‘fan pressure’. Like heck they did: every fan I knew grumbled they were going to release the bloody thing separately one day anyway; it was a surprise to us that it was this year not next.

So here’s what you get for your money on Anthology IV: a chaotic sprawl across the known and unknown, made up of  annoyingly similar takes of some of the more obscure Beatle songs out there, a full sixteen previously released takes (all taken from the pricey ‘deluxe’ album re-issues of the albums from ‘Revolver’ through to ‘Let It Be’, with the curious exception of ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ which they haven’t got round to yet), remixed versions of the three ‘reunion’ singles (the last of which only came out a couple of years ago anyway) and a small handful of beauties. There’s nothing that drop-dead amazing this time round (no ‘Leave My Kitten Alone’, the alternate take of ‘A Day In The Life’ or the demo for ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ to name the three clear highlights) but there are at least some decent alternate takes that manage to be both intriguingly different to the ones we know and love and enjoyable in their own right. All the alternate takes of ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ (recorded one after another as part of the fourteen hour sessions for the ‘Please Please Me’ album) are little crackers and take two is a gem, the first time the band have got through to the end (and the take would have been releasable had Lennon not fluffed his lines). ‘Tell Me Why’ was one of the first Beatle songs to benefit from double-tracking as their songs began too hard to perform live and this punkish raw take reveals why, as Paul and George struggle to hit the right notes and sing in tune simultaneously, something that results in an un-releasably scrappy performance that’s nevertheless fun. George’s ‘Help!’ track ‘I Need You’ is still being played like a ‘normal’ song, with the full twin guitar bass and drums attack before George re-thinks it for pedal steel and softens the arrangement considerably. It’s nowhere near as good as the finished version, but it is very different and with outtake sets that’s good enough sometimes. You might think that they couldn’t mess about with the simplistic ‘I’ve Just Seen A Face’ much either, but somehow this take has a very different feel despite nothing being actually that different – it’s faster, folkier and less Beatley without the harmonies, played with such aggression it’s a wonder Ringo doesn’t complain of blisters on his fingers. ‘Baby You’re A Rich Man’ is being played for fun, John and Paul getting so into outdoing each other than the chorus runs way longer than it does on the finished version. The backing tracks to ‘Nowhere Man’ ‘The Fool On The Hill’ and especially ‘Hey Bulldog’ are great to hear, evidence of how telepathic the Beatles were when they were in the mood (‘Fool’ interestingly has three extra repeats of the chorus and is heading for a fourth when the take falls apart, nearly doubled to six odd minutes. Were there verses cut?)

It could take a long time for them to reach that ‘mood’ though. One of the best aspects of the original Anthology series as the way that pure art that will last for millennia was created in between the sort of messing around you’d expect from teenage boys at art college. It made The Beatles more ‘human’ somehow and the fact they created such powerful music despite being ‘like us’ all the more remarkable. There are several great examples of that here again: John singing along tunelessly to the previously recorded backing track of ‘All You Need Is Love’ and making quips about Princess Margaret’s nightgown right before the satellite cameras roll for the then-biggest world TV audience in history, apparently to give both Brian Epstein and George Martin apoplexy; John asking faithful roadie Mal Evans for some ‘coke’ at the start of the take for ‘Baby You’re A Rich Man’ and Paul quipping ‘and some cannabis resin’ – George Martin doesn’t get that joke!

There’s lots of stuff that even this fully paid up Beatles obsessive didn’t need though: a remix of ‘Money’ that’s suspiciously close to the real thing (just a couple of different notes at the end away), a boring plod through ‘Matchbox’ (never the best Beatles recording in any form but a pale versions of what will end up on the ‘Long Tall Sally’ EP), a single-tracked recording of ‘In My Life’ that’s otherwise identical except for the absence of George Martin’s Bach pastiche harpsichord solo, that ‘All You Need Is Love’ which really isn’t all that different Lennon quips aside and then there’s the striking string arrangement for ‘I Am The Walrus’: a work of art indeed but not heard like this, mixed through the orchestra’s headphones so that the only true Beatle input is a ‘bleed’ (there’s a fan version without the vocals but with everything else – and the ‘King Lear’ speech mixed up high – that’s been doing the rounds on bootleg rounds for decades and is vastly superior to this version. That said the same thing goes for many of these takes: there’s a version of the ‘Bulldog’ backing track with extra false starts cut from this version that’s fab and I’ve heard me a more complete ‘Nowhere Man’ in better sound too).  

I wouldn’t mind so much had these songs come out as a standalone CD at a standalone CD price, but they haven’t: even if you buy just the stamdalone version you’re looking at a costly purchase for stuff many fans already own on the recent deluxe editions of ‘Revolver’  ‘Sgt Peppers’ ‘The White Album’ ‘Let It Be’ and ‘Abbey Road’. What’s more, far from working as a ‘trailer’ for how good those sets can be and offering the best to fans who maybe can’t afford them, the track selection seems to have been chosen at random, with an emphasis on studio jam sessions rather than the true revelations like the alternate ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’ or ‘Long Long Long’. Some tracks are good choices: George especially comes out of this set well with a thrilling ‘Love You Too’ (with abandoned harmonies), an early rougher take of ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ (that breaks down when he gets too carried away with his ‘Smokey Robinson’ like falsetto!), a rockier early take of ‘Here Comes The Sun’ and the lovely string overdub for ‘Something’ (which, again, owes more to George Martin than The Beatles) all amongst the highlights of the deluxe editions. Paul too fares well: A second go at ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’ (the ‘missing link’ between the folky one from Anthology II and the soul extravaganza released on ‘Revolver’) , the histrionic first stab at ‘Helter Skelter’ (though not the epic still unreleased twenty-seven minute one), the three minute improv that became the thirty second link ‘Can You Take Me Back?’ sandwiched unbilled between ‘Cry Baby Cry’ and ‘Revolution #9’ on The White Album is proof of his incredible instinctive creativity even when making stuff up on the spot and the strings overdub for ‘She’s Leaving Home’ (complete with a four note phrase cut out of the final master – and no, this time it’s more Paul’s work than George Martin’s) are all worthy of re-release too: frankly all of these should have been on ‘Anthology’ the first time round. John, alas, fares really badly: his best moments from the deluxe sets (a killer ‘Good Morning Good Morning’, any of the Esher White Album demos and multiple ace ‘I Dig A Ponys’) are all absent. Instead we get an endless noodle through ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, two very similar but fluffed rehearsal takes of ‘Julia’ and a similar-but-muted take of ‘Don’t Let Me Down!’ (the one played on the rooftop earlier in the day than the storming second version, which made both the film and the LP of ‘Let It Be’). Then there’s the sixty second jokey version of ‘I Will’ where Paul changes it to ‘I won’t!’ (‘yes you will!’ adds Lennon) and the weakest release of the lot: a noisy punkish brief jam through Elvis’ ‘You’re So Square’. The best of the rest of the outtakes? Hardly. Oh and the ‘This Boy’ with all the giggling fans have been raving about? That actually came out on the back of the ‘Free As A Bird’ single and, while nice to have on an album at last, isn’t quite the big discovery some fans seem to think it is.

Then there are the three remixed reunion songs, at least two of which I rank as amongst the worst things The Beatles ever did. I still can’t stand 2023’s ‘Now and Then’,  a song where Paul has re-written history, both in the publicity claiming John wrote it for him (he didn’t: it’s a love song for Yoko) and what chiefly he did to the song (cutting out the song’s best bit – Lennon’s acerbic middle eight – then re-recording George’s 1990s guitar solo and playing it himself, leaving just a couple of notes to ‘make’ it a Beatle song). Of the 200 odd demos Lennon recorded in his five years off being a house-husband it’s both the weakest song and arguably the least suitable for the Beatle treatment. Being so new they’ve not done anything to this song which sounds as bad and heavy-handed as before. ‘Free As A Bird’ is another of Lennon’s all-time worst songs, given a wretchedly heavy-handed Beatle treatment that overdubbed all life out of it, but to give them credit the Giles Martin mix makes it sound a lot more Beatley than the original Jeff Lynne one did. The new ‘MAL’ software (first used in the ‘Get Back’ documentary film and ‘Let It Be’ deluxe set) works wonders in breaking everything down into its constituent parts, cleaning it up then putting it back together again so that, for the first time ever, Lennon sounds as if he’s – not in the same room exactly – but somewhere in the same country for the first time. I don’t ever wish to hear this Godawful song ever again mind, but if I to hear it then please at least make it this version! ‘Real Love’ is the only reunion song I’ve ever cared for and I was waiting for the remix with some anticipation but unfortunately the ‘MAL’ software has gone the other way and ruined this one, making John sound further away and even more underwater, while unforgivably someone (Paul? Giles?) has taken the opportunity to rewrite history and take away a lot of its best feature: George’s guitarwork. They’ve knocked quite a few seconds off the running time too. It doesn’t sound like a ‘real’ ‘Real Love’ the way I and many other fans hoped it would and can’t compete with the 1995 mix. 

So, Anthology Four is already proving a big seller at the time of writing and is sure to keep The Beatles in another small fortune for another couple of years until we’re back to do it all over again. However the amount of grumbling going on in the Beatle community – one that didn’t even complain this loudly about the ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ remixes or the ‘Beatle Movie medley’ cash ins – makes it feel as if the band have shot themselves in the foot this time. Certainly this is all absolutely no substitute for the ‘Rubber Soul’ box set we’ve been half-promised for two Christmasses now. What is the holdup? Did they accidentally wipe the master tapes and don’t want to admit it or something? After all, what’s next for The Beatles from here? At least when we were getting a deluxe album every other year they had a steady stream of income that would last maybe a decade at current speed, but what happens to those now? Have they been abandoned partway through and this is the dregs released here? Or are we still going to get them even though they’ve been ‘spoilt’ by having so much from them released already? You see, here’s my biggest problem with Anthology Four: there’s actually more than enough in the Beatles vault to keep us going till Anthology Ten without any such ‘filler’ takes or remixes or repeats from other releases. There’s no ‘Carnival Of Light’ (the one still unreleased ‘Beatle song’ dropped from Anthology II at the 11^th hour when George complained that this avant garde production for a London nightclub wasn’t worth releasing – he might have had a point but it would be nice to find out, especially as Paul ignored George’s wishes over ‘Now and Then’ so doesn’t exactly hold his views sacrosanct these days), no eight minute jam on ‘She’s A Woman’ played as a power trio (as George was poorly), no ‘Revolution Take 20’ (the elongated one that became the basis for ‘Revolutions #1 and #9 and is utterly fab!), no demos for ‘Bad To Me’ ‘We Can Work It Out’ ‘Good Morning Good Morning’ ‘Step Inside, Love’ ‘Goodbye’ ‘Lady Madonna’ ‘Dehra Duhn’ (actually busked in Anthology in 1995 but also a full George recording from 1969) or the remaining ‘Esher’ demos missing from the White Album deluxe set, the full thirty-seven minute slowed down ‘Helter Skelter’,  early rehearsals at the Cavern Club in 1960 and 1962 including ‘I’ll Follow The Sun’ long before it made it to record, the unedited versions of ‘She’s Leaving Home’ (with extra orchestral phrase per verses but with vocals attached) ‘Sexy Sadie (with unused bridge) and ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ (with harmonies!), alternate versions of ‘Run For Your Life’ and ‘Glass Onion’, various Get Back jams still missing (such as ‘Madman’ ‘Watching Rainbows’ ‘Zero Is Just Another Number’ ‘Gone Gone Gone’ and ‘All I Want Is You’), the complete Tony Sheridan Hamburg recordings, the complete Decca audition tapes, the outtakes/backing tracks for ‘I Feel Fine’ ‘Help!’ ‘Paperback Writer’ and ‘Day Tripper’ to name just four of my favourites from the vaults. Never mind the complete ‘Star Club’ ‘Hollywood Bowl’ ‘Shea Stadium’ and ‘Blackpool’ live tapes that would have made a nice extra or the very wonderful earliest British gig from a school performance in April 1963 that the taper revealed to the world in 2023 and is well worth seeking out on youtube, by far the most exciting Beatle news in a decade (my guess is they’re sitting on those to pad out deluxe editions of the earlier albums for whom there are less tapes outtakes around). Meet you back here for the inevitable ‘Archives V’ in 2055…

The problem isn’t that Anthology Four is a bit disappointing and patchy: collectors are used to that from ‘rarities’ and ‘outtakes’ sets. It’s that it could have been utterly brilliant and make the most of emptying the vaults properly for once and for all – and they decided to make some easy money instead. How very un-Beatlesy. They didn’t even commission Klaus Voormann (the Beatle Hamburg friend whose still busy illustrating) to do a ‘fourth’ pic of the older Beatles back together again, covering up the cracks in the original sleeve ‘wallpaper’ with belated unity. I’ve seen reviewers trying to excuse this mess, saying that it’s an attempt to keep The Beatles alive for a new fanbase who might not know it, but that’s ludicrous: if you want to introduce a new generation to The Beatles you do what they very sensibly did in the 1960s: make it affordable, make it good and make whoever picks them up proud to be part of the ongoing Beatle story. My feeling is that this wasn’t intended to be a genuine attempt to prolong the Beatle story and appeal to a new audience, but more a panic that the last few box sets haven’t been selling as well and they need something more general and less specific to appeal to more casual fans and make some extra money. The backlash (Anthology #4 is the first volume not to make #1 in the charts in the UK. It peaked at #48) suggests they’ve killed off any chance of getting those sales now too. There’s certainly nothing here good enough to quite justify a fourth Anthology and especially nothing to justify the price tag beyond greed. The irony, too, is that this was rush-released before it was ready to cover up for the fact that Lennon’s estate had so badly messed up their boxset, only for this one to get backlash too. Collectors with long memories might recall the 1979 fiasco when a box set ‘exclusive’ ‘Beatles Rarities’ was only made available as part of a pricey box and then released individually for the Christmas market – at which point sales of all Beatle things declined right the way until the 1987 release of the original albums on compact disc brought fans back into the fold again. We might well see something similar here: Apple have fluffed this one badly and they know it.

37)              Robert Hunter “Tiger Rose”

Following on from last year’s 50^th reissue of the Grateful Dead lyricist’s debut ‘Tales Of the Great Rum Runners’ comes this year’s 50^th anniversary set of the sequel. ‘Tiger Rose’ is much like its predecessor in that there’s a rose of beauty in there somewhere but you have to rather search through the thorns to get to it. You see, by his own admission, Bob Hunter was neither a natural singer nor a melody writer. His gravelly growl is certainly evocative of his typically descriptive lyrics, which feel closer to ancient myths and legends and pirate shanties than mere pop songs, but it’s an acquired taste, while you badly miss Jerry Garcia’s instinct for melody as one song runs into another without much change. That said this is a more consistent and listenable album than its predecessor, mostly courtesy of the full band performance which features various members of the Grateful Dead (though not all at once and in one case, Mickey Hart as B D Shot, under a pseudonym as he hadn’t officially rejoined the band yet and was still smarting after his dad Lenny, acting as their manager, ran off with some of their money). Much of it feels like a Dead album playing at the wrong speed, not least the slow-paced ‘cowboy songs’ like ‘Wild Bill’, though Deadheads will enjoy a return to the band’s 1960s run of more ‘cosmic’ songs with ‘Dance A Hole’ the spaciest Hunter lyric since ‘Dark Star’ and ‘One Thing To try’ a typically warm and thoughtful Hunter lyric as the great man dishes out wisdom like smarties (‘Take care of your people, keep everyone fed, hide the ones in trouble under your bed!’)

As usual the CD set comes with extras – a whole album’s worth. In fact on vinyl, uniquely, you can buy just the extras without the album (as ‘Tiger Rose Rarities’) though the remastered version is out as a separate disc too. These feature alternate versions of no less than nine of the album’s ten tracks (everything bar ‘One Thing To Try’) but sequenced in the order they were recorded and, in truth, not all that different. There’s just one ‘new’ song recorded during the album sessions but only ever released on a rare 1975 Grateful Dead Records sampler LP, ‘Talkin’ Money Tree Blues’. Fans of the similarly sarcastic ‘US Blues’ will like it, but it’s not exactly a lost classic and you can see why it was dropped from the final album. One thing I do prefer though is the rejected cover art, revived and revamped for the vinyl edition, which features more ‘tiger’ and less ‘rose’ (it looks more in keeping with Jerry Garcia’s ‘Cats Under The Stars’ artwork, one of Hunter’s favourite albums he worked on). Give it a try, just…be warned!

Songs Of The Year:

1)    John Lennon “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)”

And so it is Christmas. And what the hell are we doing? The Ono-Lennon holiday hit has been re-released every few years since 1972 (when it was recorded in late 1971 between ‘Imagine’ and this year’s box set ‘Sometime In New York City’ record, but too late for the festive market so it got held back a year) and you can see why: a plea for peace and unity masquerading as a fun Christmas song, it hits the spot for lots of groups of people and is, unfortunately, as timeless as when it was written given how often man seems to like starting wars. Each time it’s released it has a different resonance: back in 1971/72 it was about the cold war and it’s hot ‘n’ sweaty battles in Vietnam and Korea. In 1980 it was the best-selling of all the Lennon singles in the wake of John’s murder, the sound of a peacenik gunned down by violence too poignant for words. In the late 1980s it became an anti-gulf war anthem. In the early 2000s it earmarked the post 9/11 world of wars with the Middle East. And now, inevitably, it reflect the wars of Israel v Palestine and Russia in Ukraine (because it’s hard to argue that a country being invaded and defending itself counts as a ‘versus’). Fifty-three years on and war still isn’t over, even though practically all of us (bar Trump and Putin and Hamas and Netanyahu and all those other yahoos plus a few soldiers) really want peace and even though all those previous wars, which once seemed such a big deal, all sort of petered out. Lennon, you suspect, would be appalled but not that surprised. Hopefully he’d also feel proud that a track he wrote because he was so sick of hearing ‘White Christmas’ on the radio has lasted all this time (and more than a little smug that Beatlemaniacs don’t feel the same way about Macca’s far emptier go ‘Wonderful Christmas Time’, a big hit during Lennon’s last Christmas in 1979). Thankfully this edition keeps Yoko’s twee but childlike and charming B-side ‘Listen The Snow Is Falling’ which does a good job of capturing the joy of Christmas morning and the original picture sleeve, of John ‘n’ Yoko with the musicians and children’s choir who sang on the record. This year it’s back out on both green vinyl (an inevitable Christmassy choice after previous editions used gold and red already) and another of those really weird zoetrope things the Beatles insist on using, with a still from the black-and-white promo video put together in a hurry after Lennon’s death for Christmas 1980 and featuring schoolchildren in front of pictures of John ‘n’ Yoko. Which wouldn’t have been my first choice.  Still a truly beautiful song though and a highlight of the solo Beatle canon. There's a new music video too, an anti-war cartoon commissioned by Sean in 2023 and featuring a chess match by pigeon post between two soldiers on opposite sides of the war (very like Paul’s video for ‘Pipes of Peace’ actually, but not as good). Alas the setting could be Israel, Ukraine, Korea or anywhere in any world conflict – you know, one of the ones Trump promised to fix in a single day a year ago (there'll probably be another one erupting by the time you read this). It's heartfelt but a bit po-faced and a lot schmaltzier than the song. As for the animation it's no 'Rupert and The Frog Song' either and looks unfinished, while all the Humans have the same big nose. I think I'll stick with the Beatle cartoons...

2)    Neil Young “Bottle Of Love”

Easily the prettiest song on the new album ‘Talkin’ To The Trees’, this song feels like a warm glow compared to the cold hard slap in the face with a wet fish of the rest of the record. A piano ballad not unlike ‘Philadelphia’, this song has Neil spotting his wife Darryl in the distance, thinking she’s alone, dancing like a child with the sheer joy of being alive. Neil is overcome by all the feels that have been caught up in a bottleneck recently, all the doubts about his divorce and the split it created inside his family, overcome by the sheer love he feels for his soulmate and how deep his ‘bottle’ of feelings really runs. The Chrome Hearts play less on this one but provide a far gentler, subtler backing that works far better than the heavy-handedness of the rest of the record, adding to the haunting vibes rather than their sloppiness detracting from the anger, with some particularly fine guitar washes that fade in and out. What with the echo on Neil’s piano and the ghostliness of his falsetto vocal and the vibe of a perfect moment in time that could never be captured in a bottle and preserved but has to be ‘lived’, it really adds to the ethereal feel, as if this song is a mirage that could float away on the wind at any time. I’d hesitate to say it’s the best thing Neil’s done in a long time as there’s usually one great song per album these days, but this is certainly right up there amongst the best of his 21^st century crop.  

3)    The Rolling Stones “Shame Shame Shame”

Most of ‘Black and Blue’ is sloppy and empty, deliberately written to be simple partly to cover for the fact that the band are one guitarist short and partly to cover for the fact that the one still there was by now so heavily strung out on heroin that Keith was out to lunch for most of the album. For most of the album that works against it: ‘Black and Blue’ struggles to find a groove and then repeats it, the band too fragile to do anything except keep going. ‘Shame Shame Shame’ though – a cover of a period hit by ‘Shirley and Company’ released at the start of 1975 -  positively dances. Even granted that the modern band have added their usual plethora of overdubs to finish the thing off, it still has way more promise and ‘life’ about it than anything else from the album (Charlie’s glorious drumming, such a joy to hear again, alone gives this song more life than most). The lyrics are a daft throwback to the 1950s, with Mick urging his girl onto the dancefloor and saying what a shame it would be if someone as pretty and cool as her is too stuck up to ‘dance’ with him. Though, this being the Stones, the amount of allusions to ‘moving your body’ make it clear that the narrator has the bedroom not the disco floor on his mind! Next Mick’s revving the engine in his car and undoing the sunroof to better show off what a party animal he is. In an instant Mick is going from hapless loser (singing in falsetto) to a strutting peacock as he owns the dancefloor and shows his trendy girlfriend up, to the accompaniment of some fine gospel singers finding their inner groove. The song has nothing to say beyond that, but the groove is infectious, with a marvellous Keith guitar solo in the middle and it’s a lot worthier of space than anything that actually made this sorry album. How this wasn’t revived for the main record (which was in serious trouble) and was then overlooked for both ‘Tattoo You’ and Emotional Rescue’ (records that started by digging through the vaults because nobody could think of anything new) I will never know, but what was our loss in the 1970s is our gain in 2025. Funky!

4)    Rolling Stones “2000 Light Years From Home”

Not a new song but – seeing as this section is a bit low – a new discovery. A collector sent a load of 1960s Top Of The Pops tapes back t the BBC archives this year and this is the big discovery: a performance of this song that no one could remember and which has puzzled many (not least because it’s an album track on a music show that famously only featured performances of singles). It’s always been one of my favourite Stones songs anyway, written when Mick was stuck in prison on trumped up drugs charges not knowing when he would get out and feeling like the loneliest person in the world. The video channels that horror, with Mick dressed in war paint (much like what he’s wearing on the ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ promo and picture sleeve) and singing a timid, spooked live vocal over the record while the rest of the Stones mime in close up (some better than others!) A real find, included at the start of this year’s TOTP Christmas compilation and well worth seeking out.

5)    Oasis “Bring It On Down”

There will, presumably, be a live album of the Oasis reunion at some point in the not too distant future (my money is on next Christmas) but for now we have just the one standalone downloadable song, a pretty decent and energetic take on the band’s early live warhorse from ‘Definitely Maybe’. Though not the most popular of Oasis’ early songs they’ve always liked playing it live and it’s become a good ‘barometer’ of how the band feel at any particular time: the early live performances are gloriously in-yer-face, middle period ones calmer and more about the lyrics, later period ones more bloated. This version is back to the early versions again, young and hungry and with something to prove.  

6)    Allan Clarke/The Get Together Choir “Christmas Sleigh Ride”

The Hollie singer has been poorly recently so hasn’t been able to plug his new single as much as usual. Which is a shame because it’s clearly made for the lucrative festive market in mind. I was always surprised The Hollies never did a Christmas record when sales began slipping: the holidays are a time for rich harmonies and songs about peace on Earth and childlike wonder, all three of which are cornerstones of the Hollie discography (have Santa’s sleigh at a bus stop and they’d have had a full house!) This is the closest we’re going to get and, well, it’s fairly standard Christmas fare really, with an annoying modern beat grafted onto a sickly children’s choir and sleigh bells. Clarkey sounds good, even if there’s a lengthy middle section where he doesn’t do anything, with a lyric theme pleading for a loved one to come home for the holidays. It sounds very like 1980s Hollies: i.e. not their best era but still better than most of what everyone else was doing.

7)    Graham Gouldman/Kevin Godley “I Don’t Want To Go To Heaven”

BBC Radio 2’s rather odd live music show ‘The Piano Room’ staggered across the line to a hundred shows this year and set their sights a bit more ambitiously than the usual singer-songwriter you’ve never heard of. A two-way 10cc reunion is easily their biggest and most unexpected scalp so far, the first time Graham Gouldman and Kevin Godley have worked together in nineteen years (with my cynical head on as a sort of mutual promotion of Graham’s ongoing yours as the sole remaining member of ‘10cc’ and the Godley-Crème box set just out; with my hippie head on as a way to let bygones be bygones and add a postscript to the band’s discography and for old friends to work together before it’s too late). The way the show works is that the bands/musicians performing play three songs rather than a full set: a reworked version of a ‘big hit’ (in this case the safe choice of ‘I’m Not In Love’, which they did rather well), a classic cover (a rather wonky take on The Everly Brothers’ ‘All I Have To Do Is Dream’) and a ‘brand new song’. The pair, who only ever worked together a couple of times as writing partners in 10cc, created ‘I Don’t Want To Go To Heaven’, a song that sounds like Graham’s recent run of catchy but deep solo albums and Kevin’s quirky under-rated solo record ‘Muscle Memory’ from 2020 juxtaposed on top of each other. The song sounds to me as if Kevin wrote the words, a pained but typically wry take on growing older, before sending them off to Graham to set to music. Part comedy, part tragedy, it’s a list of all the things Kevin is afraid might happen both likely and unlikely as death stalks him closer (10cc are a rare band from the 1970s where all the founding members are still alive), not wanting to die anonymously in an empty hospital room or party with Jesus. It’s a good try after so long away, with an unusual hard blues style unheard from either man before now, but isn’t up to the best of the GG06 songs (released as an EP and as part of ‘The Things We Do For Love: The Ultimate Hits and Beyond’ compilation) never mind the classic 10cc years. The official single re-recording works better than the ‘Piano Room’ version and was released a week later (featuring a bigger band and fewer nerves) and will, no doubt, turn up on a future 10cc compilation sometime soon.  

8)    Neil Young “Big Crime”

Though it didn’t make the ‘Talkin’ To The Trees’ record, ‘Big Crime’ is very much in the same vein: an angry sloppy protest song about how Donald Trump is a chump and everything he says is wrong. Neil turns the tables on the Donald, mocking everything he says which is clear deflection away from what he’s really doing, with lines like ‘millionaire fascists’ ‘got big crime in DC…and The White House’ and ‘no more great again’ (in reference to MAGA mugs). Neil has been one of Trump’s most outspoken critics, livid that the orange baboon borrowed ‘Rockin’ In The Free World’ for his rallies without asking for a second successive election campaign in a row (and utterly missed the point of the Reagan and Republican bashing sarcasm) and has talked about how, at the end of this year’s European tour, he might not be able to get back into America for speaking his mind but is going to keep on speaking it anyway. A song like this was inevitable, especially after the glut of songs about Trump’s first time round on 2017’s ‘The Visitor’, but this isn’t one of Neil’s best on the subject, too unfocussed and repetitive to be a serious attack on its subject. It feels more as if it’s venting, repeating Trump lines in complete confusion as to what the appeal of a racist Nazi narcissist can possibly be. But I guess that’s kind of okay – most of the rest of us are there too. The attending video is perhaps more interesting than the song, where you can see Trump ‘flip-flopping’ in his own words and pictures. Stop press: there’s now a part two, where a slightly slower version of the same instrumental theme accompanies footage of farmers trying to cope with Trump’s crazy tariffs. Will there be more?   

9)    Neil Young “As Time Explodes”

Another Neil standalone, also not on album at the time of writing, though it sounds remarkably like every other riff from ‘Talkin’ To The Trees’ stuck through a blender, with just a hint of ‘Mother Earth’ from ‘Ragged Glory’. It’s a fiery instrumental, played with full-on grunge attack, a two minute howl of pain and injustice. Really, though it’s intended as the soundtrack accompaniment to a two minute compilation film of Trump doing dumb Trump things: knocking down the East Wing of The White House and ruining several centuries of history for a ballroom even though he has no friends and dances like a penguin trying to prevent his toupe from falling off, inviting his posh tax-avoiding numbskull friends to ‘bring an Oligarch to work day’ and generally being an irritating loser. Mercifully Neil gives us some hope at the end, with shots of people taking to the streets for the ‘No Kings’ protest rally.  As protests go it’s no ‘Living With War’ never mind ‘Ohio’, but few people are brave enough to stick it to the orange buffoon where it hurts these days so for that alone it’s welcome. 

10)                    Justin Hayward “Life In A Northern Town”

Easily the weakest release of the Moodies’ guitarist’s lifetime is his unlistenable ‘Classic Blue’ reinterpretation of overly famous songs with an orchestra conducted by Mike Batt, released in 1989. It was such a lost opportunity: that voice, combined with a producer who’s made a lot of dross but also some real triumphs (check out The Hollies’ best flop single ‘Soldier’s Song’) could have been a real winner. They’ve teamed up again for a new single and, well, this doesn’t cut the mustard either. Justin, of course, is from Swindon not a Northern town at all, which might be why he never connects with this batty Batt song about a childhood in the 1960s that’s mostly a bunch of name-dropping before turning to an irritating and noisy ‘Hey mamamamama Heeeeeeeeey’ chorus that sounds like Justin is being backed by The Wombles. It’s hard to know what this song is meant to be saying: there’s a dad who ‘never waves goodbye’ from a departing train, a diet of Beatle records and watching the JFK assassination on the news. But these are only snapshots, shared by too many people of a certain age to be personal and too fragmented to be powerfully nostalgic either, while they have no more relevance to being born ‘oop North’ than they would to someone born down South (or even in another country: The Beatles got everywhere after all. Even the places so obscure Trump hasn’t hit with tariffs this year).As with ‘Classic Blue’ both men are geniuses in their own way, with the potential to do wonderful things, but somehow putting them together robs the life out of them both. 

11) Paul McCartney/Various Artists “(Bonus Track)”

We’ve been teased a lot about the release of ‘new’ Paul McCartney music for the first time in five years (since the wretched ‘Macca III’) across 2025, but it’s probably fair to say that neither release this year is quite what we thought it would be. This up first: the final track of various artists compilation ‘Is This What We Want?’, a very 1960s form of peaceful protest against a very modern sort of monster: Artificial Intelligence. All the musicians involved (others include Kate Bush and Sam Fender) have recorded something ‘Human’, the sort of mortal accidents that even a defective AI bot that’s been brought up on the ‘Zapple’ Apple albums would never dream of coming up with (a series that John and George released albums for but not Paul). Macca’s track, tucked away at the end of the record, sees him channelling his own ‘Life With The Lyons’ with an audio verite of a creak, a hiss, a bit of walking around the studio in squeaky shoes (very like The Who’s ‘Music Must Change’ already mentioned above in fact, but without the music) and roughly a minute of silence. It could be by anybody – but then that’s kind of the point: AI has reduced music to its lowest common denominators and taken out all the imagination so what we’re left with might as well be silence for all the input musicians actually have. It’s a tad hypocritical, given that AI heavily featured in the recent glut of Beatles re-issues (and in the last Beatle single ‘Now and Then’ from 2023) and not exactly listenable, but it’s heartfelt.

12) Paul McCartney and Spinal Tap “Cups and Cakes” (‘The End Continues’)

Considering he was the one Beatle who didn’t find ‘The Rutles’ funny, it’s good to hear Paul laughing at himself and the ‘granny’ side of his writing on the long awaited Spinal Tap reunion. Turning his usual twee charm up to eleven, Paul recycles ‘English Tea’ (‘How twee, How me!’) from the wretched ‘Chaos and Creation In The Backyard’ album with a song where every nasty thing in the world gets solved by a bite of afternoon tea.  Paul sings about ‘cups and cakes, oh what good things mother makes’ and adds ‘I do hope that nothing breaks’ because ‘the china is dear’ throwing in a Macca ‘I’m so glad you are here’ for good measure. There’s a very McCartneyish rhyme of ‘jam’ and ‘ma’am’ before we go back to the first verse with the variation of ‘tummy aches’. We then get a trumpet solo so like the one on ‘Penny Lane’ that Paul comments on it before being sad that the song has to ‘end’ but at least he has a ‘friend’. He just about gets away with not getting the giggles throughout. True Beatle fans will have heard Neil Innes do this sort of thing tonnes better but it’s good fun and –dare I say it – a better song than anything on Paul’s last two albums..

13) The Who “Tea and Theatre”

Not a new song of course – it was released in 2006 on the Who’s first ‘comeback’ album ‘Endless Wire’ – and it’s been regularly used as the last encore in shows since then, ending the show with just Roger and Pete on stage. However the song has taken on new significance during this year’s messy ‘farewell tour’ where it became the last song the band officially played live during a show in Los Angeles in October. This really is it this time so they say: I mean, I’ve been fooled again a few times by those sort of statements now but there really was a sense of finality to this tour given the statements the two Who have made to the press and with Pete looking sad, Roger losing his voice and both looking frail. The tour started badly, with a lot of negative publicity when Roger criticised Zak Starkey (yes Ringo’s son but more importantly in context Keith Moon’s Godson…yes Godson!) and his drum fills during the 1971 track ‘The Song Is Over’ (a song fittingly revived especially for this tour after a half century in limbo) in a performance at The Royal Albert Hall in March. It was a messy escapade that didn’t need to happen quite so publicly: I watched a lot of concerts from this last tour and Zak didn’t do anything he didn’t usually do, but Roger’s ears were playing up and he was struggling to hear his monitor so he really needed quiet at the time. Not that Zak knew this at all. A half-hearted attempt by Pete to pacify things and patch up relationships online only made things worse (Zak, after all, has been in the band since the 1990s revivals – approximately twice as long as Keith was in the band, albeit with long rests in between). Things were getting good by the last shows though and that last one is a gem, filled with nostalgia and celebration. The moment when Roger sings, for the last time, Pete’s lines on the death of John Entwistle in 2003 (‘One of us gone, one of us mad, one of us me, all of us sad’) and then ends, as The Who always do, with a nod to the crowd they’ve been reflecting all these years and an invite to the audience to ‘take some tea at the theatre with me’ is special. Some shows even had Roger ad lib ‘plus my pal Pete’ – the first time he did this the guitarist burst into tears. These tour have been at each other’s throats and in a power struggle over the band since they were The Detours in 1962 so for them to come circle – and mirror the song where they ended their ‘first’ career, the self-mocking cry of punkish anguish ‘Cry If You Want’ from 1982’s ‘It’s Hard’ about being man enough to admit to your emotions – is the perfect if unexpected goodbye. Goodnight gents and enjoy your retirement. You earned it!

Documentaries/DVDs:

1)    Live Aid: 40 Years On/The Day Rock and Roll Changed The World

I was too young to remember ‘Live Aid’ firsthand, but I’m told I was plonked in front of a TV screen for a bit (most likely the Paul McCartney finale at the end when the microphone stopped working) and took in a little about the fact that these were musicians from two different sides of the world and they were doing something good to raise money for some of the deprived people who lived in the middle. It made perfect sense to me: in a house that was always filled with music I knew already that this art form was special, that it made you see things from other people’s perspective, that it made you feel things, that it made you care. Why wouldn’t a bunch of people get together to help strangers when the music that poured out of them and made them feel so much? It seemed as natural and of the world as the vinyl on my beloved Fisher Price record player going round and round. And even though most of it probably struck me as noise (it’s taken a long time for me to love the 1980s, which always seemed more alien than the 1960s despite being the soundtrack of my own generation) I always liked the idea and the thought that music represented hope and community, of people taking a stand and making things better. Most of all, it felt as if humanity was taking part in something bigger than individuals were. One of the things I loved most about the show, which nobody ever seems to mention, is that the Wembley gig was filmed with the stage on the left and Philadelphia with the stage on the right, as if the Earth was one big concert arena and we were all invited. One other thing I loved and which the documentary makes clear is that for a day all the people squashed together in the blazing hot July sunshine must have had a feeling of what it was like to be like scenes of Africa, slum for the day, fed by hose and with all bottles banned in case they were thrown at performers. In short, ‘Live Aid’ always gave me hope that if we could do this once we could do it again, with the hope that we might get a whole load of similar benefits for similar causes.

It was one of the great disappointments of my life that they never came. The weird thing is though that the older I get the more of an outlier ‘Live Aid’ seems, despite once being so natural, and the absolute opposite of its eras values in so many ways. It was on in 1985, right in the middle of Thatcher’s dog-eat-dog era Britain (with Reagan at the height of his power across the Atlantic), a time of survival and looking after one’s self without being able to afford to care for others. It was reflected in the music business too: people talked about it in terms of competition not co-operation, of gold discs and record sales and concert attendance, as if every musician out there was battling to be the best every single time they played. Music was all about celebrity and fashion, of how you looked rather than what you stood for and was full of pop stars rather than rock and rollers, people who only stood for what their manager or their sponsor told them to say. The older I grew the less likely it ever seemed that ‘Live Aid’ had ever happened – not least because it was never repeated and only released on something you could own as late as 2003 (a DVD – it’s never come out on VHS or blu-ray). Mostly though it seemed like it had never happened because, far from being a pioneer (itself picking up from George Harrison’s Bangla Desh gigs) it seemed the last time music was ‘for’ anything.

There was a time when things looked better for a while (I’m still amazed there was never a ‘Britpop’ era Live Aid, given how many songs are about community and solidarity amongst the suffering) and even flowered into ‘Live 8’, a 20^th anniversary show in 2005 where – good grief – even Pink Floyd put their very huger differences aside for the sake of the bigger picture(and as a thankyou to Bob Geldof for appearing in their wild film version of ‘The Wall’). It felt again as if we were going to get another string of these sorts of shows, to start a new century thinking of things from a global rather than a selfish perspective. But that too was an outlier: 2005 was when streaming started to take away the rock monsters with something to say and gave us pop midgets again. Recessions meant smaller record labels went under and bigger ones were too afraid to take risks. It became trendy to only care about one’s self all over again – this is the era of The Spice Girls kung-fu kicking Tramps, of reality TV stars too afraid of breaking their image, of ‘sequels’ to hits rather than rewarding bravery by letting an artist make what they want to make. The further we moved away from Live 8 the less likely it seemed that it had ever happened – never mind happened twice. Not least because it’s not available on anything official at all. And now here we are in 2025, in an era when music is as empty and soul-less and timid and pointless as it has ever been, when it’s a commodity to be listened to in a messy background jumble rather than the soundtrack to our lives. In an era when endless recessions and ridiculous political decisions (thanks David Cameron, the man responsible for most of the bad ones!) have brought us ever further to our knees and a Murdoch-controlled rightwing media have made those with little turn on those with nothing rather than those with everything. Ours is an era of rightwing trolls, of ‘fake news’, of a.i., where even the great achievements of the past are mocked and jeered at by people who have done nothing with their sad little lives (looking at you Neil Oliver and the half of G B News saying ‘Live Aid’ was all a ‘scam’! They should have repeated the carefully made 1986 film of where the money actually went, filmed for posterity to fight against exactly this sort of accusation).

It was against this backdrop that the BBC bravely repeated seven hours of highlights from the original ten hour ‘Live Aid’ show, together with a three hour documentary that covered both concerts and the (heartfelt but admittedly wretched) Band Aid single ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ The whole concert had been made with the promise that it was a once in a lifetime event that would never be repeated and indeed most of the performers who signed up had just that printed in their contract. So repeating it, maybe three-quarters complete, was a big deal. Perhaps less so those of us who bought the DVD (still raising money after all those years) which replicated almost all of it, but even then this new compilation  was specifically the BBC coverage rather than the entire show, so we got extra behind-the-scene interviews (skipped for the DVD) screened when parts of the world were in advert breaks. There were some fun bits I never knew existed: Paul Weller and Mick Talbot of ‘The Style Council’ taking turns to pretend to be talking deeply to DJ Janice Long while the other makes ‘bunny ears’ behind her back, Linda McCartney talking about what a good cause this was to a local DJ before being urgently ushered over to where her hubby was walking out on stage (to a sadly dead microphone, the biggest bungle of the night) and the memorable moment the camera cut away from David Bowie in full political flow to a ridiculously camp video of him singing ‘Dancing In the Streets’ with Mick Jagger. There were some musical surprises too: shockingly even though ‘Live Aid’ had the biggest single global audience since the moon landings no one station thought to record all of it (the same for both big events as it happens) so the DVD was cobbled together through a sort of basic working copy of the BBC version with a lot of un-catalogued ‘B’ reels of the American show bundled in a vault, along with snatches from German and Dutch broadcasters who added acts of their own. The DVD makes big play that it contained everything thought to exist, with lots of important stuff lost to the ether (not least what was long feared to be the last ever CSNY reunion with David Crosby performing on bail from a Texas prison and not in the best of health) – and yet some new performances turned up unheralded in the BBC coverage.

Even, gloriously, some AAA ones thought lost to the ether (and returned, most likely, from home taped copies after a request from the Beeb for tapes). There’s a minute burst of The Who doing ‘My Generation’ before their generator blew and the Beeb had to cut back to their hapless presenters, a full Neil Young performance of ‘Helpless’ that knocks socks off the two on the DVD (an out of place ‘Needle and the Damage Done’ and a wretched little-heard then-new patronising song ‘Nothing Is Perfect In God’s Perfect Plan’ about how Christians are great that makes ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ sound positively kind. After all Africa has more Christians per head of population than Britain or America, forty years ago or now, something Bob Geldof and Midge Ure hadn’t realised when they wrote it). While there were a lot of important songs missing from the compilation (The Who doing an emotional ‘Love Reign O’er Me’, Mick Jagger doing ‘Miss You’ – what a shame the Stones were in their ‘World War III’ period and refused to play together) practically every act who appeared on the night got one song in the compilation. Of course some weren’t there: alas Paul Simon, who was listed on the original poster, got dropped for not being a big enough name – a year before ‘Graceland’ proved he was on the pulse of world hunger better than anyone (they really should have made the concert longer). They even controversially ‘improved’ ‘Let It Be’ by boosting the half-heard McCartney vocal to a point where we could actually hear it (always an odd choice for the finale of the British show I always thought: the whole point of this show was not letting things ‘be’ but taking a stand). 

McCartney was requested to sing ‘Let It Be’ by Geldof himself – one of the new details we learned in the three part documentary film (the only request he made, other than people play their ‘hits’ where possible). Another was the fact that The Who only reunited because Bob promised they would in his big build up to the show without even talking to them first, leading a puzzled Daltrey and Townshend to phone each other and ask ‘We aren’t are we? Should we be?!’ The one thing the DVD was missing was a decent retrospective to show how difficult this show was to put together, so it was a welcome and overdue document with some nice bits of behind-the-scenes footage filling us in on all the trouble going on behind the scenes and how little help anyone in power was giving. This was a real ‘musicians putting their money where their mouth is moment, a blow by the individual standing up for the masses despite the rich and powerful trying to stop it and the documentary managed to prove both why it was so hard to do Live Aid never truly happened again but also absolutely why it should. I would have liked a lot more on the actual acts and less on the wretched ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’, but it was a decent stab at covering a lot of ground –including the sequels - in a short space of time without missing too much (though I’m shocked the Punk Floyd reunion at the second show wasn’t even mentioned). It was a brave stab too in places, questioning why there weren’t more black acts in a show about starving black children in Africa (causing ‘USA For Africa’ to make their own version of the band Aid single; Geldof claims there just weren’t enough British black musicians in the charts in 1985 and star power was everything which is only half true. A great loss Otis Redding wasn’t around of course, he’d surely have been first in the queue along with lots of other lost friends: John Lennon, Janis Joplin and Dennis Wilson – how odd to see The Beach Boys perform without him a mere 18 months on from his drowning. I still don’t know why The Moody Blues weren’t invited after scoring some of the biggest American hits of the 1980s, while alas it was one year out for Jefferson Starship who were trying to lose their hippie roots and were a few months away from the first of their free number ones as ‘Starship’). 

Overall watching it all again was a bittersweet night: of course there wasn’t a third Live Aid gig another twenty years on, for even if the earlier two had been outliers it seems more impossible than ever in 2025 that people would put their differences aside and spend time and money helping strangers. Predictably the rightwingers worshipping at the cult of Trump moaned throughout, talking about how seeing millionaires asking for money made them queasy (even though all performed without a fee and most gave money on top), that the money went to prop up military dictatorships (it didn’t) and that it didn’t end starvation and that as some people still died anyway they shouldn’t have bothered (ludicrous: it still saved so many). Some particularly daft ones praised Live Aid for being ‘non woke and political’, even though it surely is the biggest global version of ‘woke’ that ever existed (as in the original less defamatory term for ‘keeping one’s eyes open to injustice and unfairness). Those of us on the left wept for a time when people cared about people more than politics, when the world seemed united and we had hope that we could actually make a difference. But at least we had escapism for 10 hours (well ish: I took a lengthy bathroom break when Sting was on),before we had to turn the telly off and go back to our world of Trump, Starmer, the ongoing wars everywhere, the constant attacks on the disabled and continued ignorance of covid and the harm it’s doing worldwide and dreamed of a reality where ‘Live Aid’ really had changed the world the way the title promised properly, rather than for just the one day (maybe two).   

2)    Roger Waters “This Is Not A Drill: Live In Prague” (Film)

As well as competing with his old sparring partner David Gilmour, the Floyd bassist is also competing with his old self and a 1987 archive show released this year (see above). This newer show from 2023 shows how far Roger’s live shows have come, big on spectacle, forthright on politics and with a huge band behind him. Most of the time that works: this set was taped approximately halfway between the Capitol Hill riots and Trump getting re-elected and Roger is in fiery mood, openly mocking the Orange Monster and his cronies multiple times: ‘Pigs (Three Different Ones)’ has never sounded more personal or angry, ‘Sheep’ has never sounded more mocking, ‘Have A Cigar’ more sarcastic, ‘Us and Them’ more poignant. Like Gilmour this is a cleverly crafted set too: ‘Comfortably Numb’ is usually kept for the end of shows but here sets the tone from the beginning, a beacon of sanity as the bassist tries to cut through the numbness of modern life and dig into his outrage, while ‘Two Suns In The Sunset’ (a relative rarity from ‘The Final Cut’) about the launch of a nuclear war works well as the inevitable madness that follows ‘Brain Damage’ and ‘Eclipse’. The new-ish song ‘Déjà vu’ might just be the highlight though, Roger’s tearful comment on how we’re heading back to fascism and 1930s Germany , while ‘The Bravery Of being Out Of Range’ from 1992’s ‘Amused To Death’ only gets better and more relevant with age, sadly. The new song ‘The Bar’, split into two, is rather good too: its take on refugees trying to escape a war that Britain helped cause and finding sanctuary in their bombers’ land that has made it clear it doesn’t want them there is the quiet heart of the DVD, with just Roger a piano and the backing singers in contrast to the all-singing all-dancing spectacle of the rest of the show. For the most part it works well.

Occasionally though the shows tip a little too far from being a personal live concert to a political rally, especially when Roger gets onto his bug bears. They’ve cut a lot of the rambling down from the real live shows but there are still moments when Rog goes off on a tangent and seems to care more about the politics than the music. There are also quite a few moments when the band take over too, singing the old Gilmour parts; Roger’s always done this (it’s partly why his voice is still as strong as it is, because he doesn’t sing the full three ish hours of a show himself) but it’s becoming a bigger part of the gigs and in danger of pushing the frontman out. New boy Jonathan Wilson tries hard and in any other context would be great, but he’s no Doyle Bramhall III (Roger’s Gilmour foil from live shows past) never mind Gilmour himself. Also, with so many long slow songs packed together, it can get a bit static when played out on giant screens at the back of the arenas and the audience reaction has been cut to a minimum, leaving you feeling as if you’re watching a rehearsal. Overall this show doesn’t have the musical brilliance of ‘In The Flesh’ from a quarter century ago or the very moving remake of ‘The Wall’ (Roger’s last DVD) but it’s still a largely terrific, frequently brilliant souvenir of a tour that was big and bold and brave, a last gasp of sanity in a world that seems to have gone mad.  

3)    The Beatles “Anthology” (TV Series)

Nowadays every minor one-hit band seem to be getting their own documentaries on streaming channels (there was even one on flipping Mili Vanilli! Shock horror it was rather good) in an attempt for older bands to appeal to a whole new younger audience, so it’s only natural The Beatles should be getting in on the act. Only why sanction a new official documentary series when they already have one ready made from thirty years ago? The set has been largely out of print since coming out on blu-ray fifteen or so years ago too so it is about time to have it back out again, ‘re-mastered’ apparently though my old DVD set looks exactly the same. In many ways it’s inevitable. The fuss over the schmaltzy ‘Now and Then’ in 2023 (a record John would have hated and George certainly did) has brought up dusty memories of the last time three Beatles were in one room together in the mid-1990s and finally finishing off a project started in 1972 as ‘The Long and Winding Road’ before it was discovered by film-makers how much The Beatles really hated each other back then. I have real mixed feelings about this project: clearly there had to be a documentary about The Beatles and having all the Beatles themselves take place gives it an insight and gravitas lesser documentaries lack, while they all (even John in rare archive footage) gave titbits of things we’d not heard before. Such are the costs of licensing Beatles music this is the only DVD-era-plus way to see lots of key Beatle moments together and they really are fab: the Cavern footage of ‘Some Other Guy’, the Shea Stadium concert, videos for ‘Paperback Writer’ and ‘Rain’, the ‘One World’ All You Need Is Love’ concert,  some home movies from Rishikesh in 1968 and more news reels and interview footage than you could shake a cowbell at, all of which are glorious.

Unfortunately we don’t quite get them all: even the ‘extended’ video/DVD versions don’t have space for several key moments: you’d think Apple would have looked harder for a lot of the early footage on other shows (Ed Sullivan and Ready Steady Go! Owner Dave Clark hoard their clips like Noah in the flood, but there’s plenty of other stuff out there that hasn’t seen the official light of day in sixty years). As for the reminiscences, well: for every genuinely interesting anecdote from Paul, George or Ringo there’ll be an unfortunate Macca quote that’s actually quite mean, a Ringo platitude about how they loved each other even when the facts show otherwise and George hating every minute of being reminded of his Beatle past (he only agreed to this series after ‘Handmade Films’ fell into debt after his manager ran off with most of the cash). There’s a lot of insight into how it felt to be trapped in the room-train-concert stage cycle a la A Hard Day’s Night but not much about how it really felt to be a Beatle, what it was like to be recording some of the most famous songs of their generation, only the briefest glimpse into what was going on in their personal lives  (George having an affair with Ringo’s wife is surely as big a cause of their breakup as anything Yoko was up to) and practically nothing about their split. It was and is something of a wasted opportunity to tell the true story, though by sheer access to so much brilliant footage alone remains the definitive telling of the story over any of the unofficial ones Re-watching means forgetting the fact that we learned since that George was near penniless and did the project mostly for the money and hated every second of it, or that a lot of Paul and Ringo’s memories have since been disproven by Beatle archivists, or that John’s quotes were mostly taken out of context. It’s deeply flawed, horrendously biased, frequently wrong and skirts over all the controversies, but ‘Anthology’ still remains the best way of learning about this story and it does at least tell some of the story well  some of the time with some glorious footage. There are lots of talking heads no longer with us too sadly, like Neil Aspinall and Derek Taylor and George of course, so it’s good to have their takes on the fan four story on record as well.

If they’d have simply stuck the episodes out again this would be a mid-tier entry in this year’s list and that would be that. However…The versions of the episodes streaming on Disney aren’t the extended versions for the DVD sets. They’re not even the shorter versions broadcast on TV thirty years ago. Instead they’re edited versions which lose on average a quarter hour per episode, which adds up across the eight hours. Some of the decisions make a kind of sense: in these more sensitive times the tales of the Beatles being ‘forced’ to meet handicapped children or Paul and Pete best setting fire to a condom in ‘revenge’ for the Hamburg club kicking them out have been dropped, while Mark Lewisohn’s homework has proved some of the Beale memories so wide of the mark that they’ve been quietly edited out (which is a shame still: for a band like The Beatles what they represent is in so many ways more important than what they actually are). Others, though, are just weird: random small cuts that snip one line here or there and don’t change anything. Or moments that might not change the main story but were some of my favourites because of how ‘Human’ they were, such as Paul talking about how every time he sees a ukulele it reminds him of meeting John’s mum Julia, or Ringo’s sheer joy at getting the phonecall that he was about to be a Beatle. I get the argument that they’ve done this for a younger audience with shorter brain spans and the DVDs still exists but…why bother? For all the young Beatle fans I know more is better anyway and didn’t this same age group sit through eight hours of ‘Let It Be’ tapes perfectly happily? Honestly I think they lost an opportunity to extend these episodes, to go back and put complete footage in from the ‘Blackpool’ ‘Shea Stadium’ and ‘Rooftop’ concerts as well as all the juicy footage that’s come to light in the past thirty years, to make the ‘definitive’ story even more definitive. Once again it feels as if Apple just want people to have a taster so they fork out money for the ‘complete’ DVD. As with the CDs, it all seems very mean-spirited and not very Beatlesy.

But what about the ‘new’ episode nine, I hear you ask? Oh dear. It is, to put it kindly, a desperate cash cow to get even fans who own the original set to tune in, even though 75% of it turned up on the extras on the DVD box and the other 25% is near worthless. Sadly it’s not a way of adding unseen footage missing from the originals or new insights from Paul and Ringo thirty years on. Instead it’s a loose documentary about the making of Anthology and the three ‘new’ songs ‘Free As A Bird ‘Real Love’ and ‘Now and Then’. These are nice clips to see, not least because George’s death six years later meant this is the last time the three of them were in the same room together. However it’s clear why this stuff didn’t make the original TV broadcast: George is visibly hating every minute and the banter between the three of them is decidedly frosty still at times (‘Did you write anything in India George? Apparently not…’ says Paul, ticked off that Harrison only has eyes for his ukulele at one point while George barely looks at the other two and spends more time checking out his watch. There’s also the famous moment he stops George Martin to ask what album ‘You Never Give Mon because he can’t remember!) It feels very like the ‘Get Back’ three-part documentary actually: a band who used to be closer than close who have gone their separate ways so far they can barely tolerate being in the same room together and feel they have little in common. You almost wish you hadn’t seen it: especially if you skip a few chapters and come to the ‘new’ episode after one of the early episodes. The best parts are the unscripted ones where the threesome seem to forget the cameras are running and are talking like it’s a school reunion with lots of ‘do you remembers?’ and busking of half-remembered songs (why oh why isn’t ‘Dehra Dunn’, the song George strums here but actually finished in 1969 and still not officially released yet, not on Anthology 4? It’s a lost masterpiece). You do get to see more of the threesome working on ‘Now and Then’ than was seen on the DVD, but nobody is working on it terribly hard and you don’t really learn a lot. Then there are the three music videos for the three reunion songs; at least the ‘Now and Then’ music video is on something official now (I seem to be alone in thinking it’s my favourite of the three, though the song itself is hands down the worst thing ever released under the Beatle name). Honestly that’s the only real reason to watch: far from a fascinating insight into three friends having fun it’s just a reminder of how much three guys who once really loved each other now struggle to connect over anything.

For fans who’ve come along in the thirty years since ‘Anthology’ then it’s nevertheless well worth your time and you’ll get a lot from it. Those of us who already went through this rollercoaster ride once though? There’s really not enough reason to get back on this Magical Mystery Tour, especially when we know that the destination is only half worth getting there. Meet you back here for ‘Anthology episode ten’ in another thirty years, about the desperation backstage in trying to make The Beatles relevant to a new generation all over again while filling up bank balances. I doubt that will make for interesting viewing either.

 

And that’s that for another year. My pile for 2026 is already filling up (the long awaited Gene Parsons box set looks great and there’s talk about all sorts of juicy new albums on the way!) so even though it was far from a classic the future looks bright. I know things are hard out there right now but hang in there, keep your head up as high as you can without your headphones falling off and we will get through it somehow. Till then a very happy and musical Christmas to all my readers and may you all have a joyous new year!