Utrecht International Record Fair 2016

I have seen adverts for the Utretcht International Record Fair for a few years now and always wondered what it would be like to see it for myself. I live in the UK, so getting there wouldn't be that difficult, but I'm far away from being a comfortable seasoned traveller. This is not helped by the fact that I have one of the greatest disadvantages of being English. That means I belong to a country where the language is spoken nearly the world over and so, many English people, myself included, don't ever feel the need to even try and speak another language. Don't get me wrong, speaking other languages gives a person great confidence and potential, but my problem, apart from being English and being awfully lazy as well, is that I'm just not cut out for languages at all. I can barely master English (as many of you readers may well be aware of) so I'm awful at other languages. This doesn't help one's confidence when planning to go abroad. I personally would think it ignorant if someone talked to me in England in another langauge and just expected me to understand them and help them. So I think it's ignorant of me to be the same abroad. But then, if I had to learn another language to go abroad, I simply wouldn't travel. So I drag my ignorant arse around other people's countries with no attempt at the local languages. This makes me ashamed to be so ignorant and lazy, which puts me off travelling. Thankfully I have a wife that isn't so ignorant, so she drags my sorry ass to places I wouldn't dare to go myself, because I'm pathetic!!

This holiday was supposed to be different. I really wanted to see if the International Record fair would restore my faith in record fairs in general and in the traders as well, after all it should be the pinnacle in record buying. So I talked about it with my wife, who said I should go. As usual, the idea excited me no end, but the prospect of dragging my ignorant arse across Europe quashed that excitement harshly. I know the rest of the world probably think that most British people are drunk, inconsiderate twats when abroad and so most foreigners expectations are likely considerably low anyway, but I have a problem with re-enforcing negative stereotypes. I like to think that as a person with strange dress sense and an alternative view on life, it's a life bonus to hit people that have a stereotype with a persona of intelligence and moral fibre (rarely found in many walks of life). I don't care what people think of me, I do care what I would think of me if I bumped into myself on the street. My wife says I think too much....which was the whole problem, I was going to go, then I talked myself out of it, then changed my mind again, then decided against it.

After a couple of months fighting with myself over the decision to go, my wonderful wife offered to go with me and just get the thing booked. So we did.

The flight only took an hour to Amsterdam. We booked a hotel in Utrecht right next to the train station, which was actually reasonably priced for it's location and was only a stone's throw away from the location of the record fair as well. The trains from Amsterdam Airport to Utrecht are every 15 minutes and it takes about 30 minutes travel time. We took out extra luggage space for the flight, just in case I found loads of stuff at the fair and needed to bring all that heavy vinyl back in a suitcase ( only hand luggage was included in the flight price). I had no idea if I would return empty handed or packed to the gills with so much stuff that I would be overweight at the airport check in on the way back....I had no clue if this fair would be the same as all the other UK fairs and be a total disapointment, but just bigger, or be an absolute delight.

The fair runs over two days, Saturday and Sunday. If the pickings were amazing, I may do both days, if they weren't, I may be going crazy by lunch time. We booked 4 nights at the hotel, so if my worst fears were realised we would still have time to look around Utrecht and even Amsterdam. Besides which, Holland has so many record shops, surely the backup of those may rescue an otherwise disastrous trip. There was plenty to do otherwise. So I booked tickets just for the Saturday in advance, that way if the fair was awful, at least I wouldn't have wasted a weekend ticket. If the fair was unbelievably good, I could still go on the Sunday as well and buy a ticket on the door. The tickets where about 12 Euro's each for one day and the weekend ticket wasn't much cheaper than buying the two days individually. There are supposed to be around 500 stall holders, but I have seen this before where exagerations border on complete lies.

The most difficult thing about the trip would be inconsideratly dragging a bored wife around with me for 5 days. Usually when my wife books a holiday, I remain totally ambivalent to the prospect, even right up to the day itself. This is mostly becuause of the reasons explained earlier and also becasue of the uncertainty that usually goes with a holiday. I like to know what to expect and have every scenario covered, which when it comes to holidays abroad is just unreasonable and impossible. This time, although there were still so many unknowns about this trip, I was excited and my wife was completly non-plussed. Once we got on the way to the airport though, we had everything planned and discussed beforehand. I just bought the Saturday tickets for us both with the option of doing Sunday if needed. I printed off a booklet of my 4AD collection from Discogs and also another booklet of my wantlist from Discogs too. The plan was for me to hunt through the records on each stall and when I found something that had potential, my wife would look the item up on my list. That would keep us both involved and hopefully try and minimise her boredom. She took her kindle book reader anyway just in case.

We arrived in Utrecht on the Friday afternoon and booked into the Hotel NH Utrecht, a surpisingly nice hotel. We had a tip to get a room as far up as possible as recent renovations had started at the top of the tower and worked down. The room was wonderful on the 15th floor and had an amazing view over the south of the city. After settling in we went out into the city to get something to eat. The Utrecht Centraal train station has quite a few fast food eateries that open quite late. The city centre canal has quite a selection of places to eat. We wanted to find some traditional Dutch food, but found that difficult to find. Instead, like in the UK, there were loads of Italian, Indian, Turkish and Greek restaurants and after a long day we just settled for an Indian, which was wonderful. While in there waiting for our food to arrive, two men just finishing and leaving the restuarant asked me if I was a trader at the fair, he thought he recognised me. They were traders themselves and like many we bumped into over the weekend, especially at the hotel, they had set up that day ready for the weekend.

The fair opens at 9am on Saturday. I planned to get there early to maximise the day, although I had read a review of previous fairs that told me that the Saturday is for enthusiastic collectors and Saturday morning brings the highest prices. Sunday tends to be cut price attempting to lure the passer by rather than the avid collector.

There is a map of the trade hall showing the hundreds of traders and who they are and which pitches they hold. Each one also has a small description of what they sell, if they bother to tell you. From those I put together a battle plan of the most likely top targets to hit first. There is a whole section in the fair devoted to Metal / Punk / New Wave, but the list of best potentials seemed to be all over the place. At least I had a plan, which was a start, which gave me a zig zag through the floor and at least gave me a focus to start on.

Although the fair is advertised as being held at Jaarbeurs which looked on a map to be part of the Beatrix Theatre, in fact it's accross the road and is a massive exhibition centre. On the Saturday morning after a quick breakfast stop in the train station, we made our way to the exhibition centre. I wasn't sure how many people would be lined up at the entrance at the opening time and I even wondered if it would be best to hit the fair a little later to miss any initial rush. There were streams of people walking their way to the entrance, strangely a mix of all sorts of people. This mixture made me wonder if we were going the right way as a 50/50 gender mix is not the record fair norm at all. When we got in I realised why. The entrance queue moved pretty quickly as the tickets were all printed barcodes which got the public through pretty fast. Once zapped in, I was all ready to go, trader map in hand. But in front of us was a massive hall of antique traders. As far as the eye could see, there were tables of bronze and old wood. I remembered another review of the fair which talked about getting past the other halls of traders, non music related. We moved into another hall and the antigues had turned into comics and movie collectables. We couldn't find any music at all, just hundreds of traders and people looking at "vintage" collectables. Out of the corner of my eye I could see a yellow sign that stood over a stall which said "45's". As we neared the sign, the next hall showed a mixture of scruffy looking and poorly labelled traders selling cheap vinyl mixed with other souvineer stalls, this still wasn't the fair I was looking for. Through into another hall there was a half empty expanse and I thought that this would be it. There were a buch of food traders selling allsorts of fast food and more cheap vinyl traders that looked like the records had seen too many poor days. Through the food retailers though was another hall, filled with lots of vinyl traders covered in banners and hanging "eye catchers" as their backdrops.

My poor wife, I was really concerned with the hell I was going to put her through for the next few hours, but she had a brave face on and we started to tuck in. The first stall was just on the outside of the main hall and looked sparse. The guy with his missus behind the counter was wearing a leather jacket and looked like a full on metal rocker and his stall was half empty. When a trader lays out his stock flat on the table, he hasn't got much to sell. That stall didn't last long, onto the next one. The hardest thing moving from one planned stall to another was closing my eyes to the draw of signs such as "New Wave" and "Alternative" sections on other stalls. I was determined to stick to my plan and get to the what I thought was the most likely best hitters.

After the third or fourth stall and finding they had practically nothing of what they had advertised as having and nearly a half hour of finding nothing even close to any 4AD stuff on sale, I started to get frustrated and pulled away from my plan by the section signs on other traders stalls. The problem with the fair is getting lost if you randomly have no method of going through the stall holders. I should have crossed off the ones I had visited as after an hour, I couldn't remember which stalls I had been through already. I'm usually not lost easily and I'm well coordinated, yet already I was struggling. I think just starting at one end and working a way through may seem a logical way to hit the rows one after the other, but that just may take a week to work your way through. The size of the fair just can't be under estimated, it's fucking huge!

After about an hour and half way through my list, I still hadn't bought a thing. I have talked before about how easy it is to recognise early if you are onto a winner. If there are no Cocteau Twins or Pixies, there's every chance that you won't find anything else. I had found practically nothing and was suprised that I hadn't bumped into any Cocteau Twins at all, anywhere. I had on my list a reminder to drop in on the Discogs stall and simply just thank them for a great site. With all the problems that I do have with Discogs, next to what I had before, which was an annoying Excel spreadsheet, it's an absolute godsend of a site. I turned up to the Discogs stall still empty handed. A lovel lady greeted me and asked if I had used Discogs. Of course I had to tell her how much I liked Discogs and also how much it also annoyed me as well, particularly the online snobbery of some of it's ardent users. She asked me to get in touch with her about any behaviour, but you can't stop people being gits online, otherwise there would be practically no-one on the internet. She left me her card and gave me a free vinyl carrier and some Discogs stickers. It was good to put a personal face to Discogs.

After a quick loo break, I finally bought an item. I was off finally after nearly two hours of nothing. There were quite a few items over the next few stalls that I already had. I was purposefully avoiding the UK stalls as I have practically everything on UK releases. It was amazing how easily I could spot a UK stall without talking to the trader or looking at the trading sign above the stall. Every UK trader had the same predictable stuff that I trawl through when at home at record fairs. There was more than once when I got halfway through a box and said "I think this is a UK stall" and lo and behold it would be.

In the centre of the Metal / Punk / New Wave section of the fair was an amazing trader that sold tons of Dark Wave, Industrial and Goth stuff. In there was the first Dead Can Dance stuff I had found as well as loads of cool stuff, unfortunately all ridiculously priced. There were a couple of Love Is Colder Than Death vinyl LP's both of which were priced at over 100 Euros each. The stall also had a Dead Can Dance picture disc, a bootleg, but a nice one. At first I thought the 20 Euro asking price was too much, but I changed my mind later in the day and by then it was gone. That's a lesson right there, if you see something and you are thinking twice about getting it, then just get it, because it may well be gone before long.

One other great stall was a Japanese owned stall of just Japanese releases. I got a Cocteau Twins and a This Mortal Coil releases from there. A lot cheaper than getting them posted from Japan. That stall also had good quality releases and all labeled very clearly. It was one of the best laid out stalls in the entire fair, very professional. By lunchtime we had resorted to just going up and down each aisle and picking out any New Wave or Indie section. The vast majority had absolutely nothing at all. Overall it was very surprising how few pickings there was. I still think that the main vinyl collecting market is still stuck in the sixties and seventies.

At lunchtime we pigged out on a disgustingly sickly waffle which just dripped with fat and sugar but filled a hole for a few hours. By the end of the day, this is what we had picked up :

The Breeders - Pod (4AD, Rough Trade - RTD 168) LP,
Cocteau Twins - Echoes In A Shallow Bay (Virgin, 4AD - 15VB-1064, BAD 511) 12"
Colin Newman - A-Z (Beggars Banquet - BEGA 20) LP,
Colin Newman - Provisionally Entitled The Singing Fish (CNR Records, CNR Records - 656 010, 656010) LP,
Colour Box - Breakdown (Second Version) (4AD, Megadisc - BAD 304, VR 22633) 12"
Dead Can Dance - Spleen And Ideal (DG Discos - DG-219) LP,
Modern English - After The Snow (Expanded Music - EX 28) LP,
Pixies - Monkey Gone To Heaven (Rough Trade, 4AD - RTD 052T, M1-266) 12"
Pixies - Surfer Rosa (4AD - VG 50372) LP,
Pixies - Surfer Rosa (4AD, 4AD, Rough Trade, Rough Trade - MD 7917, RTD 72) LP,
This Mortal Coil - Filigree & Shadow (Virgin - 60047) 2xLP,
This Mortal Coil - It'll End In Tears (4AD - YQ-7045) LP,
Various - Doctor Death's Volume I - Cette Enfant Me Fia Mourir (C'est La Mort - CLM001) LP,
Various - Lonely Is An Eyesore (DG Discos - DG-214)

...and also a non 4AD release I had on my wantlist, an LP I have been after for a while and is hilarious. 

Bad News (3) - Bad News (EMI, EMI - EMC 3535, 74 8310 1) LP,

My verdict on the Utrecht International Record Fair? It left me slightly warm. It was huge, there was a massive amount of vinyl on offer, but out of all that vinyl there small pickings from the 900 items I have on my wantlist. Record traders seem to be an internationally poorly organised set of beasts with a crazy variation of prices. There were a couple of items I already had that were priced in the range of a hundred Euros that just weren't worth that kind of money. Maybe on the Sunday they would have gone down in price, but after a full eight hours of searching, I was knackered and didn't fancy starting to rifle through A-Z boxes with all mixed genres in a hope of having a small amount of luck. My wonderful wife was also extremely knackered as well and hadn't moaned once all day. If it had been the other way around, I would have struggled to have been that patient and supportive. I am a lucky sod really.

I think I would go again. I would probably go row by row next time and pick out the labelled boxes on each stall. I may even confine myself to a Sunday to see if the prices are any better, although the pickings may be even slimmer by then as well.

Deciding not to go back on Sunday, gave us two days in Holland to do a spot of sight seeing. Utrecht is a wonderful place and well worth a visit. On the Monday we made a train ride to Amsterdam which in contrast is too busy and filthy next to the cleanliness of Utrecht (maybe because of all the drunk and stoned Brits that visit Amsterdam). There was always going to be an element of record shopping that had to be done when in Holland and the record fair just wasn't enough. So once again I dragged my poor wife around Amsterdam looking for what one website called the best record shops in Amsterdam. After hours once again spent looking through records, I finished with just one purchase :

The Birthday Party - Prayers On Fire (4AD, CNR Records - 656.009) LP, 

By Monday afternoon both my wife and I had had enough of records and went around Amsterdam on a boat trip trying not to waste our tour money by falling asleep in our seats. 

The whole experience was absolutely knackering. It was great to get home and get some rest. It's hard to know if it was all worth it for just 16 records. I suppose it beats doing it all online and I got to see some of Holland as well. Utrecht is a great city.

On a final footnote, if you ever go to a large fair such as this, take some hand cleansing gel with you. Once back home, I noticed that both my eyes had started with infections and it was only at that point I realised that I was handling goods that hundreds of other people had also rifled through. A good anti bacterial cleanser used occasionally may be a good idea.

Thanks for reading and sorry for taking so long once again to add a post. I will once again endeavour to make an effort and keep posting

Album Listening Clubs...Somebody set one up please

I very much like the thought of a new concept that has been sweeping the music world these last couple of years. It involves getting a group of like minded people together, which means lovers of music, not any genre specific grouping and devoting the evening to playing a couple of albums in their entirety and without interruption. The choice of album played is decided by an attendee in advance and there are strict rules applied about respecting the music and listening to it without talking, without other distractions and solely devoting attention to the album being played. Some clubs are taking this a little further and playing only vinyl, on top quality record players and amps.

I love this idea. It's unfortunate these days that the majority of people don't devote time to listening to music without any other distraction. I find myself listening to music when I can fit it in, while driving the car mostly, which is a real shame. When I was younger, I had a lot more respect for music and devoted more time to listening to it. I would decide in an evening that the TV wasn't going to be switched on, loads of incense would get burned and fill the room, the lighting would be dimmed and I would just listen to the music while at most studying the album sleeve and contents. When you listen to music that way, one studies the intricacies, the twists, turns and little nuances that make up the whole palette that otherwise would be missed. Also an album is put together without distraction. An artist doesn't record an album while watching the television at the same time or doesn't record vocals while driving down the motorway. All the structure of an album is also carefully thought out and put together as a single piece of artwork with a specific running order. Listening to it in any other way, other than with total attention and in proper running order is missing the point I suppose. We can't say we have seen a Rosetti painting if we just saw little close ups occasionally or if we saw a black and white photocopy from a magazine.

The idea of these book club style album listening groups just sound like the very thing for me. I love to listen to other peoples music (as long as it's an educated taste) and this kind of arrangement gets you listening to music that you may not naturally veer towards. Unfortunately, nobody for miles and miles around is doing anything like this at the moment. Yes, yes, I can hear you say "so why don't you do something yourself". I'm one of those sort of people that comes up with ideas, but for some reason has no idea how to execute them. In the past I've tried a couple of alternative music club nights myself with a couple of friends which died a death. I just don't understand people in the main, so when it comes to getting people together, I fall flat on my face. In my head I'm a leader, in reality I'm a loner with daft ideas, like this collecting crusade I suppose. I don't drink and I look like most younger people's dad nowadays, and because of that have no interest in dancing. If an evening doesn't involve drinking or dancing, that's 99.9 percent of the population disinterested.

If only the "build it and they will come" dream would work in that scenario, but I'm too realistic to realise that it wouldn't.

What started this train of thought? I spent last Tuesday evening, with myself and the dog listening to Dead Can Dance's two albums Within the Realm Of a Dying Sun and Spleen and Ideal, on vinyl, with the mood lights on, incense burning and no interruptions and it was fantastic. My problem when experiencing something wonderful on my own, is the pity I feel for those missing out on such an experience. But then you can't force anyone to appreciate something wonderful.

I am surprised when looking at the Album Listening clubs around the world, how many 4AD albums spring up such as This Mortal Coil or Pixies, mixed with the obvious classics such as Beatles, Stones, Zeppelin and Bowie. It just shows the influence of 4AD worldwide, punching far above it's weight.

Well the sabbatical month of April is well behind me and the collecting has carried on where it had left off. I picked up a nice Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgare CD recently. I hope soon that I can get everything on a many variants release. Some of the Dead Can Dance or This mortal Coil releases have tens of variants and would be good to show. Maybe sometime soon. For now thanks for reading

What colour is a lazy streak?

So what is happening of late. Well I went through a spate for a short time of finding lots of collection pieces on Ebay for a very reasonable price. For two weeks I was struggling to keep up with the flow of reasonable priced items on offer, and then with a bump just stopped. This wasn't from a single source but from all over the place, from the UK, from Europe and even from the US with a decent postage amount. Why the sudden peak of items and then hardly anything again, I have no idea.

Needless to say that my usual roller-coaster ride of interest and then general annoyance with myself and this stupid idea of doing this collection has made it's usual route of peaks and troughs. At the moment I'm in-between moods. Trying to persuade myself what a wonderful thing it is to collect such wonderful music and respect such great artists and then thinking that perhaps I should be slapping myself around the back of the head with a very large wet haddock for taking such a journey on in the first place.

I'm generally a lazy person. Being lazy and sitting on my fat arse is the major default setting for me. After being at work all day, the ONLY thing I want to do when I get home is sit in a nice comfy chair. Perhaps I may be persuaded to switch the TV on, maybe I will browse the interweb, but mostly it's pastimes that involve sitting. I reckon my brain also has the same desire. My brain also goes to work all day and wants to just go home and relax in a bowl of comfy warm mush. Even while writing this, my brain has had enough of working for the day and wants to just do as little as possible. That's not actually easy for me, I have a brain that never shuts up or winds down, I'm mentally on the go all the time, so my brain also nags me to just slow down a little by doing as little as possible. This of course includes doing this blog, or updating facebook, or joining in on a forum I'm a member of and, of course, all the other things I want to do generally in my life, such as sending an email to a friend and just staying in touch.

So now that I've put myself through a bought of flagellation and got my brain in gear (but still with fat arse firmly planted on sofa leather), what have I accomplished or found out since I last posted so very long ago. Well in the news......is the soon to be released 4AD book by journalist Martin Aston. Called "Facing the Other Way, the Story of 4AD". Set to be released on September 26th 2013, it will be the first official account of the label we love. Focusing on mostly the first 20 years of 4AD's history, it has the prestigious boast of having the cover designed by Vaughan Oliver and will also be available as a limited edition with 2 CD's of some of the labels musical history. Info here : 

As a warning to all those looking to try and pre-order the the book, be aware that Amazon do not have copies of the limited edition on order to sell to pre-orders made on Amazon. Amazon may get some copies if the publishers don't sell all the limited editions and have some left to pass on. I fell into this trap with Amazon before when they list something they may likely never get their hands on......so buyers beware.

On a slightly different note, I've started to notice a pattern of reprints of cassettes. I say reprints because they are not official re-releases, but an obvious sign that the originally made stock has run out and new batches of cassettes manufactured. Cassettes are really easy to spot because of the change in cassette design during the eighties. In the early eighties, cassettes were solid colour plastic, usually white or black, occasionally other funky colours to match the general colour of the album design but the coloured ones are much more rare. By the mid eighties though, a new fashion for seeing the workings of a mechanical object became desirable, the watch makers Swatch being one of the trendier items that everyone wanted which showed the gears and workings of the watch behind garish cheap clear plastic.

Cassette manufacturers such as TDK followed this fashion through, showing the tape wound up on the spools through clear plastic. Pretty soon, you couldn't get a cassette tape that wasn't trendy and see through and I suspect that 4AD had the same issue when ordering new stock. So there are distinct and obvious signs of a reprint of early eighties releases on cassette. This Mortal coil and Cocteau Twins albums are the first that I've noticed and I'm sure there will be more to be found.

So if you are interested in getting original cassettes for early eighties albums, stick to the solid colour plastics and not the clear.

Dead Can Dance Live with Love

There is only one thing I can think of at the moment to write about. My problem is that my feeble use of the English language is insufficient to describe the event with any of the colour that it richly deserves.


Last week my wife and I saw Dead Can Dance on their world tour at the Royal Albert Hall. I was very fortunate to have been able to sit on the telephone the day the tickets went on sale and got 2nd row tickets. I have never been to the Royal Albert Hall, which is a wonderful and very impressive venue. I had wondered if, because of the special venue, we may have been in for an even more impressive concert with Dead Can Dance being backed up by a small orchestra. But I can understand why this wasn’t done. Dead Can Dance would have had to have taken weeks out of the tour to prepare and practice for such a one off special and they are in the middle of a gruelling world tour.

I had seen Dead Can Dance when they last toured in 2005. We had just managed to get tickets for that concert and were right at the very back of the venue. So we were determined this time to try and better that. Even then though, stuck right at the back of the venue, the concert was awesome and an experience like no other concert I had experienced before. The only problem with that night was people getting out to take phones calls or the call of nature after having drunk too much beforehand, which was just annoying when being caught up in the atmosphere only to have it crash down by someone’s bottom shuffling in front of you a few times through the set. 

This time we had the chance to be properly involved in the atmosphere. 

We also saw Lisa Gerrard, one half of Dead Can Dance, doing her own concert a couple of years later for the Silver Tree tour. The incredible atmosphere created at that concert was the single most electrifying experience of my life, and to prove that it was not just myself imagining this experience, my wife was also very moved and judging by the tears in the audience that evening, the rest of the venue felt it too. 

But before trying to explain what a Dead Can Dance concert is like, let me first get off my chest how easily an experience like this can be ruined. I’m really starting to get fed up with concert goers that are completely selfish and ruin an experience for others. First of all there are the talkers, that have spent good money, the same as everyone else, to see an artist perform, and then spend nearly the whole time talking through it. I can sort of understand this at a live gig at an already established club night, where a proportion of the folk that are at the gig are there for the club night and not specifically there to see the artist, but when it’s a dedicated evening just to see the artist, it’s damned selfish and extremely ignorant to ruin someone else’s experience by having a catch up or general chit chat all the way through a performance. 

The other annoyance I find happening more frequently is mobile phone video recording. These people really wind me up. Masses of phone screens held up in front of you, blocking the site of the artist you have come and paid money to see, by selfish idiots that want to be able to put a poor quality, terrible sounding, crap piece of video footage on You Tube. What I don’t get with these people is the fact that they don’t realise that the time they waste recording this naff video and watching a tiny video screen instead of watching the actual artist, they have missed the experience, and the experience certainly hasn’t been captured on a wobbly out of focus video with a scratchy soundtrack!

Fortunately for us these issues were not present from the incredible seats we had at the front. But I have heard of other folk having these issues, which is quite upsetting for these people that have paid the same money to gain an experience ruined by the selfishness of others. I also heard that one of the Royal Albert Hall’s PA speakers was crackling, obviously broken.  Personally I would ask for my money back from the Royal Albert Hall if that was the case, from such a venue, I would only expect perfection in sound quality. So if you were affected by the crackling speaker, demand some money back!

The concert however, was an absolute treat. There had been strange forum user rumours that Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry didn’t seemed gelled or collaborative, but from my position, I thought they worked happily together. The new album certainly harks back to days when they worked together rather than just contributed their own tracks to an album. Brendan Perry played along with a couple of Lisa’s own solo songs instead of just sitting back and letting Lisa do her own thing. The only unusual vibe I picked up from Brendan was his frustration of getting everything absolutely right, he seems to be a perfectionist, which I can relate to. I have song writing ability, but a lack of musicianship which creates frustration against oneself. I could see this in Brendan, he composes great songs, but his technical ability next to the incredible session musicians Dead Can Dance always use most likely puts an unnecessary personal strain on proceedings. 

Having said that, there was barely a note wrong all evening. 

How do I describe a Dead Can Dance concert to the layman? This was not just a concert where the audience sings along and claps to a lovely tune, neither is a concert to stand up and strut your stuff to. Instead, at a Dead Can Dance concert, the atmosphere builds from the artists on stage out to the audience, creating a hypnotic rhythm that then sends waves of love and tenderness around the auditorium. This may sound a very hippy and silly thing to describe just a concert in such a way, but the evening started out like any other concert and by the end had the whole venue crying, for many people quite literally, including myself. 

Both artists project this love and tenderness, but the more accessible emotion emanates from Lisa Gerrard. Her piercing and beautiful voice hits you with such power, force and beauty that within minutes your heart feels as though it will explode. Brendan Perry’s power comes more from his music than his voice. Although his voice has its own tenderness, he seems to really know and get the power from the combination of rhythm and strong padded yet simple keyboard strokes. This is done simply and hypnotically even though the time signatures are sometimes very complicated. 

Dead Can Dance performed the songs from their new album which sat perfectly with the other older songs dropped in, some from Lisa Gerrard’s solo material, an old Greek song, a song Dead Can Dance did for This Mortal Coil and Brendan Perry performed Song To The Siren, a Tim Buckley song that This Mortal Coil successfully covered. After this barrage of love, tenderness and emotion thrown headlong at the audience, none of us wanted them to leave and have the experience over and done, which was cause for several encores. The last encore which looked slightly unprepared, I thought was improvised, as it was just a keyboard player and Lisa and I didn’t recognise the song and Lisa does improvise very well. Whatever the song was, it was a final blast of beauty driven headlong around the marvellous Royal Albert Hall. It was an incredible end to a wonderful show that left me personally emotionally exhausted. 

Coming away from an experience such as this, I find myself bemused and bewildered by how anyone cannot “get this”, how someone that loves music doesn’t really get caught up in the way that most of the audience and myself did. I have to feel sorry for the vast majority of music lovers in Britain that missed out on this experience and even worse don’t comprehend what they missed out on. 

I keep going back to my crisp analogy, how do you convey to someone that has a complete diet of just crisps, what a Malaysian Massaman curry tastes like and convince them of what they are missing out on.

http://4adfirstdecade.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/if-music-be-food-of-life-give-me-pizza.html

Or even worse taste it and don’t like it….

Oh well, at least this way we can feel like Dead Can Dance are our own personal and exclusive blanket of love and affection. So what if everyone doesn’t “get it”, Dead Can Dance are ours, and love ‘em to bits.

4AD Top Ten Albums

So after I gave you my all time top ten albums, you lucky people, I thought I would share the pick of my top ten 4AD albums. In rough order of release, these are the albums that have led me to want to collect 4AD. They show a great diversity of style for release from the same label.

So here goes -

Bauhaus - In the Flat Field

One of the enjoyments I get from music, is finding something different, something new that is totally different to anything I have heard before. Most of these albums did that for me. I discovered Bauhaus in the late eighties, by which time they had completely gone as a band and split into their separate projects. The first Bauhaus album I discovered was Mask. Mask was led by David J’s bass, a sound at the time I was obsessed with. Bauhaus did it differently to everyone else though. In time I appreciated this debut album more than Mask. It has an eccentrically English feel to it, unhinged and steeped in a old world of perversion behind closed doors. Steampunk?

The Birthday Party - Junkyard

Junkyard hurt your ears. It was loud, unapologetic, raw, and wonderfully disjointed. The birthday party were a rip off of The Pop Group, but took the idea further. In a similar way to Siouxsie Sioux’s vocals, all the instruments sounded out of tune and yet together somehow worked. It sounded ,on first passing, as though a bunch of 5 year olds were playing punk, until you notice interesting time signatures, mad silences, and complicated runs. The more you listen, the more you enjoy and love hating it at the same time.

Clan of Xymox - Medusa

Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares - Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares (Volume 1)

I started listening to this only recently as I continued to pick up more pieces to the collection. Two things seem amazing about this album. On the first few plays, you can hear some of the sounds that must have influenced Lisa Gerrard as she heard the folk music of many cultures as she grew up. The second surprise is the picture that forms in your head of the quite young choral singers that must be making up this choir, the voices sound so youthful and alive. I got quite a shock to see the photo’s of the general choir member, generally middle aged and showing faces of wisdom and experience. Hardly the angelic innocence that washes over you as a listener. You can only be impressed that this sound is the countries folk music. It’s a reflection of the geographic place Bulgaria finds itself, stuck between East and West mixed with Baltic influences with a disregard for the 12 note western standard.

Various - Lonely is an Eyesore

This album is a 4AD legend. It nicely wrapped up 4AD at a point just before the introduction of a new direction for 4AD with the signing of The Pixies. The whole album flows like a concept piece, which is remarkable to say each artist is different in their own way and yet the album feels as though it keeps a constant theme running through it. It changes mood from a sampled covered opening track from Colourbox which wakes you up and pulls you straight in into This Mortal Coil’s mellow Acid, Bitter and Sad. Yet the transition seems seamless. The Colourbox track may be brash, but it still retains enough calm within it to allow This Mortal Coil to follow. This sums up the whole album, nothing is out of place. This also came in several formats, the original LP had a wallet like sleeve, with all the 4AD releases so far, listed on the inside with a key as to whether still available or deleted. There was also a limited edition release, which had a 4 sleeve foldout inner and 12” colour book all in a card box sleeve. Then there was the ultimate 4AD release, some would say, a wooden box version of the album. Limited to 100 copies, 70 of which were given to 4AD band members, staff and the like and only 30 sold to the general public. This was a wooden box containing the LP, cassette, CD and video of the album, along with individual pieces of artwork unique to every box.

Lush - Scar

This was only a mini-album, but still an eye-opener for me. At the time, Indie music was taking off in a big way in the UK and hidden within this surge was a style called shoegazing. I personally never liked the shoegazing scene. For me it had too much of a fixation with the beat generation of the sixties, which never did anything for me, yes, even the Beatles. Although Lush were kind of lumped in with the rest of the shoegazing crowd, I heard something strangely new. This was the first time I had heard loud fast guitar music mellowed with a soft slow and sensual female vocal floating along the top of the white noise. There was also a track called Etherial, and to me this title summed up the music completely. Now the term Ethereal is used to describe even Dead Can Dance, which I still class as world music. Ethereal still conjures up for me what Lush introduced me to, the musical battle of noise and angelic harmony. They never did this again and got sidetracked into Britpop

Pixies - Doolittle

In 1990 in the UK, everyone was going Pixies mad. This was their fourth album, but this one got them a lot of attention in the UK. I had never heard anything like this before, it was completely new, had a sexual depravity akin to Bauhaus and was also mentally unhinged. Doolittle was a revolution in music for me like punk was more than a decade before, yet it took nearly two decades for everyone to slowly realise it. When you heard Nirvana a couple of years after this, Nirvana sounded like very poor, quick fix imitators to me. I never rated Nirvana either. In the UK, this had a special release at independent record shops which had the LP with a 12” book, a set of 12 postcards all in a Pixies Doolittle plastic bag. Very nice

Dead Can Dance - Aion

This Mortal Coil - Blood

I listened to this constantly in 1992. This album can keep you gripped musically, but it’s also fascinating as a project. There’s so much to find out about This Mortal Coil. The session musicians are from all over 4AD and beyond on this album and many of the songs are cover versions. The track that always leaves me close to tears is the cover of the Byrds “I Come and Stand at Every Door”. An individuals musical history of discovery is always interesting. I heard this version years before I heard the Byrds original version. This Mortal Coil’s interpretation of this song is incredibly moving and powerful. The original version is very good, but very much of its time in a sort of hippy, preachy way. So I prefer This Mortal Coil’s version. But is that because I heard that one first??


Lisa Gerrard - The Mirror Pool

Lisa Gerrard works on a level unlike no-one else. A true independent and individual artist. She has a way of expressing music that is deeply spiritual and beautiful without having to use any traditional language. To see Lisa perform live is a opportunity not to miss. This was Lisa’s first solo album after a career as one half of Dead Can Dance. Originally released on CD, it was later possible to get the album on vinyl, which is a real treat. The Mirror Pool is possibly less accessible to a pop fed audience, even less so than Dead Can Dance possibly are. But as with all great music, time devoted to it is paid back in multitudes. I always wonder when I hear music like this, how can anyone that says they love music, not be swept away with an album like this?

Most of these albums are from the first decade. Although many believe the nineties were 4AD’s best decade, I feel the nineties were the turnaround in music, where the number of artists shot through the roof, but the diversity fell dramatically. This was typified even in 4AD.

I would recommend any of these albums, the Lonely Is An Eyesore compilation would be fine introduction though.

Until the next post, thanks for taking the time to read through a man’s dribbling fondness.

Five Years Waiting No More

I’ve had a good week. Little in the way of quantity, but vast in quality. This week I was able to purchase a release by This Mortal Coil. This Mortal Coil didn’t release much, three albums and a few singles. But an album sampler for “Filigree And Shadow” was given out by the Polygram label in Canada.

I saw reference to it in the Eyesore database. Now, the Eyesore database was my starting point for finding out what 4AD had released and what I needed to get. It’s a thorough website and a must if collecting 4AD.

http://eyesore.no/

For five years I’ve been searching for this promo and never seen anything of it. Then for the first time in five years I see it on ebay.

So now, I have it. Only looking back at the eyesore database, it looks as though the one I have is just another version on a different label. So although I’m overjoyed I finally have a version of it, there may be another one.

That’s half the fun of this collection, the detective work needed. Sometimes it’s hard to separate fact from fiction. Ownership is probably the best proof, although bootlegs can also throw that proof out.

So, as usual, one achievement marked and another release added to the wanted list. I’m at a good point in my collection. When the idea first came to me to undertake this task and for the first couple of years after, the want list grew rapidly quicker than acquired list.

Now it’s about even. I see the progress, and the target looks achievable, but not easy so it’s still challenging. Onwards to the next acquisition.

http://www.discogs.com/This-Mortal-Coil-Advance-Selections-From-The-Forthcoming-AlbumCassette-Filigree-And-Shadow/release/2959327

The Collection Definition Conundrum

When deciding to collect something, it’s interesting trying to define the boundaries of what classes as “part of the collection”. I did decide that the first decade of 4AD releases would be a reasonable amount to collect. But the thought processes then where, should I be thorough, or just collect the music itself?

Well just the music is only part of the picture. What would 4AD be without graphic design? So the collection had to have to be physical releases really. Ok, but what about format? This is an interesting and changing decade for music. The compact cassette in the late seventies had taken over 8 tracks and reel to reel. By the mid eighties cassette singles were becoming a popular format. Then of course it was the decade of the CD (a well known UK future technology TV show, practically told you it was no problem to eat your dinner on a CD and it would still play. Wow! that of course was before dust was invented).

Ok, so maybe format then as well. So that makes the collection quite large, all releases all formats. But what about the music that the artists produced while signed to 4AD but not released by 4AD? It would be a shame to miss out on that music as well. Also, if 4AD managed to get them signed just after the artist’s first release, surely a collection would be incomplete without those releases as well? Then, of course, there’s also releases under license.

As you can see the definition gets more and more encompassing. I think I’ve finished moving the boundaries from this point. I had thoughts recently of including more recent re-releases. Some of them are wonderful. Dead Can Dance box sets, This Mortal Coil white vinyl, Bauhaus re-masters. Very tempting, but I have to stop the expansion before the waistline breaks.

So the definition is :

The first decade of 4AD releases in all formats, under all licences (within the same decade) and all other releases made by the artists in the same decade within a year either side of their contract to 4AD.

That’s still quite a haul