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If this blog wasn't called No Rock & Roll Fun, it would be called something else, and there'd be a good chance it might have wound up as Simply Thrilled Honey. Which is, by a happy coincidence, one of the tracks on the Orange Juice box set Coals To Newcastle.
That comes out on November 8th, but there's a widgety thing with five tracks barking up some extra interest:
The main advantage, presumably, of a $100 limited edition Lady Gaga special edition is, that as it comes with a lock of her hair, you can extract her DNA and clone her.
That'd be one for the RIAA copyright squad to worry over. Perhaps there's a EULA which forbids you from reproducing the DNA. Or maybe you can if you get a PRS licence.
The rest of the overpriced, pointless package consists of:
* Collectible puzzle
* Pictorials
* A behind the scenes look at her creative process
* Pull out posters
* Themed fanzines
* A paper doll collection
* 3 D glasses to view forthcoming Gaga visuals
* Personal notes from the artist
* Each book individually numbered
As if the disappointing sales of the CDs and the underwhelming performance of the computer game wasn't enough, the Beatles industry intends to carry on churning out overwrought, unnecessary stuff:
The Beatles Box Of Vision® is the deluxe companion to the newly re-mastered Beatles CDs, and will be available as the ultimate Beatles gift in the UK and Europe this Christmas from www.[a website].com and www.[a website].com, plus select retailers.
Officially licensed by The Beatles’ Apple Corps Ltd., the stunning collection, previously only available in North America, includes the following Beatles’ collectible content: The first book in the box is the LP Sized Album Artwork Book includes 200 pages of the Beatles’ LP artwork – the first time all the Beatles’ UK and US album artwork has been collected together in one LP sized book. The Album Artwork book includes front and back covers, gatefolds, inserts and the complete LP booklets from Magical Mystery Tour and many more.
The second book, ‘The Catalography’, is an extensive, all-new, full-colour guide jam-packed with photos, text and track-listings providing the first-ever side-by-side presentation of the U.K. albums and their U.S. counterparts.
The third book is entitled the ‘The Box of Vision Storage Book’ – a highly collectible, unique and stylish way for Beatles fans to organize and display all 32 discs of The Beatles’ core catalog. Beatles fans will have the opportunity to insert CDs and booklets from their existing Beatles collections or the recently released digitally re-mastered versions.
Ideal for fans, collectors and Christmas gift giving, all three Beatles books are housed in an elegant black, linen-covered box with silver embossed Beatles logos and faux Beatles LP spines.
Never mind The Beatles box set, the big cardboard-packaged event this year is set to be the Kraftwerk collection. Assuming the make it, as the release has just been pushed back to November. The constituent parts of the set - the individual records - get a re-release, as planned, on October 5th.
You'd have to be made of flint to not enjoy at least some of Erasure's fine poppy moments, and those moments have been gathered into a four-disc box set. The music, yes, is exciting, but even more exciting is disc four - a DVD of BBC appearances. And, yes, there's Top Of The Pops stuff in there - but more. Oh, so much more:
01. Sometimes - Top Of The Pops
02. It Doesn't Have To Be - The Tom O'Connor Roadshow
03. Victim Of Love - Daytime Live
04. The Circus - Daytime Live
05. Ship Of Fools - Wogan
06. Chains Of Love - Top Of The Pops
07. A Little Respect - Going Live!
08. Stop! - Top Of The Pops
09. Chorus - Wogan
10. Love To Hate You - Top Of The Pops
11. Am I Right? - Top Of The Pops
12. Breath Of Life - Top Of The Pops
13. Who Needs Love (Like That) - Top Of The Pops
14. Always - Top Of The Pops
15. Run To The Sun - Top Of The Pops
16. I Love Saturday - Smash Hits Poll Winner's Party
17. Stay With Me - Pebble Mill
18. Fingers And Thumbs (Cold Summer's Day) - Pebble Mill
19. Don't Say Your Love Is Killing Me - Top Of The Pops
20. Solsbury Hill - Top Of The Pops
21. Breathe - Top Of The Pops
22. Top Of The Pops 2 Special
23. Sometimes - Tom O'Connor Roadshow
24. How Many Times? - The Late Show
25. Miracle - Later with Jools Holland
26. Because You're So Sweet - Later With Jools Holland
27. Oh L'Amour - Promotional Video
The sweetest nuggets have got to be the clips from Tom O'Connor's Roadshow. A smidge of the performance has been teased up onto the YouTube:
Ah, if only they'd included Tom's snow-covered opening title sequence, complete with the annoyed waving of hands at the engine of the broken-down Roadshow mobile...
Bournemouth's contribution to popular culture is, to be fair, slight: That bloke who used to go to all England's matches dressed up all patriotic like until the story leaked about dubious activities with children; Jim Davidson sitting as chair of the local football club. And Shelleyan Orphan.
The latter have just reunited: We Have Everything We Need is due on October 13th on One Little Indian. The album features a collaboration with the Hungarian National Radio Orchestra, which is quite refreshing.
You might want to hold off buying it, though, as there's a box set promised this winter in which the new record is collated alongside all the 1980s-90s stuff and a bunch of rarities.
There's a tour planned, too.
Need your memory jogged? See if this doesn't bring the last half-hour of the Janice Long Show rushing back:
Fancy hearing something by Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians you won't have heard before?
This is an mp3 of A Bad Case Of History, hitherto unreleased. Unless you count the websites which have probably beaten us to putting the track up.
It's turned up as part of the second box-set of Hitchcock stuff, Luminous Groove, due out on August 4th.
Ryan Adams is preparing a box set full of stuff that has previously been unleaked to the internet, including two albums which haven't had a release before, and a lot of rarities. Of course, by the time it emerges in the autumn, he'll have gone and recorded more stuff, so there's still going to be a load of unreleased stuff laying about.
