News Update - 27 October 2006
Click on each title to expand the news item
Click on each title to expand the news item
Pentangle Box Set Latest
These things are
never simple, are they? The 4CD Pentangle box set, which I’m
delighted to have compiled, annotated and co-mastered, has been
delayed for various reasons but is, I’m told, definitely on
schedule for release by Sanctuary in January 2007. Fingers
crossed…
Unfortunately, there was too much written material to be included in the booklet so although it does contain the main 45,000 word essay on the group’s history, all the additional material on TV/radio appearances, tour dates, chronology, etc, have had to be jettisoned. Or kept aside for another opportunity… Which may just happen: if all goes to plan between Sanctuary and the BBC, regarding a blanket arrangement allowing the label financially viable access to a great deal of audio and video material, it will make possible a series of ‘deluxe edition’ versions of most or all of the Pentangle’s original albums.
I’ve already drafted tracklists for how such albums could be done, including bonus discs featuring not only BBC owned material but full right-period concerts from other sources to supplement The Pentangle (1968), Cruel Sister (1970) and Solomon’s Seal (1972). Perhaps most exciting, though, would be a 3-Disc edition of the classic Basket Of Light (1969), with a full disc of 1969 BBC radio sessions (albeit all released elsewhere in other collections) and a DVD of the group’s 1970 BBC TV In Concert.
Original album outtakes and period B-sides on Disc 1 would potentially be joined by latterday versions of BOL tracks by Jacqui McShee’s Pentangle (‘Once I Had A Sweetheart’ from their 1996 live album) and by Bert, Jacqui and Johnny Marr (‘Train Song’, from Bert’s 2003 BBC4 concert). We shall see… Meanwhile, I should have a feature on some of the group’s TV appearances appearing in Record Collector to coincide with the box set early next year.
Unfortunately, there was too much written material to be included in the booklet so although it does contain the main 45,000 word essay on the group’s history, all the additional material on TV/radio appearances, tour dates, chronology, etc, have had to be jettisoned. Or kept aside for another opportunity… Which may just happen: if all goes to plan between Sanctuary and the BBC, regarding a blanket arrangement allowing the label financially viable access to a great deal of audio and video material, it will make possible a series of ‘deluxe edition’ versions of most or all of the Pentangle’s original albums.
I’ve already drafted tracklists for how such albums could be done, including bonus discs featuring not only BBC owned material but full right-period concerts from other sources to supplement The Pentangle (1968), Cruel Sister (1970) and Solomon’s Seal (1972). Perhaps most exciting, though, would be a 3-Disc edition of the classic Basket Of Light (1969), with a full disc of 1969 BBC radio sessions (albeit all released elsewhere in other collections) and a DVD of the group’s 1970 BBC TV In Concert.
Original album outtakes and period B-sides on Disc 1 would potentially be joined by latterday versions of BOL tracks by Jacqui McShee’s Pentangle (‘Once I Had A Sweetheart’ from their 1996 live album) and by Bert, Jacqui and Johnny Marr (‘Train Song’, from Bert’s 2003 BBC4 concert). We shall see… Meanwhile, I should have a feature on some of the group’s TV appearances appearing in Record Collector to coincide with the box set early next year.
Three Other CD Reissue Projects
RPM Records have
just released
Vampers & Champers, a splendid
2CD
Duffy Power compilation,
compiled by Duffy himself as a kind of ‘best of‘
companion to RPM‘s previous 2CD set Leapers
& Sleepers, which covered
his 1962-67 Parlophone period. The new set, with a 3000 word CH
sleeve note, covers 1966-2006 and features Duffy’s classic
1971 LP Innovations
in
full (plus two outtakes) on Disc 1 and a mix of previously issued
(though still rare) tracks and unreleased goodies on Disc 2,
including a handful of recent including one with Janet Holmes on
joint vocals from the, sadly still unavailable, album
True..
RPM will be issuing Duffy’s 1973 LP Powerhouse,
on CD for the first time, early next year, plus three bonus tracks.
I may be contributing notes to that one too.
Hot on the heels of his work on the Pentangle box set, Cormac O’Kane - with the merest ‘yep, sounds fine to me’ nods of approval from myself - has just completed remastering on the two latterday Pentangle albums One More Road (1993) and Live 1994 (1995) which have long been unavailable. The last two Pentangle albums of the ‘reunion era’, featuring both Jacqui McShee and Bert Jansch, alongside some fabulous players in Nigel Portman Smith (bass), Peter Kirtley (lead guitar) and Gerry Conway (drums), they’ll be appearing as a 2CD set on Hux in due course, possibly entitled The Lost Road, with a booklet featuring numerous CH-taken B&W pics of the band from 1992-94 and possibly a sleeve note from Jacqui McShee.
Sharing its title with the forthcoming Pentangle box set, Anne Briggs’ 1971 LP The Time Has Come will be reissued by SonyBMG in March 2007, with (hopefully the full version of) a 4000 word CH sleevenote including much previously unpublished interview material from the Britfolk icon herself - dating from a 1997 interview, originally conducted for a Mojo piece.
Hot on the heels of his work on the Pentangle box set, Cormac O’Kane - with the merest ‘yep, sounds fine to me’ nods of approval from myself - has just completed remastering on the two latterday Pentangle albums One More Road (1993) and Live 1994 (1995) which have long been unavailable. The last two Pentangle albums of the ‘reunion era’, featuring both Jacqui McShee and Bert Jansch, alongside some fabulous players in Nigel Portman Smith (bass), Peter Kirtley (lead guitar) and Gerry Conway (drums), they’ll be appearing as a 2CD set on Hux in due course, possibly entitled The Lost Road, with a booklet featuring numerous CH-taken B&W pics of the band from 1992-94 and possibly a sleeve note from Jacqui McShee.
Sharing its title with the forthcoming Pentangle box set, Anne Briggs’ 1971 LP The Time Has Come will be reissued by SonyBMG in March 2007, with (hopefully the full version of) a 4000 word CH sleevenote including much previously unpublished interview material from the Britfolk icon herself - dating from a 1997 interview, originally conducted for a Mojo piece.
New Colin Harper/Brian Houston EP
Well, in a
manner of speaking… Tortuously entitled
New, Live & Rare Vol. 1: The Colin Harper
Projects, this is a 6
track limited-edition charity EP collecting together four Brian
Houston-performed tracks from 1995-98 with CH connections plus one
brand new track, the ecologically-themed ‘Don’t Give Up
(Stand And Fight)’ - a rather upbeat title for a rather
defeatist song, if truth be told - which involves a powerful Brian
Houston vocal with string quartet backing, a new departure for him
which he pulls off really well. The sixth track is a bonus one
featuring Caroline Orr singing another CH song, ‘Against The
World’, also with string quartet (well, if you’re
hiring a bunch of string players for one song…) and an
arrangement very different to the Janet Holmes version available as
an MP3 elsewhere on this site.
With a 12 page booklet, designed by Mark Case in loose homage to the first Elvis Presley LP design, the EP should be available from www.brianhouston.com within a couple of weeks for £5, with 50% of proceeds going towards the WWF/UWT ‘Wildlife Albums’ project.
With a 12 page booklet, designed by Mark Case in loose homage to the first Elvis Presley LP design, the EP should be available from www.brianhouston.com within a couple of weeks for £5, with 50% of proceeds going towards the WWF/UWT ‘Wildlife Albums’ project.
Zany Christian Comedy: The Mad Acts Men on CD!
A bit of advance
notice on this one: maybe available before Christmas 2006, maybe
not… but soon!
The Mad Acts Men were Northern
Ireland’s premier (indeed only) ‘zany Christian
comedy’ act in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s. Think
‘Monty Python with a message’, though their influences
are in fact much broader. Featuring writers / performers Mark
McCluney and Tim Dunwoody, alongside sound effects man / road
manager (and designer of this very website) Maurice Milligan, the
Acts Men produced two cassette albums in very limited quantities -
albums which I for one have always found hugely entertaining.
I was delighted to be able to bring these great recordings kicking and screaming into the CD era (just as the CD era looks like going kicking and whimpering into terminal decline) by having them remastered by Cormac O’Kane, with whom I’ve worked on the Pentangle box set. I’ve completed an 8,000 word history of the guys for the booklet and once we’ve got a few pics together it will be designed by James Davis. The resulting 2CD set will no doubt be relatively expensive to produce in the limited quantities that we’ll be able to afford, but hopefully it should become available at standard 2CD price via a dedicated website - designed by Maurice - which we’ll link to as and when.
I was delighted to be able to bring these great recordings kicking and screaming into the CD era (just as the CD era looks like going kicking and whimpering into terminal decline) by having them remastered by Cormac O’Kane, with whom I’ve worked on the Pentangle box set. I’ve completed an 8,000 word history of the guys for the booklet and once we’ve got a few pics together it will be designed by James Davis. The resulting 2CD set will no doubt be relatively expensive to produce in the limited quantities that we’ll be able to afford, but hopefully it should become available at standard 2CD price via a dedicated website - designed by Maurice - which we’ll link to as and when.
Reviews For Dazzling Stranger (New Edition)
Bert Jansch
seems to be in the middle of one of his periodic critical and
popular renaissances right now, with his new album
Black
Swan being glowingly
reviewed left, right and centre - and I’m delighted to say
that some of this critical goodwill/journalistic bandwagon has been
helping to get review space for the new edition of
Dazzling Stranger. It’s
been recommended very generously by a number of writers in
The
Guardian, Mojo, Record Collector, Guitarist, fRoots
and
Guitar &
Bass. Those are the
ones I’ve seen anyway. I’ll put quotes up on the site
when time allows.
A number of readers have also got in touch via this site, which is great - it’s always nice to know that people have enjoyed or appreciated something I’ve had the pleasure of creating!
A number of readers have also got in touch via this site, which is great - it’s always nice to know that people have enjoyed or appreciated something I’ve had the pleasure of creating!
The Geoff Harden Archive
Many people in
the folk music community throughout the UK will have known Geoff
Harden - a fellow writer on music in recent years, for the
Belfast Newsletter,
and broadcaster for various Belfast community radio stations - who
died a few weeks ago. Geoff ran folk clubs at St Andrews University
in the mid ‘60s, in Belfast in 1967-68, in Kent from 1970-75
and then again in Belfast from the late ‘70s - 1989. Being an
audio buff and sometime BBC sound engineer, he recorded everything
he promoted on reel-to-reel and later cassette, often in remarkably
high quality.
Geoff bequeathed this extraordinary collection to me and I’m working towards two goals with it: (1) to have it digitised and donated for free access to a number of folk music archives (the Vaughan Williams Library at Cecil Sharpe House, London; the School of Scottish Studies, Edinburgh; the Irish Traditional Music Archive, Dublin, etc); (2) to secure CD release, in association with various labels and with artist permissions, for the more commercially viable concerts. Progress is being made on both fronts. After various communications with funding bodies, the Arts Council NI have indicated that they should be able to secure funding to at least begin the digitising process with Northern Ireland recordings the (understandable) priority.
On the CD front, Topic, Market Square, Hux and Talking Elephant are among several labels to have expressed serious interest in the archive, and at the time of writing a number of releases are in development with the always agreeable Brian O’Reilly at Hux - a man with an almost intoxicatingly relaxed and can-do approach to business, especially if it involves arcane recordings.. More details on the Hux projects whenever artist agreements have been firmed up.. Finally, Geoff also had the great foresight to record numerous John Peel radio sessions during 1968-69, most of which don’t exist now at the BBC and many of which will probably not exist in any other off-air collection. Among the lost gems thus far identified are a full disc’s worth of Pentangle broadcasts, which will hopefully comprise one disc of a mooted 2CD set Pentangle BBC set on Hux (complementing their previous 2CD Pentangle BBC set The Lost Broadcasts).
Once I’ve compiled an inventory of this material (a longer process than you might imagine, with boxes of reels to be trawled through featuring only artist names without dates or track titles), I’ll actively seek to make any of it of interest commercially available or, where possible, to make it available to the artists concerned.
Geoff bequeathed this extraordinary collection to me and I’m working towards two goals with it: (1) to have it digitised and donated for free access to a number of folk music archives (the Vaughan Williams Library at Cecil Sharpe House, London; the School of Scottish Studies, Edinburgh; the Irish Traditional Music Archive, Dublin, etc); (2) to secure CD release, in association with various labels and with artist permissions, for the more commercially viable concerts. Progress is being made on both fronts. After various communications with funding bodies, the Arts Council NI have indicated that they should be able to secure funding to at least begin the digitising process with Northern Ireland recordings the (understandable) priority.
On the CD front, Topic, Market Square, Hux and Talking Elephant are among several labels to have expressed serious interest in the archive, and at the time of writing a number of releases are in development with the always agreeable Brian O’Reilly at Hux - a man with an almost intoxicatingly relaxed and can-do approach to business, especially if it involves arcane recordings.. More details on the Hux projects whenever artist agreements have been firmed up.. Finally, Geoff also had the great foresight to record numerous John Peel radio sessions during 1968-69, most of which don’t exist now at the BBC and many of which will probably not exist in any other off-air collection. Among the lost gems thus far identified are a full disc’s worth of Pentangle broadcasts, which will hopefully comprise one disc of a mooted 2CD set Pentangle BBC set on Hux (complementing their previous 2CD Pentangle BBC set The Lost Broadcasts).
Once I’ve compiled an inventory of this material (a longer process than you might imagine, with boxes of reels to be trawled through featuring only artist names without dates or track titles), I’ll actively seek to make any of it of interest commercially available or, where possible, to make it available to the artists concerned.