How to enrich Bryan Ferry’s Dylanesque with bonus tracks

On release in the UK several months ago, Dylanesque, Bryan Ferry’s covers CD, got great press – positive reviews and a very high profile in the English media.

Some reviews of the new American release are less positive. Probably because, while Ferry is respected (even revered) in his homeland the US has never been so receptive.

Thanks to Martin Cowan for this link: “Amusingly scathing review of the latest Ferry CD from Pitchfork here”:

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/43837-dylanesque

Pity. Ferry’s the real deal – a grade one popular musician. Dylan is the preferred singer of Dylan songs, but Ferry’s one of only two singers I’d have entrusted with a covers album. Van Morrison’s the other contender, as most who’ve seen him perform outstanding versions of Just Like A Woman and It’s All over Now, Baby Blue in concert will testify.

If you buy Dylanesque, you can enrich its 11 songs by burning a new CDR to include as bonus tracks Ferry’s earlier Dylan covers:

* A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall (These Foolish Things, 1973)

* It Ain’t Me Babe (Another Time Another Place, 1974)

* It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue (Frantic, 2002)

* Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right (Frantic, 2002)

They make a strong album even stronger.




Gerry Smith

UNCUT – Dadrock and films mag – celebrates its tenth birthday

UNCUT, the Dadrock and films monthly, is celebrating its tenth birthday with a special issue which has just hit the news-stands. I’ve enjoyed the 9 (of 123) issues I’ve bought over the years.

Here’s the ranked list of musicians who’ve stared out from the news-stands on the front cover of a decade’s worth of UNCUTs:

1. Beatles - 11 covers
2. Dylan – 7 covers
3. Stones – 6
4. Pink Floyd – 5
5= Smiths/Mozz; Who; Led Zep; Clash; Bruce; Bowie; REM – 4 covers

Two thirds of the 123 covers feature 1960s/1970s rockers, mostly English.



Gerry Smith

Fopp, outstanding music retailer, in trouble

Music for Grown-Ups has been praising Fopp ever since the small chain started rolling out its refreshing music retailing concept in England.

Its stores, notably the new flagship in London’s Tottenham Court Rd, are my preferred outlet for buying CDs, DVDs and books. Fopp leaves the competition in its slipstream, thanks to its quirky catalogue, some keen pricing, but mostly because its genre classifications – reflected in innovative display – are just so well thought-out.

Bad news this week, though – Fopp seems to be struggling to survive – a one-day closure of stores last Friday, suspension of online sales, cash only in the stores, and the Music Zone stores – their recent acquisition is a likely major cause of Fopp’s woes – closed, as I found when I went to visit the Welwyn Garden City branch yesterday.

All music retailers are currently struggling against free downloads and aggressive online and supermarket discounting. But if all the major chains went under, Fopp is the one I’d miss most.


Gerry Smith

Your armchair guide: Glastonbury on TV

Thanks to Mike Ollier

Friday/Saturday/Sunday on BBC2/BBC3/BBC4 at various times

* Glastonbury Festival
Well, glad I'm not there… crack a warm can open (preferably Fosters or some other equally pissy 'beer'), sit in the shower with a gro-bag, invite a burglar into your home, drop an E or two and have some felafel. Watch on TV. Ah, the festival experience in your own home, and a handy, safe toilet. There, I've saved you a few hundred quid and you haven't contracted trench foot.

You'll have to check times yourself, cos it's on all weekend across three channels (and some radio coverage), but on Friday you'd be a fool to miss Arcade Fire. Amy Winehouse is promised and some loud wannabes. Probably. John Fogerty and Iggy Pop are promised on Saturday.

However, you'll also have to put up with a bunch of entirely unnecessary celebrity presenters, who just get in the way of the music. One can only hope that professional good egg Mark Radcliffe is introducing/interviewing the more watchable performers.

Best Of Van Morrison, Volume 3 – impressive duets, disappointing solo material, puzzling timing

The Best Of Van Morrison Volume 3, released yesterday in the UK (and in the USA on 19 June) is a 2CD album with 31 tracks, dating from the early 1990s to mid-Noughties, including previously unreleased collaborations, as well as duets with greats like John Lee Hooker, B.B. King and Ray Charles.

If you don’t have an extensive Van Morrison collection, the new release – available online from £8.95 delivered – is an impressive round-up of Morrison’s multifarious outings with some of the greats of postwar blues and soul music. Highlights? The Junior Wells and Hooker duets – both spellbinders.

But for this formerly heavy duty Van consumer, CD2 (see below) illustrates just how The Man’s art has careered uncontrollably towards pop pastiche/showbiz/showband in the last ten years, jettisoning former hardcoristas like me along the way. You couldn’t give me most of the solo tracks on CD 2: I’d have dropped them all, in favour of more duets.

The timing of the release, a bare four months after At The Movies, the last EMI Catalogue compilation of Morrison tunes, is puzzling, too. Presumably it’s a new contract and the label wants to maximize its return - rapido. They won’t get much help from me - I haven’t bought a new Van M album this Millennium, and Best Of Volume 3 won’t change that.


Disc 1
1. Cry For Home (with Tom Jones) (previously unreleased)
2. Too Long In Exile
3. Gloria (with John Lee Hooker)
4. Help Me with Junior Wells (live)
5. Lonely Avenue / 4 O' Clock In The Morning (with Jimmy Witherspoon, Candy Dulfer & Jim Hunter) (live)
6. Days Like This
7. Ancient Highway
8. Raincheck
9. Moondance
10. Centerpiece (with Georgie Fame & Annie Ross)
11. That's Life (live)
12. Benediction (remix) (with Georgie Fame & Ben Sidran)
13. The Healing Game (re-mix)
14. I Don't Want To Go On Without You (with Jim Hunter)

Disc 2
1. Shenandoah (with The Chieftains)
2. Precious Time
3. Back On Top (remix)
4. When The Leaves Come Falling Down
5. Lost John (with Lonnie Donegan) (live)
6. Tupelo Honey (with Bobby Bland) (previously unreleased)
7. Meet Me In The Indian Summer (orchestral version) (remix)
8. Georgia On My Mind
9. Hey Mr. DJ
10. Steal My Heart Away
11. Crazy Love (with Ray Charles)
12. Once In A Blue Moon
13. Little Village
14. Blue and Green
15. Sitting On Top Of The World (with Carl Perkins)
16. Early In The Morning (with B.B. King)
17. Stranded



Gerry Smith

Waterboy Mike Scott interview in new Bowie fanzine

Tirelessly promoting Book Of Lightning, the new album, Mike Scott, Head Waterboy, has been turning up all over the media. But nowhere as surprising as the Bowie Zone Fanzine (www.bowiezone.net), the impressive new unofficial website celebrating the art of the great chameleon art rocker.

Scotty fans will love the interview. Bowie followers will want to check out this lovely new site. Grown-up rockers will get a double buzz.


http://www.bowiezone.net/11343/98901.html



Gerry Smith

Bob Marley’s Exodus – 30th anniversary CDs, book, film

Exodus, the quintessential Bob Marley album, first released 30 years ago, has been treated with respect by record label Island/Universal.

Having released re-mastered single CD and De Luxe 2CD versions in 2001, Island have just released no fewer than five 30th Anniversary versions of the great album: single CD, CD/DVD, vinyl LP and – here’s the interesting bit – CD/SD memory card version and CD/USB memory stick version.

The CD/DVD combo looks like the pick of the crop.

Exodus: Bob Marley and The Wailers, a new book (ed Richard Williams, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, £25), published on Thursday, gathers together a collection of articles on the seminal album. Looks interesting.

Bob Marley’s Exodus, Sunday’s Arena programme on BBC2, was disappointing. It made the schoolboy error of playing the album tracks under a series of ill-chosen, unrelated contemporary news clips. And compounded the error by inserting an endless series of inconsequential comments on the album by anonymous wo/men in the street.

The leitmotif of clips from a ceremony dedicating a plaque on a block of flats off London’s Tottenham Court Rd., where Marley briefly lived, was the most squirm-inducing bit of TV I’ve seen for ages.

The Arena documentary was nowhere near as good as three earlier Marley TV documentaries I have on VHS tape: largely unwatchable; a missed opportunity.


Gerry Smith