Music for a rainy day

Since I bought a new CD player last year I’ve been updating my CD collection.

When I say ‘updating’ I don’t, in general, mean with new music.

Like most people my taste in music is stuck firmly in my youth - which in my case means the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties - so what I’ve actually been doing is buying remastered versions of CDs I already possessed.

Examples include Revolver and Abbey Road (The Beatles), Imperial Bedroom and Blood and Chocolate (Elvis Costello), For Your Pleasure and Country Life (Roxy Music), Skylarking (XTC), and so on.

As it happens, I now have four versions of Skylarking on CD, which was originally released in 1986.

As well as the original CD, I have a remastered version, a ‘corrected polarity’ version (don’t ask), and now the ‘new’ remastered version that includes a 2024 Dolby Atmos mix on blu-ray.

Can I tell the difference? Probably not, and I can’t even play the blu-ray disc that came with it because I don’t have a blu-ray player. But I bought it nevertheless.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the CDs I’ve enjoyed most in recent months are those featuring tracks I had never heard before.

The best of these is Retrospective: Selected Recordings 1973-2023, a beautifully presented five-CD box set by Bryan Ferry.

Released late last year, it contains some of his solo hits plus rare and previously unreleased tracks.

There’s also a CD devoted to instrumental jazz versions of his songs, performed by the Bryan Ferry Orchestra sans Mr Ferry. (I listened to it once, I’m not sure I will listen to it again.)

Of the five CDs my favourite is ‘Rare and Unreleased’ which features 16 tracks including cover versions of 'Don't Be Cruel' (Chris Blackwell/Elvis Presley), 'Whatever Gets You Thru The Night (John Lennon), and 'Oh Lonesome Me' (Don Gibson).

‘She Belongs To Me’ is a Bob Dylan song but here it’s performed in the style of the Velvet Underground, with Ferry sounding remarkably like John Cale.

The ‘Rare and Unreleased’ disc also features ‘Sonnet 18’ (lyrics by William Shakespeare) which I would quite like to be played at my funeral.

Other CDs I’ve bought recently that feature music I had not previously heard include The Greatest Living Englishman by Martin Newell.

Released in 1993, it was produced by XTC’s Andy Partridge in his garden shed/studio using the same eight-track equipment he used to record many of his XTC demos.

Even that was a considerable upgrade for Newell who was known for recording a series of lo-fi albums in the Eighties with his band The Cleaners From Venus. Released independently, they were available on cassette only, even after the arrival of CDs.

Musician, poet and writer, Newell is a fascinating figure, someone who has followed his own path in life without, it seems, compromising his integrity.

Last month I watched The Jangling Man: The Martin Newell Story (2022), which is available to rent or buy on Amazon, and it was impossible not to warm to this rather eccentric figure who, when he is not writing music, pays the bills by doing gardening work in and around Wivenhoe, Essex, where he lives.

‘New music’ has largely passed me by. On the rare occasion I buy a CD featuring music by new bands their influences are clearly rooted in the Seventies and Eighties.

Recent examples include The Last Dinner Party's Prelude To Ecstasy, and This Could Be Texas by English Teacher.

Another new album I bought recently that could be described as a throwback to the (late) Seventies is The Cleansing by Peter Perrett.

Some of you will remember ‘Another Girl, Another Planet’ by The Only Ones.

Released in 1978, it was a minor hit but the band split after two albums (I think), with lead singer and songwriter Peter Perrett self destructing in a haze of heroin. Allegedly.

The Cleansing is heart-warmingly good - guitar pop with plenty of melodic hooks allied to some amusingly mordant lyrics about old age and death, including two very topical tracks: ‘I Wanna Go With Dignity’ and ‘Do Not Resuscitate’.

Not for everyone but if you liked The Only Ones you won’t be disappointed.