Originally posted by solenoid:
All these reviews!
It's great, I love the reviews, good, bad, long, short, indifferent, it’s the eagerness of people posting that keeps the forum alive, and as Birdsong said: “these are exciting times”.
With remasters, new CD’s, and who knows what, hey maybe John will even end up presenting a program on an Arts channel, or heaven forbid, a guest slot on a cookery program, or he might even pop up on Gardeners World to talk about his love of Nymphaea, or Primula Vulgaris…
Originally posted by Ishikawa:
"A Long Time" on this CD is fantastic. It's even more remarkable (to me at least), that a notably different version of a song I've always liked has such a positive effect on me.
And, for me also.
Getting the choice to internalise the alternative versions that I like, in place of some of those that I was never keen on has unexpectedly worked out really well for me on this remaster, I am still playing my choices quite a lot, and it’s afforded me the rare opportunity to ‘reimagine’ that period.
Originally posted by Birdsong:
the unpolished stones from which Zeus b Held charmed the sparkle in 1983...
…the arrival of the ubiquitous Held with his cloth and beeswax, on a mission to make a hit
Nicely put, but for me at least, I just wish that
Zeus had
Been
‘Held’ off from polishing those stones as much as he did in ’83 with his little duster.
Incidentally, going off topic for a mo’ did any UK members here ever catch that episode of the Terry Wogan chat show: Wogan, in ’85 (I think), when one of his guest’s was (bizarrely for Wogan) the ubiquitous Mr Held himself?
I was taken aback when John’s producer sat down on old Terry’s sofa, and chatted briefly about his work, and near the end of the interview Wogan asked him about who he thought was a ‘name to look out for' kind of thing, my jaw hit the floor when Held said the magic words I'd so rarely heard on TV,
'John Foxx'. How many mum’s and dad’s sitting around watching at teatime heard that and thought, who?
Almost as bizarre a moment as when Grace Jones appeared on Wogan, singing a song and wearing a cloth bag on her head the whole way through, until she removed it in the last few seconds…
Just a thought on my part, but on listening to the alternative ‘Tigers’ version I really became much more aware of the lyrics and the more obvious growls, and I started thinking that it felt a bit more allegorical than the TGS ’83 song, and with the lines like: “He said he was a saint”, and “silver tortures in colour vision”, and also, “A time of bones and flowers” leading up to all the growling at the end.
I wonder if John had thought originally of using Lions roaring, a much stronger image I feel, but of course that animal as a symbol is maybe a tad too religious, and might have crossed over rather than just hovered on the spiritual borderline, which (I think) he quite successfully treads on much of his work.
On the other hand…
Originally posted by Lele:
That's what happens when you have one hand round a pint and the other on a sampler
