I’m
still more than happy to stick with the music of Underpass '80, and would have liked any remix to be radically different from the source, but Mark’s is a good remix that stays true to the original, and with some new air breathed throughout it which might well open the song to wider appeal. I have to agree with everyone, when I watched the revamped visuals of the video yesterday I also thought that Mark’s version could easily be released as a single, so its good to see that today it has actually been given the green-light.
Underpass 2010, great video, its not only pruned the elements to a sleeker standard, getting rid of the distractions, but in so doing it’s also transformed what once bordered on the ‘creaky-ness of age’ into ‘a retro-ness of cool’. When RadioBeach asked if it was Mr Barnbrook to credit for the changes I expected to watch the video and find it to be completely over-hauled with lots of new animated graphic’s and less shots of John singing, but amazingly with few radical changes it’s actually as Garry says, more Foxxy than before, and its old ‘low-budget video look’ now seems more like some past vision of an urban documentary’s picture of futuristic things to come.
Even John looks better than he ever seems to have been in it, he’s obviously hopped into a time machine and beamed himself back to 1980 to re-direct his youthful self from behind the scenes, the older present-day Mr Foxx with his camera is probably just out of sight standing behind a concrete column and he’ll no doubt accidentally show-up on screen in the DVD:
Metatronic 2, the Bloopers.
Compared to some of the other forum members I’m a bit of a Johnny come lately regarding hopes and expectations about what releases to expect from John, and I hadn’t fully appreciated that the titles Metatronic and Metadelic had long ago been mooted as potential compilations. So, much as my preference is for a more unusual presentation, (such as with Herberts’ suggestion of Sparks:
Plaigarism as a good example of the creative reworking of an artists back catalogue), Metatronic is as it is, and about to arrive, and I think my own personal musings will ultimately give sway to the philospical view of Andreas suggestion, that its rather more the case of Disc 1 being the bonus here, with Discs 2 and 3 as the real deal.
Originally posted by Rob Harris:
In this instance, two [b]Metamatic-era tracks have only recently come to light, and while it would be quite easy to simply not release them (and that way no-one would be any the wiser as to their existence), it's been decided to add them to Metatronic [/b]
I think it was good that Alex posed the question about the thematic ordering or gathering of John’s work as this must be something that has passed through other people’s minds before.
I wasn’t too surprised to see more versions of John’s older work continuing to appear, being the type of artist that he is I expect that he must work out several forms of a song or artwork, and maybe moreso in the old days when he was finding his style, perhaps generating a lot of alternatives around the final piece. Keeping tabs on all of that and holding it together in one place over many years would be a difficult task and I recall John stating in the 80’s that he had lots of tapes with fragments of music/sounds, and similarly so with pieces of artwork for his collages stored away in boxes in many basements.
