I ask this rather cheeky question semi-seriously...
A few months ago, my long-serving 160GB iPod got stolen on holiday
Anyways to cut a long story short,
this meant I got a new MP3 player, and bit the bullet of re-ripping all my CD collection in lossless format (MONTHS it's taking! months!)
The past week, this has meant I've been going through something like 45 different John Foxx CDs I somehow seem to have amassed over the years (!?!)
Whilst nonetheless feasting on a lot of tunes I hadn't listened to in ages, I couldn't help but notice:
- John's back catalogue is basically a right old mess!
- There's over half a dozen different compilation albums, most of which just have one or two 'exclusive' tracks, the rest being endless duplications.
- All of John's original Virgin albums have been re-issued/re-mastered about 3 or 4 or 5 (!?) times on vinyl and CD, each time with confusingly different selections of bonus tracks (but seldom ever definitive or complete!).
- Even John's albums with Louis Gordon & Harold Budd seem to all have been re-issued/re-packaged at least twice, generally, again, with different bonus tracks (but not definitive/complete).
- Virtually all song-based material (especially the Louis Gordon stuff, also The Maths material) seems to get released as two or three of the following: (1) studio version (2) live-in-rehearsal-studio new arrangement (2) actual live-in-concert version (4) a demo/radioedit/remix version.
Again, these different versions can end up scattered across a bewildering array of different discs.
- A lot of these CDs are now out of print too, making it even harder to fill gaps if you didn't buy them at the time.
- Things reach a new low with the (albeit musically sublime) 'London Overgrown', where you have a previously released track included but retitled, instrumental versions of previously released tracks retitled, and even a track from an old compilation album now seconded to this new set.
- The original 3 Ultravox albums on CD are actually amoung the tidiest of all his releases - they do at least collect all the contemporary non-album tracks with no duplications or omissions.
I'm somewhere between moaning and amused with all this, really, I guess!
On one level I can't say I don't enjoy being a total John Foxx anorak and searching through all these oceans of tracks to work out how many different versions of "A Million Cars", "Endlessly" or "No-one Driving" I actually own.
On the other hand, there does come a point where it's just blimmin' exasperating, and surely starts becoming a barrier to people accessing John's music?