Originally Posted by Urban Hatemonger

Apparently a young David Cameron's favourite band ever was The Smiths. I know this because he keeps on going on about it all the time , so much so he decided to visit the Salford Lads Club , as seen on the inside cover of The Queen Is dead. And many LOLS were had when the local Labour party showed up and protested about his visit and stopped him getting a publicity shot outside the building.
I'm sure i'm not the only one who wonders why , if he was indeed such a fan of the band that meant so much to him why on earth he would become a Thatcherite and join the Tory party. Somehow I get the impression he may have slighty missed the point somewhere.

Originally Posted by Urban Hatemonger

Bet you weren't expecting to see them here.

As a fan of The Fall I am in a constant turmoil. You see there are times when I listen to the band and I really wish they were more like a conventional band. I would love nothing more to see Mark E Smith go out and do a tour where he plays a greatest hits set , records it properly and releases it as a double live album instead of having a constant stream of badly recorded live stuff that only covers about 2 or 3 albums. I wondered why it was that I should have so few Fall bootlegs considering I love the band so much. And then I realised it was because Smith has pretty much released them all officially.
Smith doesn't do looking back into the past. The Fall's live shows are dominated by whatever 2 albums they just recorded plus a load of stuff you won't here till the next album comes out. But he'll tease you by throwing in one classic from the past. Recently it was 'Wings' off Perverted By Language , before that it was 'The Man Who's Head Expanded' and he's been known to throw in 'New Big Prinz' off the Kurious Oranj album as well. It's like teasing you with scraps , he knows people really want to hear this stuff but to him it's what he's doing now thats important , and so it should be. I'd also love to see him do some collaborations , some of the stuff he's done with other people has been brilliant , but he's never done it with The Fall. The whole beauty of the Fall is him finding these musicians off the street , throwing them into the band without even bothering with auditions or practice and just see what happens. It might sound amateurish or ramshackle but it makes them still one of the most spontaneous & compelling bands around still even after 30 years.

But the biggest irony in all this is if they were ever to become a more conventional band it would destroy everything that is special about the band. It would stop them being most uncompromising & unique band around and it would stop them being everything that they go against.
And that is the most frustrating thing at all.

Originally Posted by Urban Hatemonger

Originally Posted by Urban Hatemonger

Originally Posted by Urban Hatemonger

I don't care who you are or how good your album or song is , fact of the matter is it has a shelf life. Yes , even the stuff I enjoy myself has a shelf life.

I mean several years ago I used to listen to Elephant 6 stuff on a regular basis. After a couple of years I got bored of it and have hardly listened to it since. Now I don't say anything bad about this stuff because i'm not under a constant barrage of hearing it all the time and I didn't dislike it to start with.

Now I probably hear stuff like Led Zeppelin , Queen , The Eagles , Guns n Roses , U2 ....

Originally Posted by Urban Hatemonger

Bet you weren't expecting to see them here.

As a fan of The Fall I am in a constant turmoil. You see there are times when I listen to the band and I really wish they were more like a conventional band. I would love nothing more to see Mark E Smith go out and do a tour where he plays a greatest hits set , records it properly and releases it as a double live album instead of having a constant stream of badly recorded live stuff that only covers about 2 or 3 albums. I wondered why it was that I should have so few Fall bootlegs considering I love the band so much. And then I realised it was because Smith has pretty much released them all officially.
Smith doesn't do looking back into the past. The Fall's live shows are dominated by whatever 2 albums they just recorded plus a load of stuff you won't here till the next album comes out. But he'll tease you by throwing in one classic from the past. Recently it was 'Wings' off Perverted By Language , before that it was 'The Man Who's Head Expanded' and he's been known to throw in 'New Big Prinz' off the Kurious Oranj album as well. It's like teasing you with scraps , he knows people really want to hear this stuff but to him it's what he's doing now thats important , and so it should be. I'd also love to see him do some collaborations , some of the stuff he's done with other people has been brilliant , but he's never done it with The Fall. The whole beauty of the Fall is him finding these musicians off the street , throwing them into the band without even bothering with auditions or practice and just see what happens. It might sound amateurish or ramshackle but it makes them still one of the most spontaneous & compelling bands around still even after 30 years.

But the biggest irony in all this is if they were ever to become a more conventional band it would destroy everything that is special about the band. It would stop them being most uncompromising & unique band around and it would stop them being everything that they go against.
And that is the most frustrating thing at all.

Originally Posted by Urban Hatemonger

The picture you see above is my own personal copy of Echo & the Bunnymen's Evergreen album. You'll notice if you read the top sticker that the album came with a bonus disc featuring every John Peel session they ever recorded. I should also point out this version came out just a few months after Evergreen was released and it cost exactly the same price as the original album.

Now I don't know about you but had I rushed out and bought the album when it came out ( Like most diehard fans would do) and then walked into a record shop a couple of months later I would have been mightily pissed off at seeing this. Thankfully I hadn't got chance to buy the album before this came out so I was lucky. As it happens the Peel Sessions disc is better than the actual album itself but thats besides the point.

Or course i'm not including all special editions of albums in this , only ones like the above that come out a few months later with a live disc or a remix disc or whatever. I have no problems if they're released simultaneously. Take AC/DC for example. When they released their 1991 'Live' album you had the option of buying a single disc version of the album or a double disc version of the album for a little extra. Had I heard the album before I bought it I wish I could have gone for the zero discs option, but never mind.

I should also like to single out The Who (again). For a band I love they seem to be cropping up in this list rather a lot. As everybody knows the original version of Live at Leeds only had about 5 or 6 songs on it. For the 25th anniversary they released an extended version of the album with about 11 or 12 songs on it. Now I didn't buy it when it came out but a couple of years after so you could imagine my annoyance when I discovered that for the 30th anniversary of the album they'd re-released it again , this time with the WHOLE show. Which makes you wonder why they couldn't do that 5 years earlier in the first place.

And while i'm on the subject of record companies ripping off people i'd like to deliver a big fuck you to the major labels for the practice of releasing one or two *Bonus Songs* on new albums exclusively for the British market so they could justify charging about £4-5 more for the album than the rest of the world and stopping shops from selling cheaper imported versions. Downloading illegally couldn't come here quick enough in my opinion.