From: owner-oppositeview-digest@smoe.org (oppositeview-digest) To: oppositeview-digest@smoe.org Subject: oppositeview-digest V6 #25 Reply-To: oppositeview@smoe.org Sender: owner-oppositeview-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-oppositeview-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk oppositeview-digest Sunday, February 22 2004 Volume 06 : Number 025 Today's Subjects: ----------------- RE: OV: First Album - The Superfecta Reissue ["Jason Fiber" Subject: RE: OV: First Album - The Superfecta Reissue Thanks for the kind words - this was our first project and it will always be special to me. Not only is this one of my favorite albums but it was the first time we got in touch with a band we loved and found them excited to help out and be involved in what we wanted to do. As far as the notes go, while I'd be the first person to appreciate anyone buying the cd (plug: visit our new online retail site - www.idealcopy.com - lots of del amitri stuff and other great reissues!!) I'll copy and paste them here for y'all (incidentally - this is copied directly from Justin's email to me - we corrected the spacing and typos when we printed it): Cheers! Jason Glasgow,Scotland in the early eighties saw an explosion of fey young white men inspired by Orange Juice,Josef K and Aztec Camera who had released a classic sequence of seven inch singles on Alan Horne's beautifully hip Postcard Records under the wittily corrupted legend "The Sound of Young Scotland".The Postcard groups shared a revolutionary slant on punk rock;they claimed that punk was purely an attitude rather than a rigid musical style and reinstated the values of classic American pop in the post-industrial cultural hinterland of Thatcher's United Kingdom.Melody,structure and wit became the signature concerns for most aspiring post-punk groups especially on the west coast where earnest young men and women wearing fringes and plaid shirts sang songs about love,abandonment and domestic utensils in every bar,club and restaurant in Glasgow. Like a great many of these Postcard pretenders Del Amitri got it painfully wrong.Years of listening to The Fall,Television,John Cooper Clarke and The Fire Engines were somehow warped through the kaleidoscope of Orange Juice's "Simply Thrilled Honey" to produce something oddly English in character.Hip it was not. Curiously our frantic and anxious songs took a viciously tight grip on the hearts and minds of a vanishingly small cabal of misfits and malcontents in weird little pockets of the globe including the U.S.A..These people's pathological enthusiasm sustained the early Del Amitri through four years of press loathing and barely stifled contempt from the macho scenesters in our home town.We lived in a state of siege from 1983 to early '87 supported passionately by our manager Barbara Shores(an ex-pat American),our A&R man Pete Lawton and our producer Hugh Jones who took our teenage naivety(I turned 20 during the vocal take on "Heard Through A Wall') and crafted it into something nearly beautiful. Of course we had a philosophy so strict that it eventually strangled us.No chords,no choruses,no distortion,no synthesizers and definately no long hair.Melody was God.There are more tunes between the twin guitar parts and bass lines in one backing track from this era of Del Amitri than in every top line melody I have written since. It was,of course,a crackpot idea but in my rock and roll dotage it holds a lot of charm.Whether anybody else in this age of entertainment will be so disarmed I doubt very much.It is a curiosity I hope,not a monstrosity. Too many fucking words though. Justin Currie,January 2003 - -----Original Message----- From: owner-oppositeview@smoe.org [mailto:owner-oppositeview@smoe.org] On Behalf Of Joe Brady Sent: Tuesday, February 17, 2004 5:51 AM To: wkates@hotmail.com; oppositeview@smoe.org Subject: RE: OV: First Album - The Superfecta Reissue Good Post Will. Apart from buying the CD is there any other place where we can read these notes? Cheers Gang. JJB. R.T.I.D"Dont be fooled by imitations We are the hoops that rock the nation..." >From: "William Kates" >To: oppositeview@smoe.org >Subject: OV: First Album - The Superfecta Reissue >Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2004 08:39:26 -0500 > >Just got around (finally) to listen to the new version of the first album >and want to share a few thoughts. First, I hadn't listened to this >record for some time and was somewhat surprised to realize >(remember) that there were very few hints on this set of the >songwriting brilliance that was to come. As a historical document of a >band at a certain stage of development, this is a fantastic reissue; >the inclusion of the single b-sides, especially Brown Eyed Girl is >wonderful. The best thing about this package may be the liner notes >written by Justin which not only define this recording's place in time >and musical perspective, but he verbalizes somewhat, his longstanding >love/hate relationship with his audience which I'm sure is nothing new >to anyone on this board, but it's interesting to see him touch on it, >in writing. Thanks again to Jason Fiber for a great job on this >reissue. > >----------------------------------------------------------------------- - - > >Watch high-quality video with fast playback at MSN Video. Free! - ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Find out more about the new range of Premium Web services from MSN. Click here for more information. ------------------------------ End of oppositeview-digest V6 #25 *********************************