From: owner-alloy-digest@smoe.org (alloy-digest) To: alloy-digest@smoe.org Subject: alloy-digest V7 #189 Reply-To: alloy@smoe.org Sender: owner-alloy-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-alloy-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk X-To-Unsubscribe: Send mail to "alloy-digest-request@smoe.org" X-To-Unsubscribe: with "unsubscribe" as the body. alloy-digest Monday, September 16 2002 Volume 07 : Number 189 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Alloy: Silent but still there-ish... [] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 14 Sep 2002 09:38:06 +0300 From: Subject: Alloy: Silent but still there-ish... Hi all, it is Saturday and I'm stuck at work under a mountain of work which is threatening to swamp me completely but I read with interest the discussion about GAOW and as there are some new members asking about the evolution of that great album I thought I would dig out the interview that I did with Thomas a while back and post the bits about GAOW for your reading pleasure: This was made about a year and a half ago now the Beatnik offices in San Mateo,CA. Jon: Lem Bingley made a comment, another from 1997, about the 'Golden Age Of Wireless' cover. Like many people, he considers it to be quite a piece of pop-art. I have a strong connection to both of them actually. He asked is it you in the background with the nurse in the wheelchair because you can't really tell? What's the story behind that cover? Thomas: The idea for the album cover initially was that we would originally just set up some lab equipment and shoot that, and we then decided that we would abstract it one more layer by turning it into to a sort of comic-book. Then in the process of having an artist hand colour the print we were going to have to re-photograph it; and in the studio it was set up on a rostrum, and we were trying different lighting effects, seeing whether we wanted to have a frame around it or have some kind of context to it. Then we decided that we wanted to have a sort of reflection in it, and it just got more elaborate as time went on and the reflection... I think the photographer had the idea of me sort of watching. I said that if it is me in the same timeframe then it won't make any sense, but if it was me looking back from much later, then that would make sense; so the concept was me as an old man being pushed by a nurse, and the nurse was his assistant. Interestingly enough there is a tie-in with a later song there as 'I Live In A Suitcase' when I do the voice in the middle section... 'going over the falls in a barrel...' that is the same character. That is me aged eighty-nine... Jon: The 'Golden Age Of Wireless' has got so many different versions... What happened? Thomas: Oh God... I completely lost track...other people are much more familiar than I am, Lazlo Nibble for example. Here's a sort of potted history of it. All of that album I recorded in a basement studio in South London. We went somewhere else to mix it, to a different studio in North London, and by then I had written a couple of new songs including 'Windpower' but all of the things with the band on, like 'Commercial Breakup', the guitar version of 'Radio Silence' and so on, that were played live with a three piece band were originally done in this South London studio. The more sequenced ones like 'Flying North' and 'Windpower' were done at the time of mixing so I kept adding new songs in; I finished the album with 'Urges' and 'Leipzig' on it and released it in the UK where there were a couple of singles off it; 'Europa' and 'Radio Silence' then 'Airwaves', which were the three singles that came out and they each had a video. The US company, Capitol, picked it up and released it over here as well and it got some fairly good reviews; it had the same running order etc. but had a different cover which was the 'Europa' cover from the Galileo set, but aside from that the running order was the same. So they released it over here and it sold about ten copies but got a couple of quite good reviews in important places. While this was going on the record company in the UK, after three singles didn't want to release any more singles from the album so they said they I should start to do some more stuff; so I went into the studio and recorded 'Science' and 'Submarines' and in the UK they released ['She Blinded Me With Science'] as a single. The American company heard those two songs and saw the video for 'Science' and felt that this was a lot more commercial than anything on the album so they put together a mini-LP, 'Blinded By Science' which had 12" versions instead of the other versions of five songs. At the time a mini-LP was eligible for the Billboard Charts but it was a promotional thing with rock-bottom prices. They paid me a royalty and basically gave it away to get a chart position and more radio-play. It was actually the most successful mini-LP of all time because shortly after it this format was deemed not eligible for the album charts anymore and they stopped making them. The mini-LP had done very well and by this time the video ['She Blinded Me With Science'] was getting played a lot on MTV and it was getting a lot of dance-club play and radio-play... they didn't want to just give away this mini-LP and not make any money on it so what they did was take 'Science' and 'Submarines' and repackage 'Golden Age Of Wireless' taking off 'Urges' and 'Leipzig', which were the oldest and replacing then with the new songs. Meanwhile, back in the UK, after 'Science' did really well decided to go back to the album and release 'Radio Silence' by which time I was getting into programming and sampling stuff and I felt that the guitar version was way too "rockist" as we say... Jon: There are many people who love it! Thomas: ...it didn't seem right for me to be releasing something like that at this stage in my career because I was so much more into programming and I just couldn't relate to it. So I decided to go back into the studio and do a sequenced version of 'Radio Silence'. I think between that it accounts for most of the mish-mash but frankly I lost track of what version were released where. A global record company like EMI don't always ask your permission or even fill you in; they have their own agenda. One of their regional companies will say, "we could sell this album if we... changed the order around or if we used a different version" and so on and so I completely lost track. Jon: It really has got quite a history hasn't it. Thomas also told in the interview that EMI own the rights to all the material of that era and so what he can and cannot do is limited by what they are feeling like on the day... Shame. BTW. I have had zero time to post recently but a few things have come to my mind when reading the posts on the net. 1. The shirt company that used Thomas' song titles as name for the fabrics: I wonder if they have considered 'Windpower' underpants, ('shorts' to those over you on the other side of the atlantic.) 2. When the discussion was ongoing about what ringing tones people have on their phones it caught my eye. Some of you will already know that I am a bit of a Luddite when it comes to ringing tones and usually keep the line that a phone should sound like a phone. i.e. ring-ring. Living in Finland where there are considerably more GSM connections than people and those people predominantly have the latest and greatest monophonic screeching of some crap pop-tune as their ring, it can get VERY annoying. I recently started using the Nokia 9210 and have used a 20 second WAV file of Lissu's version of I love You Goodbye as my default tone. It is wonderful and for those of you that don't know it you should really check it out. It raises many questions when people hear it and they often say, "no! don't answer it yet, I'm still listening!" Maybe I should be paying Lissu a royalty every time the phone rings! Greetings from Finland! Land of the Gin and Tonic monster ;-> (Hi Lissu!) Cheers all, Jon ------------------------------ End of alloy-digest V7 #189 ***************************