Category: Vinyl

Marillion – Script for a jester’s tear (1983)

So here I am once more

Oh my, how I adore this album. Marillion’s debut album from 1983 may very well be the best debut album of all time. I mean which album could challenge? Maybe this is an interesting post someday, challenge to “Script”… Who? Bowie, Floyd, Beatles, Genesis…? There are so many to consider. But that’s for another day.

Let me start with the cover. Just as with “Misplaced childhood” this cover makes me lose myself in fantasies about a strange world. The jester bearing the artist Mark Wilkinson’s face, the room with the painting of the scary lady, the albums on the floor (I see you Pink Floyd), the chameleon that wouldn’t turn up until the next album. Everything is so interesting!

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Neil Young – Tonight’s the night (1975)

Please take my advice

I am not often in the mood for Tonight’s the night. It is too bleak and depressing, all about dead friends. The overall feeling of the album is as black as the cover. Rest in peace Bruce Berry and Danny Whitten.

Often an album is greater than the sum of its parts. For this album it is quite the opposite. The overall feeling I get is mostly sadness or maybe it is melancholy? But, there are some great songs on there nevertheless.

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Neil Young – On the beach (1974)

Seagulls out of reach

The first studio album after the huge success of “Harvest” has always been a sore toe to me. I missed it when I started to listen to Neil, and then it was not released on cd for a very long time. I have felt that it has been underappreciated by me, and my feelings of guilt is real. Because I really like it. It’s a stellar album.

The whole album has a dreamy feeling. The lyrics are great with the title track in the front row. The world is turnin, I hope it don’t turn away.

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Pink Floyd – The piper of the gates of dawn (1967)

The crazy diamond shone

I find it funny that there seems to be so much prestige in which incarnation of Floyd we fans love the most. Many pretentious fans love Syd’s Floyd but that is not me. Of course, I came in late, in the early eighties, and I have always enjoyed David’s singing and his heavenly guitar playing. I guess if you were there at the time, in the middle of the sixties, and followed the band when it started it would have been something else. Syd was the musical and artistic leader of the band back then. Already during the development of the second album they transformed into a five-piece and then to a quartet again, now with less Syd but a Dave added. Syd burnt out like in the song by Neil Young.

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David Bowie – The ‘Mercury’ demos (2019)

Dear Record Company man

How many releases from the “Space oddity” demos era can there be? This is getting absurd!

The Bowie estate has run amok with this. During 2019, celebrating 50 years since these recordings, they have released three super expensive vinyl things and one slightly less expensive 5-CD box. There has been a 4-vinyl singles box, a 3-vinyl singles box and one vinyl LP box with fancy packaging. I don’t care for singles, it is only a mess to change the speed on the turntable, and I thought the “The ‘Mercury’ demos” box was way too expensive. But I also have this OCD, I am a compulsive collector, and in the end, I needed to have it.

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David Bowie – Glastonbury 2000 (2018)

The nice jacket

The Bowie estate is releasing a lot of concerts nowadays, six live albums since the beginning of 2017! It’s great and I love it. Hard for my bank account, but good stuff for my vinyl collection on the shelves. Glastonbury 2000 was released last November. It’s taken from a short summer tour David did in 2000. I was looking forward to this live show from June 25th as I love the BBC show recorded two days later, on the 27th, that was released on the special edition CD of the “Bowie at the Beeb”.

This was Bowie’s first return to the Glastonbury Festival since 1971, as told by Bowie from the stage. Bowie seems to have been in a really good mood and the band is great. The double LP contains 22 tracks. The older songs are stronger than the newest ones, but that is no surprise, I guess.

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Neil Young – Songs for Judy (2018)

“The Joel Bernstein tapes” redux

Bootlegs have always been a big part of my love for Neil. He has always been good at playing songs in different versions. It may be with different bands, in different genres or moods, performed acoustic or electric and so on. One of the holy grails of Neil boots was “The Joel Bernstein Tapes”. It was a private tape of favourite performances of the acoustic solo parts of The Neil Young and Crazy Horse tour late 1976 recorded from the mixing desk by sound technician Joel Bernstein.

In his Archives Performance Series these old live shows are released in chaotic order. It is a joy to be still alive to be able to experience all these releases. I love it and I give Neil two thumbs up for his generosity. And “Songs for Judy” is one of the better.

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