Music purchases and rumination

It is cool and yet sunny; a proper English summer’s day. I haven’t seen one of those in ages.

I didn’t want to get up this morning. Bed was warm and comfy and even with the radio on and singing to itself at the far end of the room, I was quite happy to lie there and doze. As it is, I got into work a few minutes late and as a consequence I am drinking black coffee because I didn’t have time to nip into Sainsbury’s and buy milk. Well, I could have found the time, but I actually had breakfast before coming out this morning so I didn’t want a sandwich and it seemed pointless breaking into the last fiver in my wallet for milk and a news paper. I can get both at lunchtime. Also it means that I will have, for the first time in years, managed to get through an entire working week on no more than a fiver a day.

After years (literally) of prevarication I have ordered three early Beatles albums on CD. The first two, Please Please Me and With The Beatles plus the rather less good Beatles For Sale hastily recorded and released for the Christmas market in (I think) 1964. I bought these albums years ago on vinyl, but I have resisted buying them on CD before now because of the prices EMI seem determined to charge for them. Those early albums rarely had as much as a half hour’s music on them in total, so frankly I refused to pay full price for them (plus the music is over 40 years old, now). I was looking at prices online yesterday and found that dvd.co.uk have got some good deals going on. At £6.49 each p&p free, they are more than £1.50 cheaper than from Amazon who include postage, and £2.50 cheaper than Play.com who don’t. So I thought “What the Hell…” and bought them.

That’s my Beatle collection properly up to date now for the first time in over twenty years, at least as far as the original releases go. What with the red and blue albums, the three Anthology releases, Let It Be (Naked) and Love I doubt that there’s anything left out there in the form of alternative recordings that I haven’t got on one of the albums or another. I don’t need alternative compilations or any of the US releases; the music is the same, just in different running orders and selections. Except of course, The Beatles Live at the BBC and perhaps The Beatles Live at the Hollywood Bowl (if it hasn’t been deleted). That latter release will have to be very cheap as the recording quality is most impressive mainly for the crowds at the height of Beatlemania as it is for the band’s performance.

I am not much interested in early demo recordings beyond the Decca sessions and the Tony Sheridan releases and these are on the Anthology discs anyway. Early bootlegs just make the Hollywood Bowl stuff sound as though they are recorded with digital clarity, so I guess that means just one more purchase before the inevitable “Scraping of the Barrel” album which will doubtless arrive sometime shortly after EMI post another year’s fall in profits and Heather Mills takes Macca for several dozens of the millions he made before she was born…

Music purchases and rumination

It is cool and yet sunny; a proper English summer’s day. I haven’t seen one of those in ages.

I didn’t want to get up this morning. Bed was warm and comfy and even with the radio on and singing to itself at the far end of the room, I was quite happy to lie there and doze. As it is, I got into work a few minutes late and as a consequence I am drinking black coffee because I didn’t have time to nip into Sainsbury’s and buy milk. Well, I could have found the time, but I actually had breakfast before coming out this morning so I didn’t want a sandwich and it seemed pointless breaking into the last fiver in my wallet for milk and a news paper. I can get both at lunchtime. Also it means that I will have, for the first time in years, managed to get through an entire working week on no more than a fiver a day.

After years (literally) of prevarication I have ordered three early Beatles albums on CD. The first two, Please Please Me and With The Beatles plus the rather less good Beatles For Sale hastily recorded and released for the Christmas market in (I think) 1964. I bought these albums years ago on vinyl, but I have resisted buying them on CD before now because of the prices EMI seem determined to charge for them. Those early albums rarely had as much as a half hour’s music on them in total, so frankly I refused to pay full price for them (plus the music is over 40 years old, now). I was looking at prices online yesterday and found that dvd.co.uk have got some good deals going on. At £6.49 each p&p free, they are more than £1.50 cheaper than from Amazon who include postage, and £2.50 cheaper than Play.com who don’t. So I thought “What the Hell…” and bought them.

That’s my Beatle collection properly up to date now for the first time in over twenty years, at least as far as the original releases go. What with the red and blue albums, the three Anthology releases, Let It Be (Naked) and Love I doubt that there’s anything left out there in the form of alternative recordings that I haven’t got on one of the albums or another. I don’t need alternative compilations or any of the US releases; the music is the same, just in different running orders and selections. Except of course, The Beatles Live at the BBC and perhaps The Beatles Live at the Hollywood Bowl (if it hasn’t been deleted). That latter release will have to be very cheap as the recording quality is most impressive mainly for the crowds at the height of Beatlemania as it is for the band’s performance.

I am not much interested in early demo recordings beyond the Decca sessions and the Tony Sheridan releases and these are on the Anthology discs anyway. Early bootlegs just make the Hollywood Bowl stuff sound as though they are recorded with digital clarity, so I guess that means just one more purchase before the inevitable “Scraping of the Barrel” album which will doubtless arrive sometime shortly after EMI post another year’s fall in profits and Heather Mills takes Macca for several dozens of the millions he made before she was born…