Morrison’s slash CD prices

Morrison’s, the UK “value” supermarket chain, has launched an aggressive discounting campaign, pricing its chart albums (eg the White Stripes’ Icky Thump and the new Clash compilation) at a challenging £7.

The prices are only available in-store – Morrison’s doesn’t sell CDs online.

Best value has to be new The Traveling Wilburys Collection, at £10. At that price, even those who bought the originals on release might now add the reissue to their collection; at £10, the extras – four bonus tracks, DVD, booklet and packaging – are probably worth having. For the fan, there’s a price point below which every Dylan product, bar none, is worth having. Wilburys at £10 is such a point.

Yet one more reason to shop at Morrison’s… .


Gerry Smith

White Stripes bonanza on BBC

BBC radio and TV are throwing serious resources at Icky Thump, the new White Stripes album. BBC Interactive and the web site are currently showing a 25 minute loop of the exciting gig the duo just recorded at Maida Vale studios, to be aired in full on Wednesday, as part of Radio 1’s White Stripes Day.

It’s not often that Music for Grown-Ups trails Radio 1 programmes, but the White Stripes are an exception: they’re the future of rock music. Or, maybe, its last, dying gasp? An unmissable band, White Stripes have now released half a dozen splendid albums for grown-ups.




www.bbc.co.uk/radio1


Gerry Smith

This Week’s Rock for Grown-Ups on TV

Thanks to compiler Mike Ollier

Friday/Saturday/Sunday on BBC2/BBC3/BBC4 at various times

* Glastonbury Festival
Well, glad I'm not there… crack a warm can open (preferably Fosters or some other equally pissy 'beer'), sit in the shower with a gro-bag, invite a burglar into your home, drop an E or two and have some felafel. Watch on TV. Ah, the festival experience in your own home, and a handy, safe toilet. There, I've saved you a few hundred quid and you haven't contracted trench foot.

You'll have to check times yourself, cos it's on all weekend across three channels (and some radio coverage), but on Friday you'd be a fool to miss Arcade Fire. Amy Winehouse is promised and some loud wannabes. Probably. John Fogerty and Iggy Pop are promised on Saturday.

However, you'll also have to put up with a bunch of entirely unnecessary celebrity presenters, who just get in the way of the music. One can only hope that professional good egg Mark Radcliffe is introducing/interviewing the more watchable performers.

Friday BBC1 22.35 ~ 23.35

* Friday Night with Jonathan Ross
Arcade Fire play live tonight. Knowing the Beeb it will probably clash with their appearance at Glastonbury on one of their other channels. Tape Wossy (Pete Doherty is also a guest tonight… oh good), miss out all the crap (most of the show) and see the last 10 minutes. How can Ross be so awful on TV but present a corker of a radio show on a Saturday?

Saturday BBC2 21.300 ~ 22.30

* Seven Ages Of Rock: Left Of The Dial ~ American Alternative Rock
REM, Nirvana, Pixies et al… fast/slow quiet/loud ad nauseam. I do hope that nice Courtney Love is on.

Leonard Cohen set to tour?

Leonard Cohen’s portrait on the cover of new issue of The Word, following loads and loads of recent UK press, makes me think that we’re about to see Leonard touring England - after such a long break.

He can’t surely be doing the press rounds in support of the slightly expanded reissues of the first three albums, or Anjani, his companion’s, new album of Leonard material. There simply has to be a bigger picture.

I’ve never seen Lenny live, but, then, who has? He hasn’t toured – anywhere - in 14 years…

If, like many grown-ups, you’re excited by the interface where pop culture (rock) meets high culture (literature), Lenny is certainly your man.

Watch this space…

And don’t forget – Lenny is on BBC Radio 2 tonight at 1930 BST, talking about songwriting. As Mike Ollier wrote on Monday:

Friday Night Is Music Night Presents Leonard Cohen On Songwriting - The Word's Mark Ellen laughs with Len and quizzes him about his most famous songs and how he wrote them. Hopefully BJs, Janis and The Chelsea Hotel will turn up.


www.bbc.co.uk/radio2



Gerry Smith

Traveling Wilburys Collection: worth buying?

If you already have the two Traveling Wilburys albums, should you bother with the new Traveling Wilburys Collection, released on Monday? Well, for about £14 in your supermarket/online, you get four extra audio tracks, five DVD tracks, and a short book. Worth buying, then? Maybe. Probably. Just.

If you didn’t buy the albums first time round - what were you thinking of? These vastly enjoyable good-time romps should be in the collection of any half serious rock fan.

The two Traveling Wilbury albums were cherished on initial release by Dylan fans as a sign that, after the multiple disappointments of the 1980s, Uncle Bob might not be quite ready for the scrap heap. Alongside Biograph, Oh Mercy and Bootleg Series vols 1-3, the Wilbury albums presaged a return to form.

Track Listing:

Disc One
TRAVELING WILBURYS VOL. 1
1. Handle With Care
2. Dirty World
3. Rattled
4. Last Night
5. Not Alone Any More
6. Congratulations
7. Heading For The Light
8. Margarita
9. Tweeter And The Monkey Man
10. End Of The Line
Bonus Tracks:
11. Maxine*
12. Like A Ship*

Disc Two
DVD - The True History Of The Traveling Wilburys
Music Videos:
1. Handle With Care
2. End Of The Line
3. Inside Out
4. She’s My Baby
5. Wilbury Twist

Disc Three
TRAVELING WILBURYS VOL. 3
1. She’s My Baby
2. Inside Out
3. If You Belonged To Me
4. The Devil’s Been Busy
5. 7 Deadly Sins
6. Poor House
7. Where Were You Last Night?
8. Cool Dry Place
9. New Blue Moon
10. You Took My Breath Away
11. Wilbury Twist
Bonus Tracks:
12. Runaway (B-side to “She’s My Baby” UK CD and 12”)
13. Nobody’s Child (previously released on Nobody’s Child: Romanian Angel Appeal)

*previously unreleased



Gerry Smith

The Best Of Van Morrison, Volume 3 – impressive duets, disappointing solo material, puzzling timing

The Best Of Van Morrison Volume 3, released yesterday in the UK (and in the USA on 19 June) is a 2CD album with 31 tracks, dating from the early 1990s to mid-Noughties, including previously unreleased collaborations, as well as duets with greats like John Lee Hooker, B.B. King and Ray Charles.

If you don’t have an extensive Van Morrison collection, the new release – available online from £8.95 delivered – is an impressive round-up of Morrison’s multifarious outings with some of the greats of postwar blues and soul music. Highlights? The Junior Wells and Hooker duets – both spellbinders.

But for this formerly heavy duty Van consumer, CD2 (see below) illustrates just how The Man’s art has careered uncontrollably towards pop pastiche/showbiz/showband in the last ten years, jettisoning former hardcoristas like me along the way. You couldn’t give me most of the solo tracks on CD 2: I’d have dropped them all, in favour of more duets.

The timing of the release, a bare four months after At The Movies, the last EMI Catalogue compilation of Morrison tunes, is puzzling, too. Presumably it’s a new contract and the label wants to maximize its return - rapido. They won’t get much help from me - I haven’t bought a new Van M album this Millennium, and Best Of Volume 3 won’t change that.


Disc 1
1. Cry For Home (with Tom Jones) (previously unreleased)
2. Too Long In Exile
3. Gloria (with John Lee Hooker)
4. Help Me with Junior Wells (live)
5. Lonely Avenue / 4 O' Clock In The Morning (with Jimmy Witherspoon, Candy Dulfer & Jim Hunter) (live)
6. Days Like This
7. Ancient Highway
8. Raincheck
9. Moondance
10. Centerpiece (with Georgie Fame & Annie Ross)
11. That's Life (live)
12. Benediction (remix) (with Georgie Fame & Ben Sidran)
13. The Healing Game (re-mix)
14. I Don't Want To Go On Without You (with Jim Hunter)

Disc 2
1. Shenandoah (with The Chieftains)
2. Precious Time
3. Back On Top (remix)
4. When The Leaves Come Falling Down
5. Lost John (with Lonnie Donegan) (live)
6. Tupelo Honey (with Bobby Bland) (previously unreleased)
7. Meet Me In The Indian Summer (orchestral version) (remix)
8. Georgia On My Mind
9. Hey Mr. DJ
10. Steal My Heart Away
11. Crazy Love (with Ray Charles)
12. Once In A Blue Moon
13. Little Village
14. Blue and Green
15. Sitting On Top Of The World (with Carl Perkins)
16. Early In The Morning (with B.B. King)
17. Stranded



Gerry Smith

Waterboy Mike Scott interview in new Bowie fanzine

Tirelessly promoting Book Of Lightning, the new album, Mike Scott, Head Waterboy, has been turning up all over the media. But nowhere as surprising as the Bowie Zone Fanzine (www.bowiezone.net), the impressive new unofficial website celebrating the art of the great chameleon art rocker.

Scotty fans will love the interview. Bowie followers will want to check out this lovely new site. Grown-up rockers will get a double buzz.


http://www.bowiezone.net/11343/98901.html



Gerry Smith

Bob Marley’s Exodus – 30th anniversary

Exodus, the quintessential Bob Marley album, first released 30 years ago, has been treated with respect by record label Island/Universal.

Having released re-mastered single CD and De Luxe 2CD versions in 2001, Island have just released no fewer than five 30th Anniversary versions of the great album: single CD, CD/DVD, vinyl LP and – here’s the interesting bit – CD/SD memory card version and CD/USB memory stick version.

The CD/DVD combo looks like the pick of the crop.

Exodus: Bob Marley and The Wailers, a new book (ed Richard Williams, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, £25), published on Thursday, gathers together a collection of articles on the seminal album. Looks interesting.

Bob Marley’s Exodus, Sunday’s Arena programme on BBC2, was disappointing. It made the schoolboy error of playing the album tracks under a series of ill-chosen, unrelated contemporary news clips. And compounded the error by inserting an endless series of inconsequential comments on the album by anonymous wo/men in the street.

The leitmotif of clips from a ceremony dedicating a plaque on a block of flats off London’s Tottenham Court Rd., where Marley briefly lived, was the most squirm-inducing bit of TV I’ve seen for ages.

The Arena documentary was nowhere near as good as three earlier Marley TV documentaries I have on VHS tape: largely unwatchable; a missed opportunity.


Gerry Smith

Major new Paul Weller photo exhibition

Birmingham’s Snap Galleries is notching up some top rock photography exhibitions. Following a top quality Doors show, they’re about to host first major exhibition of Paul Weller photographs, by Lawrence Watson.

Thanks to Guy White, Gallery Director, for details:

Modern Rock ‘n’ Roll - Paul Weller - The Solo Years: The photographs of Lawrence Watson. Saturday 7 July 2007 to 8 September 2007


Lawrence Watson’s first major Paul Weller exhibition to be held in Birmingham

Snap Galleries, a gallery specialising in rock ‘n’ roll photographs, will host a major exhibition of photographs from Lawrence Watson’s renowned Paul Weller archive starting on Saturday 7 July 2007. Snap Galleries is based in a 2,000 sq ft space in Fort Dunlop, one of England’s most recognisable buildings, just outside Birmingham.

The exhibition focuses on Paul Weller’s entire sixteen year (and counting) solo career, a period photographed in its entirety by Lawrence. He first photographed Paul Weller in the last days of The Style Council, and is still photographing him today.

In January 2007 he flew to New York to shoot the three consecutive concerts Paul held play songs from The Jam, The Style Council and his solo period.

Lawrence’s photographic credits do the talking - his work appears on most of Paul Weller’s albums and singles, and his photographs documenting the first few years of Paul Weller’s solo career were published in the 1995 book ‘Days Lose Their Names And Time Slips Away’.

Perhaps Lawrence’s most instantly recognizable image is the silhouette of Paul Weller strumming his guitar in a doorway with a dappled summer scene in the background, used on the cover of 1993’s ‘Wild Wood’. The exhibition features this and a feast of other work, none of which has been exhibited before.

As a video director, Watson also made the acclaimed ‘As Is Now’ DVD documentary, which will be screened regularly throughout the exhibition.

A Thousand Things: the exhibition coincides with the publication of ‘A Thousand Things’, the forthcoming luxury limited edition book by Genesis publications, which covers Paul Weller’s career from The Jam to the present day, and features Lawrence’s photographs alongside images by many other photographers. The book will be available to purchase at the gallery throughout the exhibition.

Snap Galleries Limited, Fort Dunlop, Fort Parkway, Birmingham B24 9FD
www.snapgalleries.com; email: info@snapgalleries.com

Opening Hours: Tuesday to Friday 10.30am-6.00pm, Saturday 11.00-5.00pm


Further background on Lawrence Watson

Lawrence Watson was 17 when he hustled a freelance job at the NME. His first commission was a portrait of a group called Southern Death Cult, who later became The Cult, and whose singer, Ian Astbury, replaced Jim Morrison when The Doors reformed.

He was soon shooting covers on a regular basis. His first was not a musician but a comedian-turned-film star - Eddie Murphy was in town to promote Beverly Hills Cop when Lawrence persuaded him to leave his hotel suite and travel to Bow Street police station, where he posed him beside a pair of London bobbies. For NME he shot, amongst others, The Smiths, David Bowie, KLF, BB King, INXS, Madness and Neneh Cherry.

He shot Lenny Kravitz in Bar Italia, Michael Jordan in his San Antonio dressing room, Snoop Doggy Dogg in a California police cell, and Bobby Womack in what looks like Berwick Street fruit-and-veg market.

More recently Lawrence worked with the artist Peter Blake to photograph the ‘Stop the Clocks’ album cover for Oasis. Lawrence had shot the cover for their album ‘Don’t Believe the Truth’, and accompanied Noel Gallagher on his warm-up gig in Moscow for the Teenager Cancer Trust concerts.

As a video director he has worked with Cast, Echo and the Bunnymen, One Dove, Ian Brown, Travis and, of course, Paul Weller.

For further background on Paul Weller: www.paulweller.com

Background on ‘A thousand things’, the forthcoming limited edition book by Genesis Publications: www.genesis-publications.com