Spot on Brian. I think about Bowie's music as four separate periods.

Pre-69
Embryonic. Learning the ropes, but some nice tunes and worth dipping into now and then.

69-74
Hard to be critical about this era. Everything was either good, great or brilliant. Surely not a coincidence that Ronno was around for most of this time.

75-79
Looking for new directions; some classy innovative material and some crappy disco rip-offs that missed the mark for me. Station to Station, Low and Scary Monsters all brilliant in their own way. Young Americans slightly less so. Heroes and Lodger were fairly mixed bags with some great stuff but the first signs of lazy songwriting creeping in.

Post-79
Mainly forgettable crap. The only reason any post-79 songs appear in collections is because the record companies can't say, "Look David,you've been shit for 30 years so the answer is no!"

N/P Bowie - 3 CD Platinum Collection. Guess which CD is in virtually mint condition?
Mick

Jesus and Mary Chain night:

Honey's Dead
Stoned and Dethroned

Mick

Listening last night - Joe Bonamassa Live At The Albert Hall

Guests included Eric Clapton and Paul Jones, but I don't think he really needed them. This is a great double disc and takes you to the gig - you can feel the power of the guitar throughout.

Not always "the same old blues" Joe shows how you can play some slightly unusual stuff and still get the feeling.

Recommended.

G

Listening to Dark Side of the Moon -- unlike 2/3rds of the world, I never actually bought a copy of this until recently, so picked up the remastered version. Sound quality is good, I suppose, but it brings up a couple of points in the dark side of my mind:

1. LPs never had to be remastered. The quality of the LP was always there, it just depended on the quality of the system. I'd be interested if somebody played the original LP, the remastered CD, and if the LP still didn't sounded better.

2. If Pink Floyd wants to reissue their CDs for a better listening experience, include some better smoke than I had the first time I heard these albums back in the 70s.

As I said, I never bought the album to begin with, so it was a good purchase, I think enough has been said about the album over the years. But I don't think I'm going to get the remastered CDs of Wish You Were Here or Animals. Seems to me to be more marketing than anything.

Amazon are doing their Black Friday week this week - limited amounts of items at supposedly huge discounts for a short period - most good stuff goes within a minute - some within seconds. Anyway, today they had the new complete Pink Floyd remastered box set for £70 instead of something like £130. All copies were gone before I saw it, but then I researched a bit to see if I would have bought if I had the opportunity and decided no.

Reading reviews, even a lot of the die hard fans criticised the whole thing as a marketing scam. Not particularly special packing and nothing significant in this remaster compared to the last remaster were common themes.

G

I guess if you're going to remaster old blues records to get rid of the pops and hisses, I'm all for it. But remastering CDs which were fine to begin with just doesn't seem to be justified, unless you have really high-end equipment, and then you probably have a turntable anyway, so the LPs are the way to go. Friggin Parsons recorded Dark Side with what at the time was state of the art equipment, and I just don't see much improvement, except maybe in some of the background voices. If I haven't owned the album and want to pick up a remastered copy, fine, I did it with London Calling, but I don't need to spend an extra $100 just to hear some outtakes from rehearsals.

sometimes outakes exist because they are exactly that - not as good as the "in" take - the one chosen.

However sometimes there is some really good stuff to be found from the stuff left behind - I recently posted about Carl Perkins Put Your Cat Clothes On - a stormer 50's rockabilly that waited until 1970 before it saw the light of day.

G

Surfing You Tube, currently listening to Left Banke do Walk Away Renee. I love stuff like this.

Hanoi Rocks - All Those Wasted Years

Mick

Laika and the cosmonauts.....cool surf type music

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pIRrVe3 ... re=related

Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds

OK, the guy is a one-trick pony... but he has the trick down pat... enjoyable enough / on par with the later Oasis albums which I quite liked.

Spot on Hookway, I like the single, it's very good, very old school, so it's very me.

No airplay over here... which song is the single?

Anggun, Echoes. I've always been a little back and forth with her. The first time I saw her was back in the '90s on late night T.V. David Byrne introduced her, didn't have a clue who she was, and she did this incredible version of Bowie's Life on Mars which blew me away. Got her debut CD over here in the states, it had some good stuff on it, but you kinda wanted more. Then I watched as she went back and forth from diva to Asian pop star to french diva, and kept thinking there was more here than what was being shown. Then saw her with Peter Gabriel doing Don't Give Up, and thought, yeah, that's the ticket, that's more of what I saw that first night. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URkq7XeZvek. And then back to the diva thing. This new CD is sorta the same way. You hear this great stuff on there and think, god, what she could do, then you hear the diva stuff and think, well, if that's what she wants to do, ok, but I'm not into that. I honestly think if somebody like Andy York got hold of her and produced her, she could be incredible. She does look damn good, though (IMHO).

Leslie West...Unusual suspects

I've listened to this album a few times now and I really like it. Leslie plays all of the rhythm work and lays down some nice solos. His playing is not as fast as on some of the blues albums he's released, but he squeezes the s**t out of each note he plays. It sound great,especially when compared to guests like Zack Whylde, who's shredding solo seems totally random when compared to Leslie's Basie like solos. And his voice is better than ever. There are a couple of really nice quiet songs too.