Robert Fripp - God Save The Queen / Under Heavy Manners

Oh how I am tired. Ever woken up at one in the morning to find you might be suffering from a potentially severe sleep disorder that causes you to scream out for no logically clear reason about things that make no sense? Didn't sleep well after that, although the fact I couldn't NOT sleep means I'm not suffering from insomnia which I suppose is a good thing. Anyway, the funny part is I was listening to this very record while falling asleep which leads me to wonder if it might have affected my state. I suppose one shouldn't listen to things which might affect them but this is some good shit! Maybe I need Breathe Right strips or something.

Anyway, in the recent Bowie post I mentioned my lack of knowledge regarding Fripp and Belew and requested some guidance. I want to thank everyone who wrote me which includes Roger Camden, Stanley, Anonymous (beefheartfan) and Nathan Moore (I'll be responding to you soon Nathan!), for your advice which has been quite helpful. I've found that the King Crimson stuff really isn't my thing as it just doesn't add up for me, but Fripp's work with Eno, his productions for Daryl Hall and Peter Gabriel, his group the League Of Gentlemen and his solo records are all pretty incredible! (No Pussyfooting) kinda drags but the music is so beautiful and Fripp's later pieces with Eno are amazing. Fripp's supposed AOR trio of albums are rather good if not totally off the wall, with Peter Gabriel's PG 2 ("Scratch") probably being the most sensible of the three, Hall's falling somewhere between his work with Oates and Fripp's Zen Garden vibes, and Fripp's Exposure being totally insane to the point I have no idea how it could have been labeled AOR by anyone. Exposure is incredible though, and from there I listed to the League Of Gentlemen album which is excellent and very much of it's early eighties dance/punk era. But that's when I finally heard some solo Frippertronics recordings and fell madly in love with God Save The Queen / Under Heavy Manners, one of the only albums Fripp has not reissued since it's original release.

I haven't gotten to do much research as to why GSTQ/UHM remains unavailable, but I suppose it has something to do with Under Heavy Manners, the song, also appearing on the League Of Gentlemen album and a reworked version of The Zero Of The Signified, the album's closer, also appearing on the League album as God Save The King. It's a shame though that the Frippertronics pieces haven't been reissued as they are stunningly beautiful. I've read commentary from other listeners that many see those pieces as repetitive and boring, but for myself they were just the opposite. Relaxing, beautiful, stretching out as far as they need to, it's the type of thing Eno would be proud of. And the non-Frippertronics tracks, labeled by Fripp as Discotronics for featuring bass and percussion augmenting his guitar loops, I've also seen get bashed for supposedly not changing very often, but The Zero has all kinds of little subtle shifts before the rhythm drops out leaving only Fripp's loops, and David Byrne's vocal appearance on Manners, odd and more disjointed than usual with all the lyrics written by Fripp, is stunning. Maybe Fripp thought this album, which is clearly meant to be taken as two separate sets of recordings, was damaged by this split, but I thoroughly disagree.

After having found some low bitrate MP3s of this album, a friend on a private site (who wishes to remain anonymous) hooked me up with a beautiful lossless rip that sounds so clear it's almost not believable that it's a vinyl transfer. He also gave me the artwork and liner notes for the album which are very informative, and I decided to share these all back with you, my beloved readers! So, please enjoy this ridiculously clean rip of the God/Manners album and I hope you are just as enchanted as I am. Now I'm going to do some research about sleep disorders in my family tree.


Robert Fripp - God Save The Queen / Under Heavy Manners

UPDATE: Sorry guys, but Fripp's lawyers are becoming mighty feisty regarding his solo material. With that said, I'm not going to be posting any Fripp for a while, but I may post this again down the road as part of something special. Keep an eye peeled!

01 Red Two Scorer
02 God Save The Queen
03 1983
04 Under Heavy Manners
05 The Zero Of The Signified


PS - Gotta drop you a line and chat Michael! Thanks again for the kind words.

Talking Heads - Remixes

Happy 4th of July to everyone! Today's post is an example of what a lot of my posts this month will feature, specifically weird or rare releases that are DEAD out of print. There will be a few features on unreleased things, but I've got such a backlog of things that were released but disappeared without a trace that I figured I should get around to sharing the best of those with all of you this month.

I'm sure everyone here knows about the Talking Heads, but if you don't you should run out and buy Remain In Light, Fear Of Music, More Songs... and Speaking In Tongues immediately and IN THAT ORDER DAMNIT! But seriously, their discography is pretty damn solid over all but I'm sure anyone will agree that those releases are their high points, with Remain In Light probably being tops. Their film, Stop Making Sense, is also amazing and should be hunted down on DVD or that other format I don't support. That said, this post is for those who already know about the joys of the Heads or are fascinated with their more obscure releases.

The first of the two singles by the Heads I'm featuring here today is a promotional 7" for Houses In Motion from Remain In Light. The single was for radio play and contains mono and stereo versions of a special remix which I assume was Warner Brothers Records attempt to break the song commercially. The single doesn't contain any info on who did the remix so we can only assume it was Eno or someone from the band. It's not terribly different from the released version but it does contain extra lyrics at the end which have never been released elsewhere and the mix allows you to hear the background vocals much better than on the album. The stereo version was released commercially on the original single and has never been reissued whereas the mono version doesn't seem to have ever been commercially available. Again, not a revelation of any sort but still very cool.

The second single is for remixes of Slippery People and Making Flippy Floppy, both from Speaking In Tongues. Both remixes are credited to David Byrne and John "Jellybean" Benitez. Who knows how involved Byrne was with the remixes, he may simply have been present and gave his opinions to Jellybean, but Byrne takes his art seriously so I'm sure he was involved to some extent. As for the mixes, they are basically extended versions of the songs, although it's clear these are remixes as opposed to re-edited versions of the masters. I can imagine it being likely you could hear these at a New York dance club in the early eighties, with the call and response soul of Slippery People working great somewhere in the mix and Making Flippy Floppy, with it's truly funky bass and percussion, getting folks on the floor with ease. Making Flippy Floppy, in particular, would probably have sounded incredible on a huge disco system, as the aforementioned percussion, with it's multiple rhythms beyond the simple drum machine beat, can wake a dead man. Byrne's opening line, Everybody, get in line!, is a call to arms to get on the floor that can't be ignored!

It's peculiar to me what didn't get reissued when the Talking Heads catalog was released in the short-lived DualDisc format in 2005. For those unfamiliar, DualDisc releases were a standard CD on one side and a DVD on the other, making it impossible for you to play the disc in your car without messing up the DVD side. The DVD side almost always contained a hi-def version of the album if not a 5.1 remix, and the Talking Heads reissues delivered in that area with all of those features and music videos for each album. Regarding these singles though, I would have imagined their inclusion would have been quite worthwhile, especially the version of Houses In Motion. You could argue that the label was simply ignoring single versions or remixes which isn't abnormal, but then why include a remix of Television Man on the Little Creatures reissue? The Speaking In Tongues reissue had a rough mix of Burning Down The House as a bonus track which is great since it shows some of the foundations of the track, but if you're going to include that why not additional mixes? There was a great collection rarities and outtakes named, wait for it..., Bonus Rarities & Outtakes but it was only released digitally and still didn't feature any of the tracks in this post. I guess the people handling the band's catalog did want to see more of the stuff they'd unearthed get released, but it's a shame they couldn't have gotten releases like these mixes reissued.


Talking Heads - Houses In Motion 7" Promo

01 Houses In Motion (Remix) (Stereo Version)
02 Houses In Motion (Remix) (Mono Version)

Talking Heads - Remixes 12"

01 Slippery People (Remix)
02 Making Flippy Floppy (Remix)

Talking Heads - 1975 CBS Records Demos

The original Talking Heads lineup consisted of David Byrne, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth. Jerry Harrison didn't join until 1976, partly due to his experience in the original Modern Lovers with Jonathan Richman. They secured the opportunity to record some demos for CBS Records in 1975 but it didn't get them a contract. Just growing pains, because Seymour Stein signed them up to Sire Records shortly thereafter and the band released their first album, '77, in 1977 (what an inventive title for an album!).

These demos started circulating a few years ago, probably after having been dug out of the vaults while the TH catalog was being remastered. There are a few other interesting finds available, but most everything circulating has been released. Thirteen of these tracks are exceptions, never having been released officially in any form and showing a young but very developed band. There are some differences between these and the final versions, like the tempos of Psycho Killer and I Wish You Wouldn't Say That, but these are minor. The most notable differences are the less hearty arrangements which would come when the band's lineup was finalized and they went into the studio. It's also interesting to hear songs like Love --> Building On Fire without Toni Bongiovi's production excesses like horns or Psycho Killer without strings.

This isn't my favorite period of Talking Heads' work, but I still love these songs and it's great to study their early work closer. If you dig the Heads, give this a listen, I'm sure you'll find it interesting.


Talking Heads - 1975 CBS Records Demos

01 Psycho Killer
02 Sugar On My Tongue
03 Thank You For Sending Me An Angel
04 I Want To Live
05 I Wish You Wouldn't Say That
06 The Girls Want To Be With The Girls
07 Who Is It
08 With Our Love
09 Stay Hungry
10 Tentative Decisions
11 Warning Sign
12 I'm Not In Love
13 The Book I Read
14 Love --> Building On Fire
15 No Compassion


PS - The two tracks from these sessions which were released are Sugar On My Tongue and I Want To Live, both initially available on the two disc Sand In The Vaseline retrospective compilation. Also, for those wondering, yeah, Tony Bongiovi is Jon Bon Jovi's cousin. And yeah, while I said he brought some unnecessary elements to the '77 album, he's still a great producer and is also responsible for several of the Ramones early records. He's also responsible for getting Jon his first professional singing gig on R2-D2 We Wish You A Merry Christmas from the Star Wars Christmas album, Christmas In The Stars. There is also a Meco connection there for anyone so enamored with that man's weird-ass productions. Okay, none of that has anything to do with Talking Heads but I thought you'd find it interesting nonetheless.

Brian Eno and David Byrne - Ghosts

I have issues with the label of "world music". Something tells me that people in Africa aren't referring to American or British pop music as "world music". That said, I understand why such a generalized label exists, as many people need something simple they can use when referring to something they're not necessarily familiar with or know very little about.

Music that is foreign to one's natural culture can understandably be very interesting, and I'd be lying to say I know oodles about such things, but I know what I like. The same could be said for Brian Eno and David Byrne. While Eno was producing music for Talking Heads, he and Byrne had discussed the idea of making a music that sounded like it came from an unknown country, indigenous only to itself. With this concept they started creating the music that would form their 1980 album, My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, a collection of grooves, some rather funky and not far removed from the sound of Talking Heads, but with the major difference of audio samples from varying sources in place of vocals. It created an interesting and disorienting style unlike much of anything heard before it's release.

The road to Bush Of Ghosts' release was rather complicated, largely in part to sample clearances. Kathryn Kuhlman, an American faith healer and Pentecostal evangelist, had been sampled for a piece named Into The Spirit Womb, but her estate refused to allow Eno and Byrne to use the samples of Kuhlman, so despite the album having been finished, they returned to the studio to redo the track, now named The Jezebel Spirit, and record additional pieces. With these additional sessions completed the album was again considered finished and was released, although several tracks intended for the original version of the album had been deleted and replaced by new recordings.

In 2006, Eno and Byrne reunited to reissue the released Bush Of Ghosts with some of the recordings that never received an official release. The reissue featured extensive liner notes alongside those newly released tracks, but the Kuhlman-sampling track was still unable to be cleared leaving some people disappointed.

Well before the 2006 reissue was even considered, a bootleg named Ghosts began to circulate, featuring the original, unreleased version of the album with the Kuhlman-sampling track included as well as most of the unreleased recordings featured on the reissue, albeit in different mixes, making it an equally important part of the Bush Of Ghosts story.

Included in this version of this release is an excerpt of an interview with Brian Eno discussing the creation of the album. I'm including notes as to what the differences are between the names of the tracks in this collection and their names on the 2006 reissue as well as alternate labels. All of the mixes of the tracks released on the 1980 version of the album are the same here. I am also including two additional tracks from this era, Qu'ran which was removed from later pressings of the album due to pressure from the Muslim community due to the source of it's samples, and Garbage Disco which was the working title for the original, instrumental version of America Is Waiting.


Brian Eno and David Byrne - Ghosts
NOTE: This has been re-upped for anyone having trouble with the original rar file. If you don't want to re-download the whole thing, at the bottom of the page there is a link for track five only.

01 Interview (excerpt from Eno's February 2, 1980 KPFA-FM interview)
02 Mea Culpa
03 Into The Spirit Womb (original version of The Jezebel Spirit with Kathryn Kuhlman samples. alternate working title was Lot.)
04 Regiment
05 The Friends Of Amos Tutuola (released as Two Against Three on the 2006 reissue. alternate working title was Iron Bed.)
06 America Is Waiting
07 The Carrier (working title was Breathing Once A Minute.)
08 Very, Very Hungry (working title was Shaking With My Voice.)
09 On The Way To Zagora (released as Pitch To Voltage on the 2006 reissue. alternate working title was Cunning Tendancy.)
10 Les Hommes Ne Le Sauront Jamais (released as Number 8 Mix on the 2006 reissue. alternate working title was Late But Serious.)
11 A Secret Life (working title was In The Castle Of My Skin.)
12 Come With Us (working title was Spirit Of Prey.)
13 Mountain Of Needles

Additional Tracks:
Qu'ran
Garbage Disco (instrumental of America Is Waiting)

NOTE: Garbage Disco has been reuploaded.

REUPLOAD: The Friends Of Amos Tutuola