What Are You Listening To?

Dusty Springfield

Guadalcanal Diary

Can’t remember when I last listened to them it’s been years. What a run of four albums they had and as always their lyrics, hooks, etc are well embedded in the brain cells.

kosmo wrote:
Guadalcanal Diary

Can’t remember when I last listened to them it’s been years. What a run of four albums they had and as always their lyrics, hooks, etc are well embedded in the brain cells.

Their live album "At Your Birthday Party" is worth seeking out. One of the best "club" sounds I've ever heard captured.

Justin wrote:

kosmo wrote:
Guadalcanal Diary

Can’t remember when I last listened to them it’s been years. What a run of four albums they had and as always their lyrics, hooks, etc are well embedded in the brain cells.

Their live album "At Your Birthday Party" is worth seeking out. One of the best "club" sounds I've ever heard captured.

Will do back when such things were around I belonged to their fanclub…

Ceu

Had no idea she was still active..

I think multiple forumers would dig this album…

The Beatles' final song "Now and Then," (well the Video about the making…which is very cool)
https://youtu.be/APJAQoSCwuA

now and then… it does absolutely nothing for me, doesn't even sound like a beatles track…

kosmo wrote:
now and then… it does absolutely nothing for me, doesn't even sound like a beatles track…

true, only thing I liked is how they were able to pull john's voice from that crappy demo with the panio

Serious amount of fluffing going about this track..

and occasional solid commentary on it

but James Skelly of The Coral basically nails it

“We’ve isolated Lennon’s vocal and it sounds great”

“Let’s put a really loud annoying rim shot over it and compress the fuck out out of it”

https://x.com/JamesSkellyBand/status/1720082699019522379?s=20

and honestly the only reason I listened to it today is someone referred to as a 90s Power Pop band trying to sound the like the Beatles.. not really getting that, i guess the piano is really throwing me off…

another engineering/producer said it's basically been turned into the prefect Dolby Atmos demonstration track

of course this song was nixed by george the last go around

Kirsty Maccoll - Galore

This comp has some real high points but her vocals always shine.

Yeah… George made the right call nixing that track.

Songs like free as a bird, real love and this aren’t real Beatles songs no matter how many dozens of people work on them and how many instruments Paul overdubs on the demo Lennon left behind. Just horrible stuff.

Yoko put out at least two Lennon solo albums in the 80s with the better stuff he left behind so we are really scraping the barrel here….

Nobody Told Me is such a great Lennon song
I keep forgetting Double Fantasy came out in 1980

Yes it is…although not sure about his faux accent…reminds me of Phil Collins on illegal alien. Nobody told me was one of those leftovers put out on Milk and Honey in 1983.

you really should frame that album

kosmo wrote:
now and then… it does absolutely nothing for me, doesn't even sound like a beatles track…

here was a deep dive with a lot of context


Andrew Hickey
Thoughts on "Now and Then"

I couldn't post the whole thing…
The message exceeds the maximum allowed length (20000 characters).
So I broke it into two posts

As I assume everyone here knows, yesterday the Beatles released what was billed as "the final ever Beatles record", "Now and Then", a record made largely by Paul McCartney and Giles Martin, using as its basis a John Lennon demo tape from the late seventies, and also including some minimal guitar strumming from George Harrison from a brief attempt the three then-surviving Beatles made at finishing the track up in the mid-nineties, along with a newly-recorded drum track and backing vocals from Ringo Starr/

It is of course possible that there will be future Frankenstein-Beatles records, because there *do* exist a handful of recordings featuring Lennon and Harrison together that McCartney and Starr could theoretically overdub on, though those have been released already – I joked on Bluesky yesterday that they could do a version of "How Do You Sleep?", because both Lennon and Harrison are on that – and I could imagine a world in which some Let It Be-era outtake or something was polished up and finished, though the most obvious choice, "Watching Rainbows", was recorded without Harrison and so wouldn't fit the posthumous rule of the track having to feature all four Beatles. But given the age of the participants, and the legendary difficulty of getting any decisions at all through Apple Records, we have to assume that this really is it, the last new recording by the Beatles that will ever come out.

There's a lot to say about this, as a result, and so I thought I'd do a post here. If you haven't heard it yet,
you can find the audio at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW55J2zE3N4 . I'd recommend listening to the audio-only version, rather than watching Peter Jackson's video for the track, which is astonishingly misjudged and appears to have soured several people who enjoyed the track on it retrospectively.

The first thing to say is that this is an immense technical achievement. But by that I don't mean the flying in of Lennon's vocal. Extracting the vocal from the piano part no doubt required a great deal of processing power, but it's ultimately just a question of using demixing technology that's been around a fair number of years. Throw enough processing power at the job and it's relatively straightforward, and no different from what's been done to create the new stereo mixes of various sixties records (including the Beatles' own records, but also things like the recent reissue of the Beach Boys' Sounds of Summer compilation). It's not quite something that you can do on your phone right now (or actually maybe it is if you have a better phone than I do), but it's something you'll be able to do in five years' time on your phone.

Incidentally, people have been talking about this as "AI" and it's caused some confusion – this is not "generative AI", the kind of large language models and plagiarism engines that are being promoted everywhere as the latest wonderful breakthrough by the exact same shysters who five minutes ago were promoting NFTs and Bitcoin as sure-fire ways to become extremely rich. Lennon's vocal here, what there is of it, is an actual recording of actual John Lennon, not something that's been generated by a machine.

Rather I'm talking about the technical *songwriting* accomplishment by which Paul McCartney has made, if not a silk purse then at the very least a perfectly serviceable handbag, out of something considerably worse than a sow's ear.

Because despite all the worry that comes along with things like this, I think while this may be the worst of the three Beatles reunion singles, it's in some ways the most artistically justifiable, and it's also more ethical than a fair number of recent Beatles releases.

To get the ethical question out of the way first, consent is important in all things, and obviously a dead man can't give consent to how his work is used, and that should worry people. But on the other hand it should worry us in *all* uses of a dead person's work. Would Shakespeare really consent to the film of Romeo and Juliet with Leonardo diCaprio in? Even passively keeping dead people's work available without alteration is an active choice being made about their work by others without their explicit consent.

In the case of this track, like the Beatles reunion tracks from the nineties, I don't think there are any ethical qualms to be had about its consumption. Lennon's widow, his son, and the people who were his three closest friends for much of his adult life, all said "we think he would have wanted this". They may certainly be wrong about what he might have wished, or have self-serving reasons for thinking that, or be lying about what they really think, but between them they undoubtedly knew Lennon better than anyone else, and certainly better than someone like me who never met him. If they all said "it's what he would have wanted", who am I to argue?

And I actually think this is far more ethical than many current decisions by the Beatles and others which go unquestioned (and to which I contribute financially as much as anyone – I am nothing if not a hypocrite). Since 2017 it has slowly been becoming difficult or impossible to find new copies of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Let It Be, Abbey Road or Revolver, as those albums were originally released. (Oddly, the White Album, despite also having had the deluxe set treatment, seems immune to this). If you buy those albums on CD or vinyl now, what you're getting isn't the original album as released in the 1960s in either mono or stereo, but a modern remix by Giles Martin, a man who wasn't even born until after all those albums were recorded.