Out of all my long term favourite bands who could still reunite with original members, REM are the ones who would prompt the most excitement. I write this because a reunion, of sorts, has taken place over the past month when all four were inducted into the Songwriters Hall Of Fame. To mark the occasion, they sat down together for an in depth interview and at the ceremony itself, reunited for a performance of ‘Losing My Religion’. That however, is almost certainly going to be that. When asked during the questioning about the possibility of any future reunion tour they all seemed resolute in their position, this is not something that is ever going to happen, no matter how much money is on the table.

They forever were a band acutely aware of the pitfalls that befall big rock bands in the 80s and 90s. Music fans first and foremost, I always thought this the one facet that gave them an edge over the competition, REM were pointedly vigilant in not becoming a U2 or such-like and only releasing new music around a five year tour cycle or stagnating as a live band with a punched in identikit set list. They rigorously pushed back these lazier trappings of the elite, especially when they themselves became part of that same club, always seizing initiatives like live rehearsal shows of new material or albums worked into shape during soundchecks. And so it seems to this day, the no-no of a lucrative reformation remains beyond the pale, you cannot expect a second opportunity to leave your legacy in a healthy place.

Michael Stipe referred in that interview to his reluctance to attend a reformed Velvet Underground back in 1993, but also acknowledged he probably regrets that decision now. I saw them too that year and definitely have no shame in taking that one-off opportunity while it was there. But it is true, they did rough ride with their own legacy a bit, no way did the Velvets do anything to enhance it with that reunion tour. It’s saving grace was arguably that it imploded before it even reached the US, but how can a band like the Velvet Underground open for U2, honestly? By refusing to go down the reformation route REM are also respecting another too often ignored universal truth, that when something has reached the end of its life span there is never a turning back. Everything has its time, a brief or, with luck, an extended period in the light when your actions and deeds are received and experienced to maximum effect, but it never lasts forever. And, when the finishing line is crossed, there is no going back. That which is gone can never return and all we can do hence forth is honour the memory and dive into the legacy with a sense of appreciation. I have been doing that very thing lately.

Enjoy the playlist… doesn’t feature any REM or Velvet Underground actually but there you go… others do…

The world of record collecting always has the capacity to throw up a wonderful surprise but if you want those moments of euphoria you must put in the hard yards. Unless you are very lucky, the occasions of uncovering buried treasure will not come about unless you have spent hours looking through boxes, shelves, attics and sheds containing titles by James Last, Jim Reeves, Ken Dodd, Val Doonican, Engelbert Humperdinck all sitting alongside a tasteless mélange of budget compilations on labels like Readers Digest, K-Tel, Music For Pleasure or indeed any outlet that put out releases with words like Hits or Chart or Pops in the titles. There are so many repeat offenders, so many mass-produced releases put out by blood-sucking music business mercenaries, the Simon Cowell’s of their day, which show up all the time in record collections of people who were purchasing vinyl between the sixties and the eighties. If you think Cowell later mastered the art of selling shit music to people who don’t give a shit about music, a glance through all too many 40–60-year-old record collections will prove that it was not a financial masterstroke of his making. And the thing is, even if in some cases an argument could be made for merit in the music, there is simply no demand for these albums on the collector’s market at all.

Val, James, Jim and Ken were selling in huge quantities because they had a massive audience among the older generation; those who had no desire to tune in and drop out in the sixties; the folks who didn’t mind the Beatles in the mop top years but had no tolerance when they started going a bit funny with drugs; the people whose only reaction to the punk racket was to express a wish to see national service brought back and the casualties in the eighties who yearned for the days when people played real instruments. Still, no two personal album libraries are the same and I was fortunate enough this month to find a box of albums in an auction with something rather special in it. At first it appeared to consist of nothing more than pristine copies of all the middle-of-the-road acts mentioned above and similar but then I chanced upon equally immaculate original copies of the first three Beatles albums. Two were regulation Mono issues (although still incredible in such ‘like new’ condition) but the third was actually a very rare Stereo pressing of their debut Please Please Me album (Stereo equipment was very much a specialist interest in 1963, almost everyone bought Mono). The first thing you look for is the label because the ultra-scarce first editions briefly came out with the old Parlophone label design with gold lettering. This was not, it had the more familiar yellow lettering seen on all Beatles Parlophone releases for the remainder of the decade. But in every other sense it was clearly a 1963 original and crucially, the sleeve was the exact same sleeve configuration seen on the original gold lettering release. Put simply, it is very rare, something of a holy grail item to some Beatle fanatics and there it was sat in the middle of an unremarkable box of bang average album titles underneath a table at an auction.

So, I put my bids in online for the following days sale (I could not attend in person) and hoped for the best, keeping my fingers crossed that no one else had seen what I’d seen. Well, I guess someone had because, even though I won the box, it still cost me over £200 and there is no way anybody was paying that sort of money for the Vince Hill albums also included. Still, an unwelcome drama almost happened when I went to pay and collect because I was close to falling foul of a dirty trick some unscrupulous traders pull at auctions. Because there are often several boxes of records being sold it is easy, during the viewing day, to maybe slip a tasty platter from one box into another on the morning of the sale so absent bidders like myself are unaware that the box they are bidding heavily on for just one collectable title no longer has that album in it. I have the auction porter to thank for that not happening to me because as I was carrying my box out (having checked Please Please Me was still in there, I’ve been stung before) he came and said “I assume you wanted that for the Beatles albums? They’re still there but they nearly weren’t. They’d been swapped into the box next door, but I spotted them and put them back.” Obviously, I thanked him effervescently, but it is a lesson worth remembering if you buy from auctions. There are so many people at these places with such a lively bustle of activity that this little sleight-of-hand can so easily occur. All is rarely fair and honest in any form of collectables trading, when money’s involved people are ruthless.

My Please Please Me with original Stereo sleeve has sold already I’m afraid pop pickers. Because of its rarity and, I won’t deny it, wanting to get as much money for it as possible I auctioned it on eBay. I was extremely happy with the price too but remember, whilst I accept the happy slice of good fortune involved, the number of Jim Reeves records I have flicked past over the years are the dues I’ve paid in full. Enjoy this month’s playlist…

Prompted by the terribly sad news of his passing this month, I have been back on a deep re-examination and appreciation of Karl Wallinger’s music. Primarily within the working vehicle for his songs, World Party, but also covering his too brief mid-eighties contributions to the Waterboys as well as the Peter Gabriel led Big Blue Ball project wherein Wallinger left as big and lasting an imprint as Gabriel himself; it is clear that we lost a notable musical force. Ironically, the overwhelming characteristic burning through if you check out old interviews and read the many tributes in the wake of his passing, is that he rarely over promoted his efforts, preferring to demur behind a very droll English line in self-deprecating wit. You do wonder if maybe just a sprinkling of the kind of self-aggrandizement (something that his former Waterboys sparring partner Mike Scott is happy to emit when required) might not have gone amiss just occasionally, he certainly had the music to back it up. Indeed, among the first to pay tribute when the news broke was Mike Scott himself remembering Wallinger as “one of the finest musicians I ever worked with” which said a lot, especially when you consider the animosity the pair had shown each other for the majority of the previous forty years.

There remains a sense of unfinished business between Scott and Wallinger, not in terms of the sniping but more in terms of how incredible the results were when they did collaborate on The Waterboys ‘This Is The Sea.’ The only joint songwriting credit between the pair, on record, was that albums dramatic opener ‘Don’t Bang The Drum’ but the role Wallinger played in the bands biggest hit from the same album, ‘The Whole Of The Moon,’ cannot be underestimated. Scott did, at times, go to great lengths in interviews to clearly state that Wallinger played no part in the writing of the piece (although I can find no evidence of Wallinger ever claiming it as his own) but that does show how much he left his mark on the recording. It is a track full of little sonic explosions, fantastically so when the lyric sings “came like a comet, blazing your trail” and the crash of a speeding collision pre-empts the first appearance of a saxophone, demonstrating how fully locked into the studio creativity Wallinger was at this point. But it would not even last to the end of that year, as the Waterboys made a left turn into the world of Irish folk music and Karl departed to form World Party with Mike blowing a farewell kiss in his best ‘How Do You Sleep’ style with a sarcastic sounding song of the same name; “climb your own peak, find a new streak, get yourself along to the World Party”.   

During the late 80s/90s period that followed, there is a compelling argument that says Karl’s band were far more in tune with the prevailing winds of the period than Mike’s. Listening today, World Party music actually sounds ahead of its time, quite something when one recalls how back then accusations of sounding a little too retro were levelled whilst all around the faux-psychedelia of the ‘second summer of love’ and the ‘daisy age’ were in full bloom and celebrated by a music press rather more impressed by sixties-referencing music if it was stitched to a dance culture aesthetic and backed by the ubiquitous funky-drummer sample. Wallinger’s genius was evident in how he recognized production values and analogue sounds from thirty years previous as the design classic they, later in the Britpop era, became acknowledged as being and simply used that as his studio canvas. He was no mere Beatles and Dylan obsessive though, the influence of Prince always loomed large in the work of a similarly gifted multi-instrumentalist who always took care of the lions share of playing in his studio work. Lyrically too, his environmental concerns can no longer be dismissed as the hippy-leaning idealism of a man indulging in too much blue sky thinking; indeed, everything he sang about sounds like front page news in 2024.

The execution on the albums he made sounds absolutely flawless today, not least on 1990’s classic ‘Goodbye Jumbo’. It really is worthy of the word ‘classic’ too, boasting a timelessness due to the creation being undertaken with zero intention of merely photocopying sounds of the past, far more realizing the sonic treatment each and every song required and it just so happens that, unusually for any record, every song is a must hear. Recordings remain bursting with untapped potential on ‘Goodbye Jumbo’ where songs like ‘Is It Too Late?,’ ‘When The Rainbow Comes’ and the gorgeous ‘Sweet Soul Dream’ are guaranteed to enjoy extended lives in the hands of TV and film producers for years to come. As messed up as the music business can seem to be, there is a satisfying tendency for the great stuff to rise to the top eventually in many cases. Karl continued to release World Party albums for the rest of the 90s and deservedly won some financial security after Robbie Williams covered his 1997 song ‘She’s The One’, something that, regardless of his mixed feelings about the cover version, he must have felt grateful for when health issues began in 2001, pre-empting only intermittent music releasing and performing activity for the rest of his life. The catalogue he did leave behind though is overflowing with wonderful music and I cannot over emphasize this enough. Occasionally a music related death stops me in my tracks with a sense of oh no, we have lost a good one here (Elliott Smith and Lou Reed spring to mind from the past twenty or so years) and this same feeling has returned with the passing of Karl Wallinger. This month’s playlist therefore has a few representations that hint at the incredible range of his legacy…

This months playlist is headed up by The Zutons, a band that I am more than a little excited to find are returning after being mostly inactive for the past fifteen years. It just so happened that my record shop took in a rare original vinyl copy of their 2004 debut album these past couple of weeks, ‘Who Killed The Zutons’, which was online for less than a day before someone had snapped it up. Luckily, before the sale and largely because there were a few surface scuff marks on the record, I had to play test it before listing it for sale. It played great and just reminded me what a stonking debut album that was twenty years ago. Hence the inclusion of a classic from that album to get this playlist started.

The new material the band are returning with sounds pretty special too if what I have heard already is anything to go by. I do recall how exciting it was when they first appeared, seemingly another classic band from Liverpool (and this was only a short while after The Coral first surfaced) already developed and producing brilliant music. I knew John Peel at the time and can remember him holding their debut album in his hands saying how fantastic the band were and complaining that record companies such as theirs no longer sent him releases like that for free so he had to go out and buy his own copy. To be fair, he probably wasn’t being sent them because they knew he would be unlikely to play it. The Zutons were a Radio One daytime playlist band from the word go and Peel was always reluctant to play much music that was already getting exposure elsewhere. Still, it is worth noting that he rated The Zutons, especially given his high opinion of other Liverpool greats and of course, he was right.

Within a couple of years The Zutons world changed indelibly when Amy Winehouse covered their ‘Valerie’ making it, almost instantly, one of the most popular and familiar songs of the decade. It is hard to not believe that this must have had a demotivating effect on the band, especially with all the financial security that singer Dave McCabe, by his own recent admission, still enjoys to this day. It could indeed be the reason that, as of today, there are only a frustratingly paltry three Zutons albums to look out for. But, that is about to change, maybe this time they can stick around for the long run…