Monday 24 November 2008

Day four of my stinking cold here: today I didn't so much throw in the towel as pick one up, spending the afternoon at the baths with Greg, where we agreed to swap harmony lessons for violin overdubs. Speaking of overdubs, you can hear the results of last Wednesday's kitchen session on my myspace page.

I caught some of the coverage of the 40th anniversary of the Beatles White Album over the weekend. When I was discovering that music 20 years ago or thereabouts with the help of Mark Lewisohn's 'sessions' book, getting hold of the original mono mixes was pretty much impossible unless you were very lucky and came across a very expensive mono copy at a record fair (or as I did last year, a cheap one in a jumble sale). Now thanks to P2P, you can find it all very easily, not to mention alternate mixes, outtakes, demos, you name it. Given that the Beatles records constitute some of the most influential pop music of the last century, it's quite incredible that EMI haven't released the mono versions commercially yet: it's the mono mixes that the Beatles largely concerned themselves with at the time. Anyway, the White Album is one of those records that you put on and think 'come on, half of this is just a mess' and then you find yourself humming all the tunes for days afterwards and realise how good it is. Unfortunately it opened the door to lots of lesser talents making similarly undisciplined records at great expense: that'll be the 1970s then.