VIA PRESS RELEASE | Island Records, Interscope, and UMe today announce the 20th Anniversary reissue of U2’s global smash hit album All That You Can’t Leave Behind. This multi-format anniversary edition release, featuring a brand new 12-track remaster of the record, and a 51-track Super Deluxe box set is to be released on the actual date of the 20th anniversary, October 30, 2020. The anniversary also sees the release of an acoustic version of “Stuck In A Moment You Can’t Get Out Of.”

​All That You Can’t Leave Behind is the tenth studio album from U2. Released in October 2000, the original 11-track record included the hit singles “Beautiful Day,” “Stuck In A Moment You Can’t Get Out Of,” “Elevation,” and “Walk On” and went to Number 1 in 32 countries around the world. Produced by Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno and recorded in Dublin and France, All That You Can’t Leave Behind won 7 Grammy Awards, including Best Rock Album, and is the only album in history to have multiple tracks win the award for Record Of The Year (“Beautiful Day” in 2001 and “Walk On” in 2002).

The brand new remaster of the album is available as a 12-track version and includes an additional track “The Ground Beneath Her Feet” in all formats of the reissue.

Super Deluxe Box Set highlights include:

• A 32-page hardback book from longtime friend and collaborator Anton Corbijn featuring many previously unseen images of the band along with hand-written notes by Anton, plus a double-sided poster.

• 39 additional bonus tracks, including remastered B-sides (“Summer Rain,” “Always,” “Big Girls Are Best,” “Don’t Take Your Guns To Town”).

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | The Style Council was emblematic of its creator. Paul Weller, smart, fearless, audacious, with a social conscience totally unafraid to push the possibilities of pop. With their generous slew of U.K. chart hits, The Style Council were one of the defining pop bands of the ’80s. And they didn’t need big hair to get there.

​And now, finally Long Hot Summers—the long-awaited and eagerly anticipated definitive career anthology teaming with all the greatest hits and more is released on October 30th. Named with a nod to the band’s biggest hit, Long Hot Summers is endorsed and co-compiled by Paul Weller himself. As well as the huge U.K. hit “Long Hot Summer,” the album also includes the band’s sterling debut top 5 U.K. single “Speak Like A Child” as well as other masterpieces such as the languid “You’re The Best Thing,” “Ever Changing Moods,” and dance floor filler “Shout To The Top.”

Long Hot Summers includes two unreleased tracks—an intriguing demo of the U.K. top 5 single “My Ever Changing Moods” with strings, and the extended, 5-minute plus version of “Dropping Bombs On The Whitehouse.” Of course, it also includes all the band’s classic singles—12 U.K. top-20 hits—including the debut single “Speak Like A Child” and the utterly sublime “Long Hot Summer.” The album also features key album tracks and fans’ favorites such as “Headstart For Happiness” (full tracklisting below).

Long Hot Summers features rare photos, an introduction by Paul Weller, a new essay by Lois Wilson, and sleeve-notes from ‘super-fan,’ actor Martin Freeman. The album was remastered at Abbey Road Studios.

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“When I was 12 years old and listening to the last bands on the long tail of hair metal on cassette, my brother and I had a nanny whose boyfriend played in a hardcore band. I did not know what that was, but he correctly saw a potential convert in me and brought over a crate of LPs and seven-inches of bands I’d never heard of — Gorilla Biscuits, Cro-Mags, Quicksand, Minor Threat. Immediately I didn’t want to listen to Use Your Illusion II anymore and wanted more of this.”

“We went to ReConstruction Records on East 6th St. and I’m pretty sure I bought Bad Religion’s “Atomic Garden” 7” ‘cause I liked their name it had the artwork etched into the B-side of the record. After that I took the subway downtown to ReCon every Saturday, desperately not wanting any of the people who hung out there to find out that I was a private school kid from the Upper West Side. Years later came the slow reveal that they were all private school kids from New Jersey and Long Island.

The shop was volunteer-run and I started working there on weekends. Every Saturday I would buy a few seven inches and maybe an LP based on whatever people were listening to at the shop. The era of punk just before Green Day hit was in retrospect a very strange time for indie music in that we were very elitist (major label records were verboten, but not The Clash or XRaySpex—anything that was old and/or British was exempt) but also very accepting and big-tent musically; the punk community was too small an ecosystem to not include everything independent under its banner.

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Paul Collins was in what he calls, “the greatest band that never was.” As an integral member of California’s first power-pop trio, The Nerves, Collins was an early architect of a sound that wasn’t quite punk or new wave, it was power pop, but it was more: it was 24 carat rock and roll. Their music was so tight, well crafted and full of youthful energy and spunk that Blondie chose to cover The Nerves’ song, “Hanging on the Telephone” on their massively successful Parallel Lines album; in fact, it was the lead-off track. Today, Parallel Lines has sold somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 million copies; anyone who ever put a needle down on side one of that record had to hear a Nerves song first.

TVD’s Radar returns with part 2 of our interview with rock and roll hero, Paul Collins who joins us to talk about his new book, I Don’t Fit In: My Wild Ride Through the Punk and Power Pop Trenches with The Nerves and The Beat.

The last time we visited with him, we discussed the exhausting quality of being ahead of your time, the benefits of having Eddie Money on your side, and receiving mixed signals from Blondie. This time around, we’ll get into what power pop is—and isn’t—that old place MySpace, being a rock and roll dad, and how you’re never fully dressed without a smile.

Evan Toth is a songwriter, professional musician, educator, radio host, avid record collector and hi-fi aficionado. Toth hosts and produces The Sharp Notes each Saturday evening at 6pm and TVD Radar on Sundays at 5AM on WFDU, 89.1 FM. Follow him at the usual social media places and visit his website.

Rising from the same sleazy L.A. punk scene that spawned the shock antics of the Germs and Black Randy and the Metrosquad, the Go-Go’s did the most shocking thing imaginable–they waved farewell to the infamous Plunger Pit and set out to become pop stars.

The Go-Go’s began life as a traditional punk band. Scene maker Elissa Bello’s take on vocalist Belinda Carlisle was “she couldn’t sing,” while fellow scenester Pleasant Gehman declared, “Charlotte [Caffey, the band’s lead guitarist] was the only one who really knew how to play.” But despite such limitations, by 1981 the Go-Go’s were looking at a chart-topping success with their chipper and polished to a sheen debut LP, Beauty and the Beat. One can only wonder what Darby Crash would have made of the unfailingly chipper quintet, but the New Wave kids thought they were just swell.

“We Got the Beat” is, of course, the song the Go-Go’s will best be remembered for; it’s happy-go-lucky pop froth in the great tradition of Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” The Bangles’ “Manic Monday,” and Katrina and the Waves’ “Walking on Sunshine.” The band’s other timeless tune is the perky who-cares-what-they think “Our Lips Are Sealed,” which evokes early Madonna and is every bit as dance party friendly.

And the great tunes kept coming. The appropriately titled “Get Up and Go” brings Bow Wow Wow to mind, while “Head Over Heels” is tuff girl ear candy. On the jaded “This Town” the Go-Go’s strike a rare dark note–the City of Angels may be the destination of the fame hungry, but the song strikes a cautionary note–”We’re all dreamers, we’re all whores/Discarded stars/Like worn out cars.” The Go-Go’s may—as they boast in the song—own L.A., but you have to wonder if they want to.

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We’re extending our Labor Day break through this week. While we’re away, why not fire up our free Record Store Locator app and visit one of your local indie record stores, either online, curbside, or with some sound social distancing?

Perhaps there’s an interview, review, or feature you might have missed? Catch up and we’ll see you back here on Monday, 9/14.

VIA PRESS RELEASE | On October 9 via Domino, the singular Robert Wyatt will release His Greatest Misses—a compilation spanning his decades-long career—on vinyl for the first time ever.

​His Greatest Misses acknowledges that Wyatt’s career has taken place outside the limited space and definition of commercial pop success, but simultaneously recognizes that Wyatt’s non-careerist career has nevertheless proven both productive and rigorous. The collection, originally released as a Japanese edition, includes selections dating from Rock Bottom (1974) to Cuckooland (2003), although its running order is non-chronological. This makes the subtle point that Wyatt’s recordings are best considered as a non-linear catalog—a world through which the listener can move at any pace in any direction.

The compilation showcases many of Wyatt’s musical abilities, particularly his favored technique of allowing his serpentine keyboard melodies to intertwine with his voice, vividly present in the opening bars of “Sea Song.”

Across the nineteen songs present, His Greatest Misses pays tribute to Wyatt’s much noted gift as an interpreter of other songwriters’ material—most notably, Chic’s “At Last I Am Free,” and Clive Langer and Elvis Costello’s “Shipbuilding.” The latter, along with Wyatt’s cover of Neil Diamond’s “I’m A Believer,” originally made popular by The Monkees, placed him in the Top 40 singles chart.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Three pioneering synth-pop classics from Dan Lacksman’s 1970s catalog will be reissued on vinyl, CD, and digitally on October 23 via Real Gone Music, featuring the albums Dan Lacksman and Electronic System: Vol. II (both from 1973) and 1974’s Electronic System: Tchip Tchip (Vol. 3).

​In the early 1970s, Belgian recording engineer and synthesist Daniel Lacksman née Lanckmans recorded and released a series of pop music records, using early analog synthesizers as a central sonic element. Under an admittedly confusing array of names, Lacksman (who later founded the group Telex) created music that was equal parts innovation and ear-candy accessibility. Those often happy-go-lucky records gained some popularity throughout Europe, but their lasting influence can be heard in the music of Portishead, Massive Attack, The Moog Cookbook, and Air. And a casual survey online quickly reveals that these records are among the most collectible of their kind, with original copies commanding hundreds of dollars.

Real Gone Music is finally reissuing and restoring three pioneering Euro synth-pop classics from Lacksman’s 1970s catalog: Dan Lacksman and Electronic System: Vol. II (both from 1973), and 1974’s Electronic System: Tchip Tchip (Vol. 3) (also released Germany as Skylab). Though Moog-based electronic sounds would fall out of musical fashion in the 1980s, with the dawn of MIDI and digital technology, modern-day listeners and musicians alike have been rediscovering the music of Lanckmans and his peers; all three albums – as well as Lanckmans’ other records of that era and beyond – have been widely sampled by 21st century artists.

Real Gone Music’s reissues (which will also be available for streaming) have been mastered for LP and CD from the original tapes by the composer himself, and feature liner notes by Bill Kopp that include exclusive quotes from Lanckmans and photos from his private archive.

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Pop Quiz: A hippie is anyone who’s anyone who’s ever: a) stood by the side of the road holding a sign that reads “Will Work for Tofu? b) been rushed to the hospital with tie-dye poisoning , c) emerged from the womb wearing a peace symbol, d) expressed reverence for all living things, including rocks e), kept all of their wordly possessions in a small cloth satchel beneath their Mexican poncho or f) all of the above.

If you guessed f) you’re correct, which brings us, in a roundabout way, to Country Joe and The Fish. Aside from the Grateful Dead, these furry freak brothers were perhaps the shaggiest of the bands residing in the psychedelic garden of Eden that was San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury District, which would soon be packed 50 flower children per square foot and a necessary stop for tour buses filled with straights eager to gawk at the colorful animals in the face-painted zoo. (“To your left,” says your guide, “you will see trio of “trippies” smoking what they call a “twist of zoot.”)

Led by Joseph Allen “Country Joe” McDonald and Barry “The Fish” Melton, Country Joe and the Fish were a vital force in the musical culture of the time, but they haven’t aged well. The vast majority of people who weren’t around when the Age of Aquarius collided head on with the increasingly violent protests against the Vietnam War would be hard pressed to name a single one of the band’s songs, aside (perhaps) from “The Fish Cheer/I-Feel-Like-I’m/Fixin’-to-Die.” I guess you could you say this puts Country Joe and the Fish in the odd position of being one-hit wonders whose one hit you’ll never hear on the radio.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | On October 23, 2020, UMe will release Beastie Boys Music, a 20-song collection covering the GRAMMY® Award winning and multi-platinum selling Beastie Boys’ recording career.

​The collection is a companion piece to the critically acclaimed documentary Beastie Boys Story, currently nominated for 5 Emmys®, and the group’s best seller Beastie Boys Book, which ascended to #1 on The New York Times Best Sellers List—topping both the Nonfiction Print Hardcover and Nonfiction Combined Print & E-Book Best Sellers charts. Beastie Boys Music will be available digitally, on CD and as a 180gram 2LP vinyl set and can be pre-ordered here.

Beastie Boys Music features 20 Beastie Boys classics spanning the band’s 30+ year career including “Fight For Your Right,” “Brass Monkey,” “Paul Revere,” and “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” from their Diamond-certified 1986 No. 1 debut Licensed To Ill, “Shake Your Rump” and “Hey Ladies” from their 1989 reinvention Paul’s Boutique, and “So What’Cha Want” and “Pass The Mic” from 1992’s multi-platinum Check Your Head, which hit Top Ten on the Billboard 200 chart.

Also included are “Sure Shot” and “Sabotage” from 1994’s Ill Communication, which saw the band return to No. 1 on the Billboard 200, “Body Movin’” and the universal smash hit “Intergalactic” from their GRAMMY®-winning 1998 No. 1 album Hello Nasty, “Ch-Check It Out” from 2004’s To The 5 Boroughs, which marked the band’s third consecutive Billboard No. 1 debut, as well as “Make Some Noise” and “Don’t Play No Game That I Can’t Win” from 2011’s critically acclaimed Hot Sauce Committee Part Two, which reached No. 2 on the Billboard 200.

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