Date: Sun, 25 Apr 93 04:00:08 CDT From: numan@cs.uwp.edu Reply-To: numan@cs.uwp.edu (Gary Numan) Subject: Gary Numan Digest V1 #29 Gary Numan Digest Sun, 25 Apr 93 Volume 1 : Issue 29 Today's Topics: Foxx : 8 years ago Musical Tastes (was Re Gary's direction) Some news - rerecordings/tour 93 dates/new cars cover Yet another Foxx/Numan connection ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 23 Apr 93 09:28:57 PDT From: dlangs%sunstroke@sdsu.edu (Derek Langsford) Subject: Foxx : 8 years ago To: numanews@cs.uwp.edu >From wet!ken@netcom.com Mon Apr 19 23:53:47 1993 Date: Mon, 19 Apr 93 23:09 PST From: wet!ken@netcom.com (kenneth stuart) Subject: Foxx ; 8 years ago Hello, First, I thought I'd add another connection between John Foxx and Numan: Billy Currie played keyboards for Numan on one of his tours; Billy Curries was the keyboardist for Ultravox; Foxx was the vocalist for the first few Ultravox albums :-). Actually, this is more of a connection than it sounds because there was probably some sort of influence there - in one direction or the other (or both). There are definitely similar elements.... With all due respect to Gregor, I think the "nostalgia" analysis is wrong. I read this all the time from the current 18-22 year olds who think that the albums recorded within the last year or two, are automatically as good as those recorded in past years (a view shared by all artists who have recorded within the last couple of years :-) ). In reality, I think that what is recorded is affected by what is going on in the culture at the time and especially by the music business. Periodically, a new sub-genre of music appears. The record companies have no idea about what the fans like about this new sub-genre, so they have no choice but to rely on the tastes of the fans. The result is that a lot of innovative artists get heard. Eventually, the artists start repeating themselves, and at the same time, the record companies identify an overall sound to the sub-genre that is NOT the essence of it :-). This allows them to put forth all sorts of pseudo-artists who sound like the new music. This fools some of the people, and the more discriminating just go back to buying older recordings they previously may have overlooked :-). IMHO, you see this in 1964, 1967, 1969, 1972-3, 1977, and 1980-3 . [ie those are the dates of more innovation; the record companies reacted in the periods in-between] Cheers, Ken ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 23 Apr 93 09:26:15 PDT From: dlangs%sunstroke@sdsu.edu (Derek Langsford) Subject: Musical Tastes (was Re Gary's direction) To: numanews@cs.uwp.edu >From awrc@dcs.ed.ac.uk Mon Apr 19 05:48:30 1993 Date: Mon, 19 Apr 93 13:40:18 BST From: Al Crawford Subject: Musical Tastes (was Re Gary's direction) > From: island!paris!greg@uunet.UU.NET (Gregor Torrence) > > Now let me go out on a limb here and risk offending everyone on the mailing > list. Have you really liked any albums by anyone in the last eight years? I'd have to say a definite "Yes" to that - I'd also go along with your hidden subtext by saying that there's not been nearly as *much* that I've liked around since, oh, about 1983, but I still find enough new stuff to keep me going (well, as long as there's a steady stream of new-to-CD back catalogue releases too). The only real difference has been that while the period 1978-1982 saw my musical tastes roughly paralleling what was popular at the time, since then one of us (either the general public or myself - I reckon the former, the general public has no taste :-)) has veered off, leaving my musical tastes stranded somewhere between the esoteric, the nostalgic and the ridiculous. > I have no idea what the ages of people around here are, but it seems to > me that somewhere between the ages of 18 and 22 most people seem to get > their taste in music stuck on what ever was in style when they were that > age. Hmmm. Nope. I'd say that my own observations do tally to a degree - at some point people's tastes seem to stick - but I think the age it occurs at is much more variable. Personally speaking, I'd place that time for me around 1981 - when I was 13. Since I put this down to the fact that back in 1981 I listened to pop music on the radio almost non-stop, I'm inclined to put it down to people's tastes fixing at a time when suddenly they're exposed to a lot more music, or when they suddenly find music that they relate to or can feel "ownership" of. In my case I went from listening to almost no music at all to listening to my local radio station for 8 hours a day and the fact that at that time the "mainstream" was pretty varied so I was hearing a good variety of music. It's possible that the 18-22 you observe is due to people suddenly being exposed to more music when they leave school and go to university (leave high school and go to college for those of a USAn disposition). Having only relatively limited experience of life in the radio-saturated US though, I can't do more than hypothesise. Oh, a brief aside - my wife, prior to moving here from the US, bought a couple of CDs in the "Rock Of The 80s" series. One of these discs includes Numan's "Cars". After listening to it a couple of times, I just couldn't figure out what sounded so *wrong* about it. Eventually it clicking, and I reached over to the equaliser, figuring that my wife had turned the bass up. She hadn't. In fact, every single track on the CD had been remastered with truly ghastly amounts of pumped-up bass. My wife informed me that the songs all sounded OK to her and we eventually concluded that the CDs had been remastered due to US FM radios tendency to be bass-heavy by comparison with its European equivalent (not for technical reasons though - it's just that they like it that way :-)) What do the other readers of the list think of the practice of remastering material in this way to suit a particular market? I was personally somewhat puzzled, since it seemed to me it would have made more sense to master it accurately and let the listener fiddle around with the precise amount of bass. As it is, I find much of the CD approaches unlistenability ("Here in my car, I feel safest of all..."). > Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to be insulting. Don't worry, it's not taken as an insult. I'd be the first to admit that my musical worldview revolves around the very early 80s. > I'm just suggesting that you conisder your own receptiveness to new music > when you evaluate it. I do, I do. Although the early 80s are very much "my" period, some quick pummelling of my on-line list of the album-length CDs I own reveals the following statistics... Year # 1974 2 1975 2 1976 2 1977 6 1978 7 1979 8 1980 16 1981 22 1982 25 1983 15 1984 26 1985 27 1986 27 1987 24 1988 42 1989 41 1990 52 1991 50 1992 47 1993 8 So, apart from the fact that I don't own many CDs of music dating from earlier than the late seventies, there's no obvious bias in my collection towards any particular year. The imbalance between the late 80s/early 90s and the other years has more to do with record companies back catalogue release programmes having rather mistreated the early 80s in favour of Baby Boomer Approved (tm) eras in music :-) > Is your music collection full of 8-10 year old recordings, or by at least > by artists who have been around that long? Yes. Call it premature fogeydom but a lot of the "new" groups coming along have very little appeal for me - faceless dance acts, "rebellious" trendy indie guitar groups who're pretty much retreading the same turf that indie guitar groups have been treading since the dawn of time. Yawn. I'll stick to what I know I like and pick the good bits out of the new stuff, thank you very much :-) One interesting note though (and one that will hopefully drag this lengthy reply back into Numan territory so that Derek doesn't start ticking me off for wandering off-topic) is that while the early 80s synth-pop/new romantic period is to date the only musical fad/genre for which I've felt any real affinity (*), I didn't actually get into Numan's music until 1990 or so. Sure, I *remember* when he had his hits back in the late seventies and early eighties but while I loved "Are `Friends' Electric?" his other hits from that period (in particular "Cars") left me completely cold. I'm not sure whether it was his voice (which I've never been blown away by) or the media attention that surrounded him at the time, or even his image, but at the same time I was making enthusiastic noises about Ultravox, John Foxx, New Musik, the Human League, Visage, all that lot, I completely ignored Numan. It was only in 1989 that I got around to buying a Numan compilation CD and discovered that miraculously all the songs that annoyed me back in 1979/80 were suddenly new And exciting. Fortunately, the Alfa "Asylum" sets made it quite easy to become an Instant Numanoid :-) I'd say this same retrospective approach, where I rediscover an artist I used to dislike or find one that I missed first time around, is true of a lot of the listening I do - much of my back catalogue purchasing is material I wasn't aware of at the time of its original release. > The occasional mention of John Foxx/Ultravox, Depeche Mode or Kate Bush > makes me think that is the case with many of us. (BTW those are three > artists I like a lot too.) Or that people who like Numan like similar artists (which all of the above except Kate Bush are)? Then again, I do have other theories (**) While I'm mentioning Foxx - latest info is that only the first two Foxx solo albums (ie the ones that sold well first time around) are being re-released by Virgin, but with bonus tracks. *Hopefully* the _Metamatic_ disc will include "Miles Away", thus prompting me to post something vaguely quizlike to Numanews to give the readers a brief moment's entertainment. (*) It's true, honest! Had I been 16 or 17 in 1981 instead of 13 I'd probably have been a New Romantic, terrible dress sense and all. Born after my time . (**) Namely that the reason people in this list spend more time talking about these artists than others, and praising early Numan whilst deriding his later work is that the early 80s were Intrinsically Better and that this can be scientifically proved by the simple observations that Kraftwerk's "The Model" was number 1 on my 14th birthday and that back then videos were much more entertaining too. It's true! Compare todays videos, which seem to fall into one of two categories (Bland concert footage or heaps of computer trickery to prop up a bland song) with all the wonderfully bizarre and vacuous imagery of early 80s videos by the likes of Ultravox, Visage and Lufthansa Terminal! I'm off for a lie down and a cup of tea. -- Al Crawford - awrc@dcs.ed.ac.uk Department Of Computer Science, The University of Edinburgh Rm 1410, JCMB, Kings Buildings, Mayfield Rd, EDINBURGH, EH9 3JZ, Scotland Tel: +44 (0) 31 650 5165 Fax: +44 (0) 31 667 7209 ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 23 Apr 93 09:21:45 PDT From: dlangs%sunstroke@sdsu.edu (Derek Langsford) Subject: Some news - rerecordings/tour 93 dates/new cars cover To: numanews@cs.uwp.edu >From bhammond@zephyr.cair.du.edu Thu Apr 22 12:14:41 1993 Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1993 13:11:20 -0600 From: "BRIAN D. HAMMOND" Subject: Some news Just got a letter from one of my UK pen-pals. She writes that on the latest hotline message, Numan says he is considering releasing compilation albums in the future that have different mixes of old songs rather than releasing the old songs again in their original versions. The tour dates for this fall are: 30 October at Oxford, 31 Oct. at Manchester, 1 November at Bristol, 2 Nov at Guildford, 4 Nov at Portsmouth, 5 Nov at Cambridge, 6 Nov at London. Finally, a new version of Cars, done by someone other than Numan should be released this week. Me! I Disconnect From You ---------------------------- Derek here: I hope to get my 93 membership materials soon (my fee went in with the White Noise/Shadow Man order of which I have no news yet). Will these mixes be up to date or different mixes from when the songs were originally recorded. If it is alternative versions of old songs recorded at that time then it may be a welcome thing indeed. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 23 Apr 93 09:34:55 PDT From: dlangs%sunstroke@sdsu.edu (Derek Langsford) Subject: Yet another Foxx/Numan connection To: numanews@cs.uwp.edu While we are dealing with John Foxx and his connection with Gary I have noticed yet another one. The connection is Zeus B. Held. He produced a few tracks for Foxx in his Golden Section period and also did the 'E' Reg. Model version of Cars (pretty good job IMO). When I get time I will write something on Gregor's message of last week but keeping on top of the digest moderation is all I can do at the moment. Have a good week. Derek Derek H. Langsford dlangs@sunstroke.sdsu.edu Dept. of Biology, Tel. work +1 619 594 2885 San Diego State Univ. San Diego, CA 92182, USA ------------------------------ End of Gary Numan Digest ******************************