Reading about the totally different tracklisting on the cassette version of City to City just now (look, it’s my day off, don’t judge me) I was reminded of my mate Giff’s recent purchase of the original UK vinyl version of Crowded House’s debut album, which someone at EMI (unbelievably) thought would sound better if it didn’t start with – side one, track one – Mean to Me. Then I remembered that Snowy White out of Thin Lizzy plays the solo on Pink Floyd’s Pigs on the Wing but – get this – only on the 8 Track version!
I wonder if any of our correspondents can recall similar anomalous format-related A&R diversions which might delight the, ahem, Massive?
“Nope – put the single on side one, move that one to the middle of side two”
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Much as I love The Pretenders’ first album, who thought of putting the singles as the last track of side 1 and all the rest on side 2?
What? You object to the album opening with Precious!
That is an absolutely great opening track in my book.
No objections. But another 5 tracks separating Precious and anything a civilian would recognise.
New Order’s Substance has differences across the LP, Tape and CD formats.
Perfect Kiss i edited on the CD, but the full version on vinyl and tape.
And there’s other oddities too
It’s just the sort of thing you expect Factory to do
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substance_1987
See also Heaven 17’s Endless and Costello’s Girls Girls Girls (I refuse to reproduce his absurd punctuation)
I had (probably still have in the attic) NO’s Substance and Low-Life in those fabulously elegant boxed double-cassette versions Factory did for a while – NO’s were white, Durutti Column’s were red, I can’t remember the others, but they were packed with various remixes & B-sides, great value at the time…
ACR’s were blue. I am very dull.
Not for me, big guy. Not for me.
Apropos of weirdly differing tracklistings, @Twang and I were only yesterday comparing various versions of the Hall & Oates compo called “Rock ‘N Soul Part 1” – so far we have discovered that we both own differently sequenced versions of this CD, with a slightly different number of tracks in either case, and we’ve also spotted that the dodger’s CD listing illustrates a third variation of track inclusions.
As Discogs lists 103 diffferent versions of this album (yes, that’s one hundred and three) across all available formats, we won’t bother looking any further into this particular mystery. However, if this is anything to go by, one suspects there may be oodles of examples out there, with some much more mystifying than others.
Splendid work!
Quintessentially Afterwordian. The whole comment could be on one of Junes’ XXXXLLLL Fat Bastard t-shirts.
Was (Not Was) had two different versions of “11 Miles An Hour” on the CD and Cassette editions of “What Up Dog?”. I think the track order was altered to make the two sides of the cassette closer to the same running time too. I can’t be arsed to get my big cardboard box of cassettes down off the top of the bookcase to check that. It was fairly common for album running orders to be changed on cassette editions, to give sides of roughly equal lengths.
The original CD issue of Snap (titled Compact Snap) lopped off 8 tracks – basically the B Sides and album tracks.
Apart from Smithers-Jones, which I’m guessing was kept so Bruce Foxton got the same royalty payment as the pukka album.
Was very common to change running order to equalise the sides in order to save 0.2p worth of tape or something. This was particularly common in the 70s.
However there does seem to be some willful carnage going on. I always thought Please Please Me opened with Misery! Brilliant opener on vinyl I Saw Her Standing There is relegated to 5th.
https://www.superdeluxeedition.com/reviews/the-beatles-vinyl-remasters-1-please-please-me/
The cavalier throwing-things-at-a-wall approach of the Beatles’ albums post-60s was replicated in fiction. The Bond novels, republished in the 1970s and beyond, were often served up in “will this do?” covers. It’s only in the last 20 or so years when this has been rectified.
Why didn’t people at EMI or Penguin etc. think that work so redolent of a particular era (and of such huge importance) shouldn’t have that era or vibe accurately replicated?
I knew that should be the case at the age of 14.
Quite simply, EMI used to re-order albums on the cassette version to get the two sides as close as possible to the same length so that they would use less tape and not have a long blank run out on one side.
They quite simply shouldn’t have done it until the technology caught up.
Why not make one side of the tape longer than the other? Hey presto!
Because then one of those little cogs inside the cassette would have to be bigger than the other one, and the carrying case would be all lop sided.
I wrote that above but it wouldn’t explain why e.g. Misery moved from track 2 to 1 on side 1 of Please Please Me and I Saw Her Standing There went from 1 to 5 on same side. Further research (google) reveals that they were actually divided into sections of 4 equal lengths for 8 tracks and this is what was reproduced initially on cassettes.
Odd then, that these sticklers for tidiness and resource-saving released The Beatles’ red compilation on two pricey CDs when the whole show would have comfortably fit on one..
That was a contractual obligation thing. The contract said that because the original was a double, any subsequent reissues would have to be doubles, too.
But on the Crowded House LP they’ve simply moved Mean to Me from track one on side one (where it was on the original NZ/Aus release) to track four and kept all the other (reordered) songs the same.
The 1990s Elvis Costello compilation Girls Girls Girls was issued with different selections on LP, CD, MC and DAT. There’s a handy chart on the Wiki page if you wish to compare and contrast.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girls_Girls_Girls_(Elvis_Costello_album)
Because I’ve been taking lessons in Dullness from @FentonSteve I copied it into Excel and can say that there are 64 tracks in total. The CD has 47 (9 of which do not appear on any other format), the LP has 30 (none of them unique, but 2 of them only share a listing with the DAT), the cassette has 51 (15 of them only on the cassettes), and the DAT has 31 (the same listing as the LP but with 1 track which isn’t on the LP but is on the CD and cassette versions).
Tracks from King of America are especially subject to being added or omitted apparently on whim.
I’d got my first CD Player around 1990 and was looking to buy Girls Girl Girls because it had Girls Talk on it.
Nah … not buying the tape. I think I bought MC5 and LedZep 3 instead.
For Peter Gabriel’s “So”, “In your Eyes”:
– was the first track on side 2 of the LP.
– was the final track on the CD
– was the final track on the 45 RPM half-speed remastered version of the LP.
Explanation from the Red Shark News website:
“The half-speed version of ‘So’ corrects for the first time on vinyl the problem with the running order — one of those original limitations that Gabriel refers to — that the original record ran into.
Gabriel had always intended ‘In Your Eyes’ to be the closing track on the album, but there was just too much bass for it to be cut near the centre of the disc. So it was swapped with the slightly quirkier ‘This is The Picture (excellent birds)’ recorded with New York-based avant-garde artist Laurie Anderson.
Which was all very nice, but did slightly rob the album of a proper closing track.
“I always wanted ‘In Your Eyes’ to go at the end of the record,” said Gabriel in interviews around the ‘Back to Front’ tour a few years ago. “But to get a fat bass line on a full vinyl record, you can’t put it near the end, because there isn’t enough room for the needle to vibrate in the groove as it got close to the centre. You have to have it nearer the beginning, so it went on the start of side two.
“When CDs came along, I was able to take that track and put it back on the end where it always should have been.”
It’s incredible to think now that cassette versions of LPs only had one side of about 20 minutes and then you had to turn it over.
You can see the limitations with a record, but the cassette tape can easily hold an LP on one side. I think Island issued quite a few “doubles”’with a previous album on the other side.
They also released some with a full album on one side of the tape and the other side blank, so you could record something yourself to fill it. I have a cassette of Marianne Faithfull’s “Broken English” in that format.
Yeah, that was Island. I think of Warm Leatherette as being the first cassette to have different (extended) versions of the songs from the LP. It’s a measure of how cool Walkmans/Stowaways were supposed to be in 1980.
Polydor did the Twofer as well.
The Jam – In The City/Modern World and All Mod Cons/Setting Sons.
I had both and whilst I can split All Mod Cons and Setting Sons, I still see In The City and The Modern World as a double album
Side 2 of Trans Europe Express by Kraftwerk is mostly one long track split into sections, which are given names. Metal on Metal has some brilliant metal bashing noises and then settles back into Trans Europe Express – that bit is now called “Azbug’.
It was always Abzug on the German edition, and I think in other territories. Why they changed this on the English edition… who knows.
I did not know that. I thought it was a way to make the most money out of streaming services by splitting long tracks into separate ones.
Allegedly that’s why Neil Young’s “Country Girl” is split into three parts on ‘Deja Vu’.
The CD version of Roy Harper’s Flashes From The Archives of Oblivion omits both the studio and live versions of Home (one of my favourites among his songs) but also inexplicably Too Many Movies.
The first CD version of Little Feat’s “Waiting For Columbus” omitted “A Apolitical Blues” due to wanting to squeeze the double vinyl album onto a single CD. Then when the extended 2-CD version was released, they altered the running order of the original tracks to better represent the playing order at the actual gigs the recordings came from. They also added a slew of tracks that were originally discarded because they couldn’t fit them all onto a double vinyl album.
Yes – including that killer version of “Day at the Dog Races”!
There were numerous variations of the first Focus album – tracks, cover designs, title, etc. Recorded privately in Jan 1970 it wasn’t released first until October 1970 (on Imperial in Holland) – and only then because ‘House of the King’ (recorded in July 1970), a stand alone single, became a Dutch hit. The first issue was called ‘Focus Plays Focus’ and had a desultory group pic on the front, but no ‘H of the K’ on it. It was then reissued as ‘In and Out of Focus’ with ‘H of the K’ added and a different cover… and then all sorts of variants in Germany, Britain and the US started happening. Four totally different covers (at least two being godawful), one track ‘Sugar Island’ (worst thing on it) dropped in some versions, plus variants in the composer credits of a couple of tracks (bass player Martijn Dresden getting excised from one or two) and even in the spelling of one title, ‘Anonymus’ (erroneously corrected to ‘Anonymous’ in Anglophone countries.
‘House of the King’ was subsequently added to the ‘Focus 3’ double LP, presumably because (a) most UK /US listeners wouldn’t know it, and (b) the fourth side was otherwise distinctly short weight (and even with it less than 14 minutes).
That two CD Best of Bowie that came out about 10 years back had loads of market-specific variations.
IIRC, there was only one track (not one of the obvous ones) that appeared on every version.
I have read about this before, IIRC, the one track that was on all world wide versions is Fame.
The first pressing of Harry Nilsson’s second album (Aerial Ballet) had his version of ‘Daddy’s Song’ as the first track. The Monkees had also recorded a version of the song, and cos they were both on the same label (RCA), the record company dropped Harry’s version from subsequent pressings in case it interfered with sales of the prefab four’s single.
Now I think about it, they couldn’t decide which was the better solo, so The Scorpions put one take of ‘China White’ on the American version of ‘Blackout’ and another on the European release.
If we’re also counting different *versions* of tracks rather than track-listing differences, my favourite example is Seal’s debut album, because the changes are so big, and that it’s so relatively unknown for a big-selling album…
There are actually 2 almost entirely versions of the album, the first “premix” version, and a later version, issued by ZTT some time after release with no official announcement, because Seal and Trevor Horn were dissatisfied with the first edition. Only two of the nine tracks are unchanged, though 3 others have only minor differences – the remaining tracks are very different to the “originals”. The different versions are available on all formats in all territories, and the sleeves & labels are the same for both versions, so you don’t know what version you have until you play it (or at least see the track lengths on a CD…)
Oh yeah, I forgot about that one.
I knew/know a drummer who could identify the different version by drum machine and samples alone. And name them. The drum machines, not the songs.
Has anyone else just cum?
Typical ZTT. Slave to the Rhythm is in very different shapes on the US and UK LPs, and the CD is/was different again. I can’t speak for the cassette, but one assumes…
There’s a box set in it, methinks.
Oh yes.
Also ZTT, the versions of the singles from Propaganda’s A Secret Wish album are different ‘cos they apparently hadn’t dicked around with them enough before release date.
My original CD version of XTC’s English Settlement had 2 tracks missing (Leisure and Down In The Cockpit), though I’ve since seen CDs with the complete tracklisting, so I assume early CD technology at the time couldn’t cope with the original double-album’s length… Wikipedia says there was even a 10-track single vinyl version, though I’ve never come across it myself…
Yep. Early CDs could only carry 74 mins until about 1988/89.
Strictly speaking, according to the Red Book standard, they still can’t.
Pretty sure I read somewhere that 74 minutes was chosen as it was just long enough to include the whole of Beethoven’s fifth.
Pedant alert: Ninth, not Fifth.
This explains it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_Digital_Audio#Storage_capacity_and_playing_time
As ever in life, it comes down to money.
Useless fact: Red Book specifies 74 minutes based upon a certain ‘groove’ size with a plus/minus production tolerance. There’s no specified upper length. 80 minute CDs just make the grooves smaller, still within the tolerances.
There are some commercial CDs longer than 80 minutes. I have some 90 minute CDRs.
Years ahead of my time as usual…
I’ve checked the various recordings I own of the Ninth. Playing times are about 60 to 67 minutes long, and several of the recordings have the CD padded out with extra filler tracks – in one case the filler is a slightly different scoring of the second section of the final movement, missing a couple of bars.
This is the first CD release from 1984, coming in at 74:28. It must be like Tindersticks doing The Ramones:
https://www.discogs.com/Beethoven-Wilhelm-Furtw%C3%A4ngler-Bayreuth-Festpiele-Cho-Bayreuth-Festpiele-Orchester-Sinfonie-No-9-Sym/release/7810546
You didn’t say it was a Furtwangler recording!
And that’s Numberwang!
It depends which orchestra. Roger Norrington’s mob charge through it like The Ramones.
I’m picturing the conductor up on his lecturn, gently swaying his baton at the orchestra, and then belting out “1-2-3-4!!!”
Bagga Baggatelles Op. 126
Single album version of ES is common in North America.
This thread should be set as a test for new applicants to site membership. ( I would fail).
I had a twofer REM cassette with Murmur on one side and Reckoning on the other
Trouble was if you wanted to listen to one album but were at the start of the other one you had a lot of REW or FF to do.
“REW” would be a really good title for an REM retrospective album…