The bastards have been at it again. First they came for Elvis, then poor old Roy Orbison…..and now the Beach Boys have the honour of being slathered in string arrangements. I love the Beach Boys, so much so that this has made me mad as hell. What next? The Kinks? The Small Faces?? I guess anyone who feels they need to wring just a bit more out of their recorded legacy will go for this treatment.
Oh, and the snippet of Fun, Fun, Fun you can here via the link sounds just awful…
https://ume.lnk.to/BeachBoysOrchestralEm?utm_source=ExactTarget&utm_medium=email&utm_content=https%3a%2f%2fUMe.lnk.to%2fBeachBoysOrchestralEm&utm_campaign=22143509&utm_umg_et=313042290
Link again…
https://ume.lnk.to/BeachBoysOrchestralEm?utm_source=ExactTarget&utm_medium=email&utm_content=https%3a%2f%2fUMe.lnk.to%2fBeachBoysOrchestralEm&utm_campaign=22143509&utm_umg_et=313042290
Thought I’d dreamt this. But no, we are living in a nightmare.
When they get round to Schoolly D I will really lose my shit.
Not forgetting Aretha Franklin either of course – but it’s important to remember the artists consent to this!
Not sure Elvis and the Big O actually consented.
Some people consent to being buggered with kitchenware, doesn’t mean the rest of us have to witness it.
I didn’t think the Aretha one was that awful and neither did that fine judge of all that’s great and good in the musical world, Junior Wells!
You have to scroll to the bottom to reach Junior’s wise words.
Oh yes, I had actually forgotten about this one – I think a mix of Junior’s positive review as well as not encountering it anywhere had wiped it from my decaying memory banks. I wonder how well it sold..? According to Wikipedia, it failed to chart anywhere at all. I suspect Aretha fans avoided it, and it also didn’t have enough crossover appeal to the casual Tesco browser (if it was even stocked there…?).
I won a copy of this in one of Bargepole’s competitions! I wanted to hear what it was like and…it’s alright.
The arrangements are quite sympathetic & using the original vocal tracks means it’s more a “gentle remix” than a complete overhaul.
Mind you, it’s never going to replace listening to the original versions & the poor sales makes it rather pointless.
People who don’t like pop music love this stuff.
The Elvis/Philharmonic rubbish currently has 4,198 customer reviews on Amazon.
Elvis is an interesting example:
There are brilliant releases out there, sometimes at a price (the Follow That Dream 2-CD versions of the studio albums are £23), but it is tat like the Philharmonic disc or the obvious hits compilation that will sell bucket loads, and these are the only things 99% of his fan-base really want.
I feel sorry for the orchestra too, years of devotion to scales and scholarship, all for Fun, Fun, Fun…..
The sales of this will mean that they can afford to do loss-making concerts of music by Scriabin and the like I suppose. It’s like John Lydon doing those Kerrygold ads to fund a PiL tour.
I think I’m beginning to see the real reason posters are rushing to abandon this blog with the same haste that people are burning their old Morrissey t shirts: if there’s one thing that will always guarantee a full house it’s pedantic attention to detail. Although Monsieur Lydon was a tiny bit disrespectful towards the reigning British monarch and he did issue a biography titled “No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs and one of his biggest post Pistols hits is based around an old Gaelic salutation wishing good fortune on its recipient, The Entire Premise of Rotten Johnny’s butter commercials was that its product (Anchor Butter) was thoroughly British – British cows with British dung, British farmers with a fear/hatred of non Britons, British rain on British grass etc – all brought to your attention by that great British institution of that bloke who called Her Madje a moron.
I mean, really. Without facts we are no better than feverishly masturbating monkeys..
The book was called Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs.
🎵There’s always someone, somewhere with a big nose who knows🎵
DAMMIT! Carn’t be quoting Morrissey. My wife will kill me etc
Pointless Pedantry:
John Lydon’s ads were for Country Life butter and were controversial for targeting it’s rival, Anchor, for it’s New Zealand origin.
Country Life are owned by Dairy Crest, which originated as the UK Milk Marketing Board post-privatisation.
Anchor is a licensed New Zealand brand and until August 2012 sold NZ-produced butter in the UK. It is currently licensed to the Swedish/Danish Arla group in the UK and it’s butter in the UK is, since August 2012, British-produced (in Wiltshire).
And more pointless pedantry……
In the later book Anger Is An Energy, Lyndon says that the ads were filmed in Lurgashall, near Petworth and the locals were lovely to him. TBH, I’d lost interest in the book by then.
What was it about the PiL tour that required John Lydon to raise funding from a butter ad? I’ve never heard of anyone else needing the extra cash for that reason. Did Iggy come up with an equally implausible reason for the insurance ads, or did he just do it for the money?
IIRC, he said he didn’t get any royalties from EMI which he believed he was due.
I don’t have any issue with him doing adverts, I couldn’t care less. It just seems to me that because there would be accusations of sell out from people who want middle aged men to stay true to the punk ideals, he came out with this claim so he could be seen to be doing it for the people, and not – heaven forbid – to make himself some dish.
From the book
“I was still at a stalemate with record companies, and any time I tried to get anything off the ground I’d always run into a financial barrier that you had no way of overcoming. So every penny I earned from those ads went straight into reactivating Public Image Ltd. There was enough there –not an enormous amount, but a bulk lump sum –that I could put up to get a band together and into a rehearsal framework. From there, it worked out that we could actually survive on touring, and get enough together to record, and make an album our way without having to have a record label. In the end, it worked out fine: we’re now our own label, PiL Official Ltd, and we have our own publishing company. All that freedom, thanks to those ads.”
Anyway, the real issue is that Metal Box now needs the RPO treatment. Swan Lake is already on it!
One of these days the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra will find themselves in concert backing the London Symphony Orchestra – most likely some kind of matter/antimatter explosion will ensue.
Finally! Gustav Mahler as you’ve never heard him before. Five movements of his very greatest music..now with orchestral backing.
You guys are gonna flip when I let into a little secret about the new Wilko Johnson album…
His fine, funky guitar runs are backed by The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra?
Or, worse still, he *sings* every track?
Arf!
As Mike Love is the legal owner of the band name, I assume he is totally responsible for this latest addition to his relentless buggering of the Beach Boys legacy in the chase for dollars.