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  5. A nerd’s top 5:

    Brazillia 12″
    I Need Someone Tonite 12″
    Coldest Days from the unloved A&R album
    Inside from the Mickey Way 12″
    Sounds Like Something Dirty from the Wild Party 12″
    The Runner from the Italian 12″
    Be What You Wanna Be from the Four for the Floor EP

    Oh, alright, top 7. I could go on…

  8. Prompted by doing an ACR compilation CD for the woman who sorts out my back, I’ve been revisiting my singles.

    I don’t suppose anybody has the CD singles of ‘Back to the Wall’ or ‘Your Blue Eyes’? I have them both on 12″ and the pressings are awful – A&M must have been recycling unsold copies of No Parlez*.

    *Yes, I know – not on A&M. But the late 80s / early 90s were lean times for vinyl. I was a student and couldn’t afford CDs.

    • They were lean times for vinyl because most LPs were flimsy, badly pressed pieces of crap. That’s why folk of my generation went into the arms of CDs and even cassettes.

      The UK version of 3 Feet HIgh and Rising was like watching Lawrence of Arabia projected onto the back of a spoon.

      • Yup, and I recall WEA being the worst offenders. Thin vinyl, thin card sleeves, and worst of all – they printed bar codes on the labels! Bar codes mind! Well at least they did on The Sisters of Mercy records.

        For cassettes the worst was Virgin, who were obviously using Woolies own brand tape rather than TDK. the result was cassettes that sounded like they were being played on one of those mono Murphy cassette players no matter how expensive your Ghetto Blaster* was.

        *The closest my Ghetto Blaster got to an actual ghetto was when the train went through Kirkcaldy on the way home from college.

    • By the way, doing an ACR compilation CD was proper hard work (in the first-world problems sense). There’s so much of it – my first attempt at tracklist was just under 4 hours long. CDR blanks are only 80 mins. The post-Factory years were represented by just one track.

      Next week will be much easier – she’s never heard the 3rd Dexys album.

    • Same here I’ve got the 12″ singles @fentonsteve -although since you own the vinyl I think morally you have the right to source an illegal download since none of the A&M stuff is available digitally.

      Mute now have the ACR catalogue and are promising to reissue it (yet again) – not sure if that includes the A&M material which has never been reissued – some of the Factory master tapes are missing, wouldn’t be surprised if the A&M tapes have been mislaid too.

      • I understand that the members of ACR consider the A&M years to be a dark and shameful part of their history, never to be revisited. I doubt those tracks will be in the Mute reissues.

        That’s a shame as the Four for the Floor EP was superb, the singles were great, even the Good Together album had its moments – it just didn’t sound much like what came before (or after).

        The A&M deal did give them enough cash to build the Soundstation studio, so not all bad.

        • They’ve not disowned it altogether. ‘The Big E’ is usually in their live set and lately they’ve been playing ‘Good Together’ and ‘Be What You Wanna Be’ from the 4 EP.

          The ACR:MCR album (which was some remixed tracks from the EP and a bunch of more percussive/electronic stuff) was really good but probably wasn’t what A&M signed them for – I think they were expecting another ‘Force’ or maybe the kind of Dance/AOR crossover thing that Mike Pickering did with M People.

          Only fruits of the Mute deal so far as this obscurity – which suggests the re-issues will include stuff pre and post A&M :
          https://www.discogs.com/A-Certain-Ratio-ACRPERC/release/9417029

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