Make room…

It is the silly season after all. Since 2000, Machine Head (which is on my mind as I am working hard to wrap up the new book!) has been reissued on vinyl by Rhino, EMI, Back to Black, Universal and Warners, in a choice of clear, black or purple vinyl. And those are just the ones I know about.  So please forgive me if I can’t get too excited by this and the accompanying set of similarly coloured vinyl reissues of that part of the Deep Purple catalogue which Universal now control. And I own 25 copies of Machine Head, so must be their target market! What saner heads must think I can only guess.

Anyhow, if you missed them before, here’s your chance again.  Of course they’re remastered, although one suspects this just means a new master has been cut rather than anything more substantial (and I’m not certain remastering technology has developed that much in the three years since the last one!). And sure this work will have been done at Abbey Road, but only because that’s where the tapes are stored and copied. And yes they’re in a nice shade of purple, but then again so was the Machine Head reissue six years ago.  It is also limited, not really a big surprise as most reissue vinyl is these days. The sales people calculate the likely market and profit, an appropriate number are pressed, and then the run is closed.  It does seem to me major labels are quickly killing off this market; does the world need a reissue on vinyl of the first Now That’s What I Call Music LP?  Because there is one. I spotted it in Sainsbury’s last week.

Of course the set looks nice in the pack shot (let’s hope the sleeve scanner has remembered to remove the Record & Tape Exchange price stickers this time too!), but sadly they would just get squeezed onto our shelf, spine out. Maybe my £126 would be better spent on some more shelving.  

Any variations here? Well they’ve added the Mk 4 label to Last Concert, which also seems to have been pressed in black and purple vinyl (check the inner bag below where someone has forgotten the Photoshop mask)!  But you can pick up a nice original import press for only a few dollars more.  Or there is a very spiffing original first press minty looking copy of In Rock down at my local second hand shop. At least there is some history behind that.

Don’t misquote me on this…

Latest piece of fab merch from the official band store.  Can you spot the mistake?  That’s right, it should be a washing machine NOT a motorcycle!  Oh, and someone might like to check back to the lyrics to the song.  They’re on the album sleeve…

Next up, the Stormbringer shirt “Dark cloud gathering, breaking the day, Stormbringer coming, just watch yourself…”

Into 2013

Best wishes to everyone for the coming year, and let’s hope April lives up to expectations. I had thought the band might make the most of the time of year to post a five minute audio trailer for the album over the Xmas break – what a great way to gee everyone along. But then I woke up…!
DTB are getting back into the swing of things after a fraught run up to the Christmas break. The phone lines up our neck of the woods are never great. One had already gone down a few weeks ago and was proving a struggle to repair, then the other line went the week before Xmas – leaving us with no phone, no internet and no credit card access. Happily it was reinstated after a couple of days but it did backlog the office orders. The other line was finally repaired as well – but they forgot to tell us! One bit of good news out of it all was that the BT engineer told us fibre optic is now installed in the locale and we should get this in a few months. Not that the Government is funding it. The money is coming from the EU development budget. So any UKIPers who try and doorstep us will get a mouthful!
Anyhow, working through the weekend we did get all the orders out before Xmas but we do apologise if some were a bit late. Also struggling against the elements was the California Jam book. Literally on one occasion when in that ice-storm we had a forklift truck carrying cases skidded and dropped the lot. Then, everyone concerned having bust several guts to get the book finished, the big problem came with the vinyl; having decided to press in the UK the plant let the publisher down, delivered just 100 copies and then closed a week before Xmas. The only fair option was to dig back and ship the oldest orders out first, and the other copies will go this month once the vinyl problem is sorted out.
After all that we needed cheering up, but didn’t expect Blackmore to be the one to provide the laughs. Tim Summers caught Mr. & Mrs. Blackmore on a radio interview recently. He was asked the rather bizarre question of ‘Which singer that you’ve worked with in the past does Candice most remind you of?’ Blackmore quickly came back with ‘Coverdale, because she’s always shouting at me and calling me Baby’! Good to see he’s not lost his sense of humour altogether. It does beg the question is she always exhorting him to take up cigarettes as well? (“I said Smoke!”).  Sorry.
Keith Sharp was out doing his Xmas shopping in Primark and spotted this gem on sale there between the Hendrix and Stones skinny tops. Size – very small.

The US label Friday Music have done a ‘deluxe’ reissue of Slaves & Masters on CD (due Feb). I’m not a fan of their editions at all. This promises ‘remastering’, which if their other efforts are anything to go by, will be awful.
For some light relief, check out this new Brazilian TV advert which uses a cover version of Highway Star as the backing music. Thanks to Roberto Souza for the heads up. The agency have done two versions of the track, one a female vocal pop take, the other more like the original, then switch between the two as the graphics go from Sin City type urban imagery to more colourful comic book stuff. Hard to explain, so have a look! Who makes JAC cars (or why anyone would want to buy one) I’ve no idea.
http://carros.uol.com.br/noticias/redacao/2012/12/12/jac-j2-deixa-faustao-de-lado-e-aposta-em-deep-purple-para-atrair-jovens.htm

Update – the rock rendition is actually Glenn Hughes, and it’s the one on that patchy tribute album ReMachined from last year!