Here’s the latest album chart for stowaways:
Let’s take a final look at the history of the Ivor Novello Awards, by trying to summarise the winners by award category. As they should, these have evolved somewhat over the years, and many have changed their name, so I’ve tried to reconcile them into a single category if they’re roughly the same. I’ve generally tried to use the most recent name in each instance.
Those with an asterisk (*) were awarded jointly as Most Performed Work and Best Selling British Song, as a single award.
Those with an asterisk (*) were awarded jointly as Most Performed Work and Best Selling British Song, as a single award.
In the second and final part next week, we’ll look at the Artist, Genre or Style-Specific Awards, and awards for Musicals, Films, Television, Radio, and Video Games.
Here’s a great track – as always – from the brilliant Sparks. This is This is the Renaissance:
There is a part of me, I must confess, that has always been a little disappointed that Jean-Michel Jarre has never recorded a formal sequel* to Équinoxe in the way that he has for Oxygène. This follow-up may have not quite had the success of its predecessor (although it didn’t do badly), but it seems to have been largely forgotten in the forty years since its original release.
Part 1 opens the album, and is a triumphant synth piece that harks back a little to Oxygène (Part III), but it’s also not entirely familiar, so not a bad way to kick things off. It mixes into Part 2, which is a gentler piece. There’s a lot of high-level synthetic sparkle, and it feels very much as though we’re building towards something, although it’s far from clear at this stage what that might end up being.
Turns out that it’s Part 3, a much more rhythmic piece than anything that had come before, with a deliciously bubbly sauntering melody. Part 3 is a particularly lovely piece, but ends by mixing into the heavily sequenced second single Part 4. This one should be pretty familiar, as Jarre has performed it live many times. What always strikes me is just how weak the lead part is on here – and on every version except for the one on Les Concerts en Chine, where he went to the trouble of beefing it up a bit. Otherwise, it’s a great electronic piece with an extremely and unfortunately anticlimactic lead line.
In many ways, though, it feels as though this album is a more fitting sequel to Oxygène than the second and third releases which followed that release. Now, forty years on, it’s fine that they sound so similar, but I would have also forgiven the audience of 1978 for having been a little disappointed with this as Jarre’s second full commercial release.
Starting Side B of the album, Part 5 is another track that gets rolled out for concerts pretty regularly, and also appeared as the lead single in late December 1978. If Jarre could ever be bothered to release a chronological singles collection, you would hear a natural progression between the Oxygène singles, these, and then Les Chants Magnétiques 2. I don’t think it’s exactly groundbreaking, but it’s pretty good nonetheless.
In a first for Jarre, Part 6 is a very clear continuation of Part 5, taking the synth arpeggio and advancing it. In a way it’s strange that he never released a 12″ single that used this as an extended mix of Part 5, but maybe that would have been a step too far.
Or maybe the parts of Équinoxe are a lot more of a continuation than those on the previous album – Part 7 builds from the same arpeggio, but grows into something rather glorious. It’s a little too triumphant at times, admittedly, but this is probably my favourite piece on this album – somehow the arpeggios and melody come together perfectly this time.
Well, then of course there’s Part 8, which you’ll know from some of his concerts. It’s definitely clever – he wrote and programmed his own punched-card piece, Band in the Rain, and this part opens with that, accompanied by a lot of rain noises. But you do have to wonder what he was thinking – exactly how does that fit with anything else on this album? Jean-Michel Jarre seems, at this point, to have gone a little bit crazy.
Part 8 continues, though, with a slower synth piece, almost as a coda to the rest of the album. Honestly, the damage is done by this point, though – what on earth was he thinking by including Band in the Rain as part of the album? Did he just not have enough freedom to release singles at this stage?
But Équinoxe is, for the most part, an exceptional album – the first seven parts, at least, while strongly echoing Oxygène, do advance his sound somewhat, and this album can now go down in history as one of Jarre’s finer moments. If only we could just tweak history a little, and accidentally omit the final track.
I gather purists aren’t keen, but I’d advise going with one of the most recent reissues, as some of the early versions had weird problems like flipped stereo and glitches. Read up first, or try one of these.
* At the time I wrote this post, it was true that there wasn’t a follow-up album, but by the time you read this, Équinoxe Infinity will have appeared in the shops. Hopefully it’s as good as the original album!
I’m not quite sure what the aspect ratio is here, but Dead Can Dance are back with this very-widescreen offering, Act II – The Mountain, taken from their new album Dionysus.
Here are this week’s top ten singles:
For the final post in this series, we reach the 2010s, and 55 years of the Ivor Novello Awards. The 2010 ceremony took place on 20th May 2010 at the Grosvenor House, London.
Grosvenor House in London hosted the 2011 Ivor Novello Awards, on 19th May.
The 2012 ceremony took place at Grosvenor House on 17th May.
I wanted to include The Mutineer here, but the only video has unlistenable sound quality, so instead here’s another track from 2015’s Red Kite:
Beth Orton may prefer these days to pretend that it never happened, but three years before 1996’s Trailer Park, she actually recorded and released an entire album, Superpinkymandy. Released only in Japan as a limited edition, history hasn’t been especially kind to this debut, which is a very great shame, as it’s an exceptional album.
Orton had met William Orbit at a party in the late 1980s, and had become his girlfriend for a while, and this album appears to have been the result of their early 1990s collaborations, along with several contributions to his Strange Cargo series.
It opens with the adorable Don’t Wanna Know Bout Evil, a cover of a song by John Martyn. Orton’s soft vocal style is already well formed on this opener, and while she may not agree now, Orbit’s gentle electronic production works wonderfully. It’s a great song.
Other tracks are less fully formed – Faith Will Carry is good, but it lacks some of the gravitas of other tracks – Water from a Vine Leaf, for example, had appeared the same year, and features some similar production, but feels a lot more polished.
There is a strong Strange Cargo feel here, although that’s hardly surprising. If Yesterday’s Gone feels as though it should be on one of Orbit’s releases, that’s because it’s essentially an early version of Montok Point, from Strange Cargo Hinterland. Only perhaps not quite as good.
Is that She Cries Your Name next? It is! In a very similar version to the one on Strange Cargo Hinterland, too. Both Orbit and Orton recognised just how good this track is, as it appeared on both of their next albums, including opening Beth Orton‘s “debut” Trailer Park in a sadly somewhat inferior version.
When You Wake is good too, a jangly guitar piece that doesn’t sound as though it’s been quite as heavily touched by Orbit. Roll the Dice is a bit weaker, but still a nice background track. Then the short interlude City Blue is pleasant too – possibly the most folky and Beth Orton-like of any of the tracks on here.
The Prisoner seems to bear little resemblance to the classic 1960s television show, which is a shame. Instead, it’s a pleasantly catchy song. You do have to wonder, though, whether Orton was really ready to release this album – apart from She Cries Your Name, most of the tracks appear to be demo recordings with typically full-on William Orbit production.
Some are better than others, though – Where Do Yo Go is a good song, a little more memorable than most, and the gospel-fuelled closing track Release Me is entirely competent too. In a way, it’s surprising that it took Orton another three years to complete Trailer Park, as she clearly had a pretty good idea of what she was doing by 1993.
If you ever have a couple of hundred pounds or dollars to spend, Superpinkymandy is therefore, at worst, an interesting early release for Orton, and a fun lost release for Orbit. At best, it has an early and entirely brilliant version of She Cries Your Name, which surely makes it worth buying? Well, maybe not for that price.
This album was never widely available.
Never one to jump the gun, Jean-Michel Jarre has made us wait a whopping 2 months since his latest career-spanning compilation Planet Jarre, and now continues the theme of revisiting the past with Équinoxe Infinity.
Music for stowaways 