bit of a peculiar one, this. ultimately, or realistically, i have gone done that thing of spending real coins of money for, mostly, the sake of a blog post, look you see. one may argue it was "only £5", but still. at the time of doing so it felt vaguely interesting, but now i am not so sure. well, you decide, if you read on after me doing a stellar job selling it.
mostly this relates to the compilation Now That's What I Call Music 18, or if you will Now 18 as it appears to have been most commonly abridged to. it does not feel all that long ago when i got it and did the usual, obligatory post on it. yes, here is the link to it. whilst it wasn't the single greatest compilation of vibes ever to exist it also wasn't that bad, and a surprising reminder that there were indeed some pretty decent songs in the first couple of years of the 90s when memory suggested it was a bit of a wasteland.
for quite some time - say the last 6 of them, possibly 8 - these Now re-releases on tape (disc) have had a bit of a pointless feel to them. granted the music on them has been occasionally excellent, but they were issued on compact disc at the time. it was great to get the earlier volumes, never put out on disc, and there was some surprise that they just went on and on re-issuing more and more. just for the curiosity of it all, then, i picked up an original issue of Now 18 down the market.
no less than two (2) major issues have been widely commented on with all these re-releases. the first, and the most disappointing, is that "different versions" (or if you will mixes) have been used. easily the big one here was on Now III, where they used the "standard" 7" mix of Frankie's Two Tribes when the original release had the somewhat different "picture disc" 7". the other issue was that the sets were coming out not as exact Now replicas, for some songs were missing. in one instance it was so that they elected to exclude a not particularly memorable single from Sir Gary Glitter for not unreasonable and somewhat understandable reasons. other than that one it seems tracks got excluded from that pain in the backside of the modern world, "rights and royalties" issues.
whereas i had not (reasonably) expected to ever play Now 18 again, the lure of getting the original issue of it was obviously irresistible, hence me having something to write of. the re-issued version of 18 excluded (or if you prefer) omitted four (4) from the original release. if you are interested in learning which ones are missing you can play "spot the difference" with the image below, or scroll down a bit more and i shall list them for you.
so, to confirm the difference you spotted, or just to tell you, the missing songs are -
The Joker off of Steve Miller Band (think it was used in a Levi's jeans ad)
Something Happened On The Way To Heaven off of Phil Collins
Suicide Blonde off of INXS
Fascinating Rhythm off of Bass-O-Matic (no, me neither)
i really have no clue how, exactly, all that rights and permission stuff works, but the omitted tracks are quite strange when compared to what remains. again, no expert, but i would have thought securing the use of songs by the likes of Elton John, Pet Shop Boys, Sting and The Cure (plus others) would be as problematic (and by that i mean costly) as the ones missed off. also i would have assumed that including Nothing Compares 2 U would have been a battle, for a Sinead O'Connor recording of a Prince song doesn't particularly sound cheap to licence.
a trademark, hallmark or signature move of the Now re-releases and "issued on CD for the first time" experience has been the "cheap and cheerful" nature. up above is that illustrated for you. the booklets with the "new" ones are just one folded thing, with the text below the artist images being so small you can't really read them. for the original issues, as you can hopefully make out, the wisely and kindly went and made proper booklets, so you may read provenance and chart history of the songs.
how does the sound quality differ between the two version of Now 18. to be honest i have a quite decent Sony "ghettoblaster" which does the job but isn't in the hundreds or thousands of pounds area of music equipment you need to tell that much of a difference. also no, i would not know how to do an "analysis" of the discs on a computer. others have claimed that the re-issues have effectively been little better than putting some mp3s on a CD-R, but i don't know. both sound decent.
if they have indeed cancelled all future re-releases (i believe so but don't have it confirmed as fact) why now? not sure. there were "logical" points at which to stop, being the point at which they reached never before on CD, or when they reached volume 10 (ten), or when they arrived at the end of the 80s. a speculative guess would be the latter is of some relevance, likely that sales dropped off significantly with the last few, as i suspect there's nowhere near the viable size market for nostalgia for the early 90s as exists for pretty much all of the 80s.
should it really be so and the Now re-issues have ceased, well, that's me not feeling obliged to purchase them any further. they weren't badly priced at around £8 a go, to be fair. also my all time favourite one of the series, Now That's What I Call Music 4, somehow got released more or less exactly as it was the first time around. oh, they are continuing to release variations on compilations, with some new collections being called Now That's What I Call and then whatever the link or year is. every now and then i pick these up, depending on the track list.
overall, if this really is it for the re-issues, it's been a really fun journey. not just a nostalgia thing, but rather (if there is a difference) a wonderful memory jog, with some stuff being surprisingly better than i would have recalled. unless i am just a bit more mellow in my three quarters life crisis.
be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
