If I Start Believing You

Spotify is kind of neat, isn’t it? It takes mere seconds to find Pinball Cha Cha, Nlogax, the Cinematic Orchestra’s fabulous Late Night Tales session or Blanck Mass without having to journey down to the archive. Which is admittedly about 5 steps over there and 15 steps downstairs but it’s the principle that counts. From an artist point of view it doesn’t seem to be all that fair, each play probably nets you about 0.000003 pence per play which is about as much exposure as you get from some guy on the Internet posting the tracks you hoped were in the permanent bin.

(BTW, it’s worth pointing out that there’s a stream of the new BoC album tonight over here. I am kind of looking forward to this and hope it helps remove the disappointing Dad House feeling I got from the Daft Punk album. The Moroder track is pretty great, it’s a wonderfully rewarding labour of love but the rest of it isn’t so much fun. IMO.)

edit, 2023, Spotify turned out to be the devil.

Anyway. Enough complaining. Let’s music.

It’s hard not to get emotional listening to Billy Mackenzie, he had an astonishing voice that I don’t think anyone came close to until Antony Hegarty. And not to mention Billy’s writing, his collaborations with Yello in particular led to perhaps one of their best known tracks with vocal duties fulfilled by Dame Shirley Bassey. Billy sadly committed suicide in 1997, but left a legacy of some work which I’d encourage anyone reading to further investigate. That’s not however the point of this posting, if there is indeed one.

The post today is about an EP released in part to promote a 1990 singles collection, Popera was the album and Poperetta was the EP. The EP focuses on two versions of two tracks, Waiting For The Loveboat & Club Country. All four tracks were remixed by Thomas Fehlmann, a well known staple of the Berlin music scene and frequent collaborator with The Orb.

The promo was issued in the UK on Ost-West Schallplatten with German translated titles. For reasons unknown.

Zu Spielen

Club Country is one of my favourite Associates tracks, but to be honest, the versions here are not that great. Club Country Club updates the track for a more 90s dancefloor that it didn’t really need.

Landschaftsverein

The Time Unlimited version is a bit of a mashup of Billy Mackenzie with samples of Tricky Disco, maybe also D-Shake – Technotrance, GTO – Pure, and 808 State – Cobra Bora. And a bit of whoo-yeah from Tricky Disco to cap it off.

Alive and Kicking

Waiting For The Loveboat comes off a little better in the Extended Voyage mix which didn’t make it to the compilation. Judge for yourself.

Wink