(^62) Australian
ROCK ON
By Jez Ford
avhub.com.au
Harry Belafonte| The Legacy of Harry Belafonte: When the Colors Come Together
The Beatles| Live at the Hollywood Bowl (Eight Days A Week)
Kate Bush | Before the Dawn | 4LP set
There was a wait of four months for the vinyl
to follow the digital release, following a wait of
two years after the 2014 concerts themselves,
all paling beside the 37 years since her previous
live concerts—not from a fear of playing live,
she insists, she had just ‘gone on another path’.
Every moment of patience is rewarded by the
result, both technically, with the 155-minute
set mixed, mastered and cut magnificently
onto four LPs, and creatively, with Bush and
band delivering superb performances charged
to devastating emotional heights by adoring
Hammersmith Apollo audiences which
apparently adhered almost entirely to the
request for no pictures, no phone videos, so
that no visual record is yet available, even on
YouTube. It was filmed, but Kate insists ‘there
are absolutely no plans to release a video’.
Why? Because she loves her audio. ‘I’m not
saying we’ll never do anything with it,’ she
said recently, ‘but music is an important
medium. The album is more representative of being
there, you use your imagination.’ And how. The evening
and the LPs are presented in three acts—a hard-hitting
first disc delivering hits such as Running Up That Hill and
Hounds of Love, also reinstating one rehearsal recording
of a song cut because the show was so long—‘the only
take’, she says in the sleeve notes, of Never Be Mine from
‘The Sensual World’ (there are no song choices from her
first four albums). A new climactic ending to King of the
Mountain builds to a storm which heralds the first of two
concept pieces, ‘The Ninth Wave’, originally side two of
1985’s ‘Hounds of Love’. The audience mikes are silenced
for this second LP, enhancing the dramatic focus of this
extended treatment where the drowning sequences
were pre-recorded, the dream sequences enacted live on
stage. One of many audio highlights is Waking the Witch,
its rapid rhythms kept tight, fast and downright scary on
the vinyl edition. The final act is the softer ‘Sky of Honey’
song cycle from ‘Aerial’, its delicious delicacy developed
over the last two LPs and reinforcing the conclusion that
this whole performance is a dream made real.
Remastered and extended for its 30th
anniversary with six new alternate takes
(though only one is on the CD, the rest come
as downloads), this delightful performance
surely ranks among the great get-togethers
of rock and roll—Jackson Browne, T Bone
Burnett, James Burton, Elvis Costello, k.d.
lang, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits and more,
backing Orbison before a wildly affectionate
audience at L.A.’s Coconut Grove nightclub.
Fascinating how context can convert
‘novelty’ songs into statements of
protest. Day-O (The Banana Boat
Song)—an amusing exercise in distance
miking, but also a traditional Jamaican
plantation work song. The magnificently
mono Matilda—a jaunty and infectious
singalong, but whose lyric details a life
in ruins. Musically it’s the punchy 1950s
calypsos that delight most; the brass is
mambo mad on his signatureAngelina, so far back
from the beat they’re nearly bumped by the one
behind. The slower ballads are more dated, though
his version ofAbraham, Martin and Johnis as moving
as any, and the collection succeeds in its aim to
remind us that Belafonte, now 90, not only had
America’s first-ever million-selling LP, but also used
the proceeds to support Martin Luther King’s family,
finance the 1961 Freedom Rides, and help organise
the 1963 March on Washington.
Twenty years gone, the 1997 two-CD release
of BBC session recordings now gets the
luxury box-set treatment to match the studio
album remasters from 2015. Does it deserve
it? There seems no further remastering made
to those tracks already released, while the
‘missing’ content which serves as the reissue
impetus is tacked on as an extra disc instead
of being inserted into rightful placing in the
original sets. So the June 1969 Playhouse
Theatre recordings ofDazed and Confused(a
fine 11-minute take, beginning its extended
evolution from the studio version) andWhite
Summer (8:23) are isolated on the bonus
disc instead of slotting in after the broadcast
interview with Page and Plant, which is great
fun but still not included here. There’s twice the
offence thus separating offWhat Is and What
Should Never BeandCommunication Breakdown
from the 1971 Paris Theatre concert since, unlike the
Playhouse gig, this was recorded as an end-to-end
performance. Why not present the lot in the order they
happened? Still, good to have them, and the material
as a whole remains an impressive display of their early
mightiness and ability to mess around as they go—the
‘Pop Sundae’ take ofCommunication Breakdown(one of
five versions here) is remarkable for the band’s shortest
random diversion ever, all of 15 seconds near the end,
as well as this session’s burying of Jimmy’s rhythm track
(though not his solo overdubs) in the mono mix behind
amazingly high bass and drum levels (for the BBC).
The final three tracks are, however, mainly there for
completism, a lost session for Alexis Korner’s ‘Rhythm
& Blues’ World Service show in 1969, ‘recorded off
the radio by someone in Eastern Europe’, according to
Jimmy—and off Short Wave by the grungy sound of
it—a bootleg recycled here in a luxury box-set. Zeppelin
always was magnificent at marketing, too. Jez Ford
Roy Orbison | Black and White Night 30 (CD/DVD & CD/Blu-ray)
Respect is high (even Waits wears a tie), with no-one
upstaging the Big O or even getting name-checked, so
that without watching the video (also remastered) you’d
never know that the harmony on Dream Baby is a clearly
thrilled Springsteen, while the super-smooth BVs emanate
from lang, Bonnie Raitt and Jennifer Warnes. Recorded
pre-Wilburys and just over a year before Orbison’s death,
the new remix is edgier, more band and lower strings,
notably highlighting Oh, Pretty Woman’s fine guitar battle
between Springsteen and Burton.
martin jones
(Martin Jones)
#1