REMASTERING AND THE CULT OF THE FLAT....

Current mood: BECAUSE YOUNG PEOPLE HAVE NEVER HEARD THE ORIGINAL
Category: BECAUSE YOUNG PEOPLE HAVE NEVER HEARD THE ORIGINAL Music

Here we go with what could be both the longest and the last extract from Mark E Smiths wonderful autobiography....

As I've said before this is as good a piece of music writing as you'll read this year - so be sure to catch the book in full as soon as the piggy bank allows...


'I remember recording 'Mr Pharnmacist' at Abbey Road in the mid 80s around the time when CDs were the new thing. The second day I was there I walked up the stairs to the cutting room and I couldn't get in the door due to a stack of mail. I asked one of the producer guys what it was, and he told me it was complaint mail for The Beatles. The Beatles were one of the first bands to get the whole re-issue treatment, but the fans couldn't listen to it. Years of listening to the original vinyl and then this...to them it might as well have been a differnt band.

People aren't as daft as you think. There were so many of these letters they had to stick them in the back room - they couldn't answer them.

It's the same with Elvis. 'Heartbreak Hotel' on CD is almost a completely different song from on vinyl. You've got forty-odd tracks to monkey around with on CD, and not four - as was the case with the original recording. And you can hear all these nonsense noises. It's flat. Instead of having all the sounds at the front, like they did with the original, they've flattenned it out across forty-odd tracks; one here, one there.

What a lot of people don't realise is that you've got these total strangers in the cutting room fiddling around - that's what they mean by re-mastered. You might as well ask a fellow in the pub to do it, at least he'll have some knowledge of the music he's butchering. It'd probably work out better that way. It's not as if the people working on the re-mastering give a shit about the acts - to them it's just a new way to waste time, and the record companies know full well that they'll wangle a bit more dough out of it. It's just dolling up the dead. Instead of using their energy to promote the living they'd rather go down the Burke and Hare path. They always make a big thing out of it as well : the re-mastered version. It's just another cynical record company trick. How many versions of Sgt Pepper can one man own? The daft thing is that now people do buy that shit. they must have rocks in their head. It's a racket. We're living in a re-issue world filching from the past like magpies with a Tardis. I used to take tape recordings of the original vinyl on tour with me. Record them in the kitchen on to tape. You get a bit of fuzz on it, but it sounds better than the CD. Tapes and vinyl are very underrated. It's like the difference between reading a book and reading something on a computer.'


Taken from Renegade: The Lives & Tales Of Mark E Smith By Mark E Smith