Val Jennings Interview

[The Gentleman]

Great interview with Val Jennings of Demon/Edsel in which he discusses the reissue business and the projects he's worked on:

http://www.superdeluxeedition.com/inter ... er-part-1/

One highlight:

SuperDeluxe Edition: You are referring to the third round of reissues, many of which have live concerts on a second disc. Plainly nobody was going to buy them again, and they haven’t

Val Jennings: Yes, which they really haven’t sold, because nobody’s going to buy them again. Had we carried on with the catalogue – in a sense they’ve half nicked my idea – I was going to put out a series of… almost an impersonation of Frank Zappa’s series You Can’t Do That On Stage… I was going to do two-CD sets of live stuff, where the two halves were contrasting tours, so you’d have the Armed Forces tour with the Punch The Clock tour, completely different sounds, arrangements, everything. Have that as a series – not do the albums again, since plainly nobody was going to buy them again, and they haven’t. Nor have Universal finished doing them, they never bothered. I think they got as far as Armed Forces and gave up on it. And now they’ve put together the odd themed compilation like the new movie one. The sort of thing you might put together yourself at home..

Though my favorite quote of Val's must be: "One does get used to dealing with artistes without getting star-struck, which none of them like! Let’s face it you don’t need to tell Elvis Costello that his records are brilliant, because he already knows!"

Part 2 is also a great read, but aside from a brief comment on the Spinning Songbook box there isn't any EC content:

http://www.superdeluxeedition.com/inter ... more-17041

[cwr]

UGH.

That would have been SO great, to have the 2CD live series instead of the live discs attached to a third round of CD reissues.

Universal really botched their whole handling of EC's catalog. Presumably they paid a fair amount of money for it without every figuring out the proper way to deal with it. They stopped their Costello Live series right as they were starting to get more and more interesting.

Why they don't make any effort to at least release some of those things on iTunes is beyond me. Fans would buy them, and it makes no sense to wait decades to release that stuff-- the people who want to hear it are alive NOW. There will be fewer of them/us later.

[The Gentleman]

UGH.

That would have been SO great, to have the 2CD live series instead of the live discs attached to a third round of CD reissues.

Universal really botched their whole handling of EC's catalog. Presumably they paid a fair amount of money for it without every figuring out the proper way to deal with it. They stopped their Costello Live series right as they were starting to get more and more interesting.

Why they don't make any effort to at least release some of those things on iTunes is beyond me. Fans would buy them, and it makes no sense to wait decades to release that stuff-- the people who want to hear it are alive NOW. There will be fewer of them/us later.

Couldn't agree more, with one caveat. The 2CDs/2 contrasting concerts formula is an interesting--and fairly original-- concept (reminds me of The Name of This Band is Talking Heads, now that I think about it), but most of the shows I was most excited to see released (the full Broadway '86 ; the solo Warfield '84, the RPO show) would require both discs to be presented in their entirety. So either we'd get truncated concerts, or some of the most enticing prospects wouldn't even have been considered.

[And No Coffee Table]

Very interesting interview. Thanks for posting it.

The 2CDs/2 contrasting concerts formula is an interesting--and fairly original-- concept

I don't know if the distinction is significant, but notice he says "contrasting tours" rather than "contrasting concerts." I wonder whether he was even thinking in terms of individual shows, or if he intended to compile highlights from multiple shows on each tour. The latter approach seems more in line with the Frank Zappa series he mentions.

[sweetest punch]

The people at Universal really don't have a clue how to put together a good reissue campaigne.
EC fans hardly care for releases like Rock and Roll Music, Pomp and Pout, In Motion Pictures, Live At El Mocambo, Live At Hollywood High, ...
So, please, Universal, hire Val Jennings to put together the 2 CD-reissues of Painted From Memory, For The Stars, When I was Cruel, North, The Delivery Man, The River And Reverse, Momofuku, Secret, Profane and Sugarcane and National Ransom.
And let him also put together a Live Series like the one he suggests in this interview.