Tiny Music...Songs from Various Record Shops VI -- How to Compose Popular Songs That Will Sell by Bob Geldof

First, a brief interlude. Coloured vinyl is a pretty, pretty thing and I never miss a chance to show it off:

Tiny Music...a series of entries on recent and seemingly random purchases. Why I made them, and why, perhaps, you ought to do the same--or at least take up the methodology!

Part I

Part II

Part III

 Part IV

Part V

That Make a Small Portion of the World Cry -- B-Sides

There are, I don't know four or five major types of bonus tracks included on reissues and special versions of albums: studio out-takes and "alternate" versions, live tracks, b-sides, BBC sessions (which are occasionally live), and non-album singles. Similarly, there are about four major types of compilation: the best of or greatest hits, which typically collects singles with an occasional popular deep cut;the live album, which may contain a concert or two, or tracks excised from a variety of performances, either on a single tour or throughout a band's career; rarities albums that contain a mix of the "bonus tracks" I've just listed, and occasionally focusing exclusively or almost exclusively on one of them like b-sides or BBC sessions; and "comprehensive" (sometimes!) anthologies of a band's entire career that typically contain all of the above, though they're sometimes just pretentiously named "best of" compilations.

Now, there's debate, concern, wariness, and about every negative (and probably every positive) attitude you can think of when it comes to these "extra" or "bonus" tracks. Some people are annoyed when they interrupt the repeat flow of an album, when playing it numerous times in succession on a CD player or the like. Others think it's a cheap gimmick to gouge people for money. Some people just find them extraneous junk and trim them away in digital form or just eject the CD when the album proper ends. Some artists or labels acknowledge this and program in an extra bit of silence to separate the album from its errata, often using the "negative space" that CD technology allows (I'll talk more about this some other time, as it's actually quite interesting), or doing like Rhino did with their 2008 Replacements reissues, and sticking in an audio cue, which, in that case, was the sound of someone walking to a door and locking up to leave (which I appreciated at the end of "Here Comes a Regular," but was disheartening to find on every other album, including the far more raucous Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash or Stink, where it was less appropriate to the song it followed). They're a mixed bag in "anthologies" and the like, too, being seen in the same light as "valueless filler" to some, and the entire point to others.

Me? I love them.

Indeed, for whatever it says about me, there's little I love more than dissecting these extra tracks--or, better yet, whole compilations of them!--and discovering where they came from, the context they originally appeared in, and how they were originally presented, if at all. My digital music database is filled to the brim with excessive information, like replacing an album title with the name and location of a studio for "unreleased" tracks, which I arrange by their recording dates. It's interesting to find a studio appear in common between seemingly disparate artists, or to find a studio that has seen a huge chunk of a genre come through it. Trident Studios in London, for instance, saw Harry Nilsson recording for Son of Schmilsson, David Bowie recording for many of his earlier albums--and the Buzzcocks, recording demos shortly after Howard DeVoto left to form Magazine.

But let's pare me down here, and for now, let's talk about my favourite of these options: The B-Side.

No Matter What People Say, I Never Loved Eva Braun -- The Boomtown Rats

While I was not old enough to be thoroughly aware for the entirety of the 80s (indeed, I wasn't even alive for about half of them), I have a pretty distinct affection for bands from the 80s, and a predilection for many of those scorned and discarded as one-hit wonders, known only for one hit (if that) or otherwise "lame" and catchy, thus becoming "pop" which is now often a bad word.¹ This isn't to say that it's a consistent opinion, nor that I do this with all bands thought of as such. I mean, it isn't as if I've got even Reach for the Beach, let alone the entire Fixx discography, for all that I indeed love "One Thing Leads to Another"--though I did recall the album, artist and song title without a pause, so there's still something there.

In any case, my love for INXS, Oingo Boingo, XTC and Robert Palmer are uncomfortably well-known amongst people who like me, though it often becomes known rapidly that these artists have a lot more to them--true of most bands or performers given a large enough oeuvre, though. Still, it gets more complicated with the band I want to talk about right now: The Boomtown Rats. That name isn't one people hear too terribly often, and if they do, it's likely in the context of "I Don't Like Mondays," and is immediately followed by a reference to loud-mouthed frontman Bob Geldof and, more specifically, his involvement in Band-Aid and Live-Aid.

Me? I had no idea there was a connection, except somewhere in the back of my mind. Like many artists I started listening to in high school and college, an interesting song or three led me to obsessively tracking down everything I could find. As it happens, "I Don't Like Mondays" is both indicative and not representative of the band, though it comes three albums in in 1979, on The Fine Art of Surfacing. But alongside it are similarly acerbic descriptions of morbid topics like "Diamond Smiles."