Mailbag

[IED0DXM%OAC.UCLA.EDU@MITVMA.MIT.EDU]

 To: Love-Hounds
 From: Andrew Marvick
 Subject: Mailbag

 >     i for one am glad she didn't get a chance to rerecord the rest... is
 >i've yet to hear a good reason.
 >lack of perfection is no reason as far as i'm concerned. if everyone was
 >allowed patch up earlier mistakes every time a compilation lp went out,
 >well words fail me !
 >
 > -- Colm Mulcahy

     Evidently so does logic. Why should an artist's wish to
re-interpret his or her own work be in any way a bad thing?
After all, it's not as though the original were to be replaced
by the revision and lost forever.

 >what's the reason ?? originals not good enough any more ??? i'm surprised
 >that gaffa folk would swallow that argument, after all every thing she ever
 >did is totally perfect right ?!

     First, it's not a question, in IED's mind anyway, of
improving on imperfection. The re-recorded version of
_Wuthering_Heights_, for example, is neither better nor
worse than the original--it's simply a very different
interpretation. Each has its own virtues. Neither has
any flaws.
     Kate, however, seems to disagree. She said that, on
listening recently to her early recordings (apparently for the
first time in many months), she was struck by how "little girl"-like
her Cathy Earnshaw was in the early recording. She said that
that was not her impression of Cathy's character now, and so
she felt that a new, maturer vocalisation was called for. Also,
she said that she would have liked to have been able to re-mix
all of the early singles on _The_Whole_Story_ because the originals
sounded "very Seventies". She wanted, in other words, to take advantage
of the increased capabilities of her home forty-eight-track studio (as
well as of her own vastly greater mastery of the recording process).
     How could such an enterprise, had it been undertaken, have
been anything but desirable? The only disadvantage that IED could
see would be that it might have taken time away from the completion of
KBVI--but we've waited three-and-a-quarter years already for that, with
no firm end in sight; so what would another month or two have mattered?

-- Andrew Marvick