KonvenTion plans

[Andrew B Marvick <abm4@cunixd.cc.columbia.edu>]

Hello, Love-Hounds.
     IED will be joining the rest in London for the convention. It's
more or less final now. He would love to join an American quiz team,
should the need arise. One thing he won't do is compete as an
individual, the way it was set up for the '85 convention--too 
nerve-wracking for this philo-canine.
     IED will plan tentatively to meet up with Vickie 'n' Chris
et al. in front of Le Palais a little before 11 a.m., unless he
and they communicate beforehand and arrange to meet somewhere 
else in London earlier in the morning. Since we'll only be in
town together for a very short time, let's all plan on enjoying
ourselves as much as possible while we're there!
     Apparently in the interview with Gilmour in _Q_ recently,
G. mentions that when he originally encountered Kate's songs,
they were in the form of a very poor-quality home demo recording.
(These must have been the "two hundred" or so--at least there 
must have been a lot by that time: early 1973.) He says that
the tape recorder was not good. So he paid to have Kate go into
a studio and re-record some _fifty_ songs over again (again,
apparently, solo with her own piano accompaniment--_not_, it
seems, with Gilmour and his musician friends at Gilmour's house).
These must have been done during the spring of 1973, as far
as IED can tell. (Then, in the summer of 1973, Gilmour invited
Kate to his house where they recorded group sessions with Gilmour's
friends, performing somewhere between ten and twenty of Kate's
songs, including the version we all know of _Passing_Through_Air_
as well as the version we know part of of _Maybe_. Finally, after
the initial solo demos failed to produce a contract for Kate, Gilmour
paid to have three of her songs re-recorded in a proper studio with
a full contingent of musicians. These tracks were the versions of
_Saxophone_Song_ and _The_Man_With_the_Child_in_His_Eyes_ which
are found on the album, _The_Kick_Inside_; as well as a _second_
band version of _Maybe_--not the version we know the excerpt from.)
     With this news of a second _early_solo-piano_ session, paid
for by Gilmour and conducted under studio conditions, we have at
last a plausible explanation of the _Cathy_Demos_. Surely _these_
are the spring 1973 recordings which Gilmour subsidized, before
going on to produce the _Passing_Through_Air_ sessions later in
'73, and the _Saxophone_Song_ sessions in '75. The sound quality
of the _Cathy_Demos_ is very high, and (at least as heard on 
the EPs and, IED gathers, on the new _If_You_Could_See_Me_Fly_
CD) there is virtually no tape hiss. (Note: If you know these
demos only from a cassette dub, as for example the "obsKuriTies"
collection or the "Fiddle" cassette, then you will not have 
been able to tell how quiet the original recordings actually are.)
     The most exciting thing about this new information from
Gilmour is that it suggests the very real likelihood that there
are _twenty-seven_more_ demos from the _Cathy_ collection which
may yet be released by bootleggers! Even as IED's heart goes out
to Kate for the frustration she must feel over this news, he
thrills at the prospect of hearing still another revelatory cache of
early masterpieces. We will just have to wait and see...

-- Andrew Marvick, Love-Hound, KBC member and Wickham Street Irregular
   P.S.: praKTice Quiz KuesTion No. 1--Difficult.) A panther
stalked through the jungle. Who or what was the panther?
         praKTice Quiz KuesTion No. 2--Intermediate.) What was
Kate's source for the rhythm in _Jig_of_Life_?
         praKTice Quiz KuesTion No. 3--Difficult.) How long
did the fall of Jericho take--be as precise as possible.