Picking some rare flowers...

[nvbaren@bio.vu.nl (Nico van Baren)]

Greetings all ye gaffans and Love-Hounds!

After lurking here for well over a year, I think it's time to officially
*de-lurk*. It seemed to become good practice for first posters to start off
with a Rate-Kate; obviously, I could do the same, but it wouldn't be such
an  interesting read: The Dreaming and The Ninth Wave vying for second
place, after The Kick Inside. TD and TNW are probably the best work she's
ever done and objectively I should rate them first, but TKI simply was the
album that told me what music was all about. I mean, I was exposed to her
KaTeness at the tender age of 8, when Wuthering Heights was released upon
the unsuspecting Dutch masses, causing as much as a stir as it did in
England. I noticed that a lot of the Dutch gaffans/Love-Hounds were also
KonverTed at about this age and I can tell you: it can define your entire
vision of music to grow up with Hers.

Now there is something that struck me in most people's lists: the uniformly
low rating of Lionheart. This also holds true for me. Although I can claim
no psychic knowledge of what went on in the studio when LH was made, to me
it has an atmosphere of being a rushed job, for which quite a few songs
from her large collection of 'old' songs were used (since a number of the
songs can also be found among the Cathy Demos). I seem to remember a recent
interview in Q-magazine in which She herself gave some negative comments to
this album (and the song Oh England, my Lionheart in particular).

Now this led me to the following What-If: What if KaTe had picked some
other songs from her KolleKTion? There are some songs among the demos which
would sound great when they were further developed, so I have spent some
time making up a tracklist of an Alternative Second Album, revolving around
the two questions:
(1) Which demo would I really like to hear fully orchestrated and recorded
properly? and (and this is the hard one)
(2) Which songs on Lionheart could give way to these other songs?

YES, I KNOW THIS IS SACRILEGE :-) !!!

My instinctive answers were (1) ALL and (2) NONE, but we're talking 1978
and vinyl here, so we only have 50 minutes at the most (some 10 songs) and
there ARE some hard choices to be made...
After a long inner struggle, I came up with this tracklist:
(A): Symphony in Blue / The Craft of Love / Wow / Pick the Rare Flower /
Something like A Song
(B):  Nevertheless / Keeping me Waiting / Kashka from Bagdad / Coffee
Homeground / Hammer Horror
As you can see, the songs I chose are the more 'rock-oriented' ones; not
since that's the side of KB's music I like best, but these are probably the
most interesting to be recorded 'in full'. For that matter, my favorite
demo of them all, Disbelieving Angel, I have not included: I don't want
perfection to be changed! And N.B. I don't expect KaTe ever to return to
these songs; wonderful as it would be to have some of these songs recorded
with a band, I like her current work just as much.
I'd love to hear other gaffans' & Love-Hounds' ideas & suggestions on this
subject. Track-lists, anyone...?

(If you don't have the Cathy Demos: do try to pick up copies! Although I
don't like the idea of bootlegging music and violating artists' copyright,
these songs are simply too good to be without and you just can't get them
through any official channel. Mine came on two CDs, titled If You Could See
Me Fly and Passing Through Air, both on the Chapter One label; I picked
them up at a record fair here in the Netherlands some two years ago.)

Yes, I must admit: quite a long and somewhat ambitious first contribution
to this newsgroup, but I have been pondering this for some time and would
simply love to hear the ideas of some experts on these matters (and, face
It,  where elsE to finD them but here ;-)). To round off: to all you
Christians out there (aw, come on, there must be at least SOME of you
lurking over here!) a wonderful Christmas, and to all you Pagans a Magickal
December!

Nico

*********************************************************************
*  Nico van Baren                                nvbaren@bio.vu.nl  *
*      ...our experiment in sound was nearly ready to begin...      *
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