I was under the impression that de minimis was gone, completely. I’ll be very happy to find out that I’m wrong on this.

I’ll certainly try, but while I’ve had some titles arrive 2-3 days before release (advantage of being 75 miles from Chicago O’Hare and the ludicrously over-centralized international mail in the UK these days) it remains to be seen how much processing of tariffs will slow down customs and how they’ll handle paying tariffs. I may end up getting my set long after everyone else.

More than three tracks, surely - the radio sessions haven’t previously appeared, have they? Buying direct from Cherry Red is never cheap, particularly if you’re not in the UK. In the US it cost £58 for the set and £15 for shipping, for a $97 purchase. However, a friend who ordered elsewhere paid $63 including shipping. He’ll get it a week or two after me, but save a bunch. Haven’t all the BBD/Red Noise boxes been about the same ( Live In The Air Age excepted)? The only others I bought directly were Sound On Sound and Drastic Plastic - I picked up Futurama and Sunburst Finish long after release through cheap eBay vendors, and I got Axe Victim and Modern Music in weird mutant digital download versions from Qobuz - $18 each for the contents of the CDs, no DVD content. If they do another batch of Modern Music boxes, I’ll definitely go for that, but only if Trumpolini/Il Douche/The Tangerine Baboon at least restores some reasonable de minimis to avoid tariffs on small purchases.

Hey! Elastica - This Town This is a band whose name I used to constantly hear circa ‘83-‘84 on my local station in Edinburgh - it seemed that barely a night went past where Hey! Elastica weren’t playing live somewhere in the area. Yet in all that time, I never had any idea what the band sounded like. They only ever released four singles and an album (first single produced by Tony Visconti, everything else produced by Martin Rushent). Then last year, all of them turned up on Qobuz and the streaming services. Most of what they did was rather underwhelming, but their final single really did deserve more success. It is, I’ll admit, very much of its time, but the song is a total earworm, and the video is a lot of fun, a mix of very bold, abstract white, black and red coloring, the obligatory 80s “story”, it even had a “quirky” video interruption. In retrospect, it’s not really surprising they vanished without trace, but they deserved a little more - “This Town” should have at least got them one-hit wonder status. This Town - Hey! Elastica (1984) Vdeoclip - HQ Audio

“Do You Dream In Colour?” Promo video, and the 15 tracks from the “New Stereo Mix” in both stereo (hopefully 24-bit, 96kHz) and 5.1 Surround formats. Surround is described as “hi-res” so it’s presumably DTS-HD or DTS 96/24. Quite why Blu-Ray is required I don’t know, it might just be that Cherry Red are trying to push people from DVD to Blu-Ray generally. I have to say my excitement over this release has been drained by the delays and that it now appears I’ll have to pay a tariff on the set.

I first discovered Bill’s music in about 1989 or so, after reading his entry in my copy of the Trouser Press guide, thinking “I like the sound of that” then buying “Duplex” in the Virgin Megastore in Edinburgh. Then I got a big boost in 1990 when I had to present a paper at a conference in SF and a friend took me round the local record stores, and I came home with quite a haul of the Enigma CDs. As for “Practically Wired”. I picked that up in my local Best Buy in N. Virginia the week it was released. At that point it was unusual for me to buy from physical stores (and very unusual for it to be on the shelf in Best Buy) because my review website I ran at the time was doing quite well in terms of earning me credit at CDNow whenever people read my reviews and clicked through to buy stuff. It wasn’t exactly big bucks - my best ever month earned me $128 - but most months I ended up getting enough to buy anything new that I was interested in.

I know, replying to myself, but after posting a link to this site, I was looking at his blog today, which can be found at https://lileks.com/bleats/archive/25/0425/13.html - scroll down a page or two, and there’s not just an item on Drastic Plastic but also a link to a YouTube clip and a musing on “Why isn’t this guy famous and wealthy beyond compare?”

Yeah, spin-off from Brinsley Schwarz (where Nick Lowe started out) that gradually absorbed people from other pub rock bands until it even absorbed Brinsley Schwarz himself, and that band and all other pub rock bands ceased to exist. When they split, it resulted in Graham Parker and The Rumour and The Motors (of “Airport” fame). Named after a fruit machine (in the sense of one-armed bandit rather than orange juice squeezer) apparently.

Yeah, it’s put me right off pre-orders. Prior to this I’d have had the pre-order for Cherry Red’s new 6CD After The Fire set (due 25 June) in already, but between the fact that it might *just* make it out in time for Christmas, combined with wanting to be sure the stuff is from proper masters (Cherry Red previously did a 3CD set that was mastered entirely from vinyl), not going to order until it’s a) out and b) confirmed not to be from vinyl.

And…another delay, it’s now been pushed back to May 16th 2025. This means that it’s now over six months late, since it was originally an early December release, I think.

Not a photo but, despite all of the terrible things people say about AI, it can be a lot of fun… No, I don’t know what the duck is going on here. No, I don’t know what the duck is going on here.

I can’t copy an entire website, so here’s a link to a site packed with the best of real-world retro-futurism, as well as some truly terrifying food. https://www.lileks.com/institute/index.html

“Tomkinson’s Schooldays” was the pilot, they dropped the laugh track for the one and a half series they made. I remember dreading that the PE teachers at my school (a perfectly standard Scottish secondary school in most respects) might get ideas if they saw it - the school leopard and 30-mile hop would have been exactly the sort of thing they would have loved.

One that I never thought I’d post to a BN forum, and that may not work everywhere, but it’s a rather clever approach to a music video. It’s 1991, you’re a moderately selling Canadian band in a fairly small musical niche, and you need a spectacular video. What to do? Hey, how about acquiring the Canadian rights to a recent Japanese giant robot movie that hadn’t been licensed by anybody else, then shoot the band running around in a disused factory and on some fairly basic sets, get someone to do lots of computer graphics overlays, and mix them all together with very rapid jump cuts to music video length. The end result is a video that’s still impressive even now, and that at the time looked as though its budget was waaay more than the band could afford. This is the end result, Front Line Assembly’s “Mindphaser”: FRONT LINE ASSEMBLY - Mindphaser 4k w/ HQ audio

Win’s “Super Popoid Groove” from spring ‘87. Great song, and I thought the readers might like the numerous guitars, even if it’s all being mimed. Win should have been huge, but the single before this, whose sales should have pushed it into the top 20 on its week of release, drew the suspicions of the UK chart compilers because the sales in Scotland were huge there were barely any elsewhere. Since their manager was Alan Horne, shenanigans were suspected, but it was really just that the single really was huge in Scotland, due to use in an ad. This follow-up single made it into the 50s. Win - Super Popoid Groove

I should add that they did actually manage to get the Nik Kershaw box out. Mine is currently sitting in Chicago, with a tentative delivery date of Thursday 20th. However, it’s in the ISC near Chicago O’Hare. ISC allegedly stands for International Sorting Center, but actually stands for “Indefinite Stopover in Chicago”. I had one package take three months to get through it. USPS used to maintain a dedicated forum where people could plead for their packages, and where the post office would list the many problems the place had, which ranged from random piles of packages just lying around to not enough people to wheel carts of packages from one part of the center to another to swarms of enormous savage rodents (ROUSPS, as it were). I got banned from the forum for suggesting they hire some of the rats to move the carts.

They say “further delay at manufacturing this product”. I guess it’s marginally better than “We’ve delayed it until April because we want to be able to look at big stacks of box sets in the warehouse and laugh evilly”, but that margin is getting pretty thin. Do you dream of delays? Do you dream of delays? Do you dream of delays? It might arrive by fall..

Suspect it might just make it for Christmas 2025 - the date has been pushed back to 11th April. Amusingly, the delay e-mail specified “11th April 2025” just to indicate they’re hoping it may yet make it this year.

The Kershaw box was announced last June for an end-of-July release. It’s still not out, and while Cherry Red says 21st February, I won’t believe it until I get a shipping notice. Sorry to hear about the Quit Dreaming delay - the Cherry Red site still says 28th February - but March 7th at least isn’t much longer considering this was supposed to be an early December release. I’ll survive, somehow…

On the subject of remastering, I’d assumed that the Bandcamp releases of “the black albums” were all just digital downloads of the Cocteau originals, picked them all up anyway, but it hadn’t occurred to me that Sounding The Ritual Echo was remastered for the Dreamy Screens set. Anyone know if the Bandcamp release is from the original CD or the remaster?