I Found That Purity Of Essence Rare

Koen writes: The music industry can be a weird business, plenty of stories of labels/managers who ripped off their artists and/or exploited them in other ways.

On the other hand, artists recording for different labels under different names wasn’t uncommon in the past either, e.g. John Lee Hooker had an impressive number of aliases: Birmingham Sam, Boogie John, Delta John, John Lee Cooker, Johnny Lee, Johnny Williams, Texas Slim, and The Boogie Man!

Claiming copyright of traditional songs by just changing a few words used to be standard. Some bands with the same name played live gigs on the same dates but in far-away places with different musicians!  The list could on for a long time…

In the sixties it was common that albums released in the UK would have slightly different track lists from the US versions, e.g. the first few lps of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, etc. Much later Japanese CD releases usually got 1 or 2 bonus tracks which increased their value a lot!

Lately some modern-day artists have been re-recording earlier albums for copyright reasons, e.g. Taylor Swift.  Recently, Strohmian shared a story on the Twilight Zone blog that gave all of the above a completely new twist!

Graham Parker’s old band, The Rumour (with Brinsley Schwarz!) released three albums.  The second one - 1979’s Frogs, Sprouts, Clogs And Krauts (wonderful title!) - even had a minor hit in Holland: 'Frozen Years'. 

But they never really broke through, and their 3rd album became their swan song.  The original UK release of Purity Of Essence came out on Stiff Records in 1980.  And now we are entering the Twilight Zone of recorded music…  From the liner notes by Martin Belmont:

"The Rumour recorded its third album without Graham Parker (and its first without keyboard player and singer Bob Andrews) in 1980. The title 'Purity of Essence' came from the Stanley Kubrick film 'Dr Strangelove', a band favourite on the tour bus. The album was produced by Alan Winstanley at Eden Studios in West London, and released in the UK on Stiff Records. 

"Joe Boyd wanted to release it in the States on his Hannibal imprint, but, after being unable to reach a financial agreement with Stiff, he figured it would be cheaper to re-record the entire album. We did this at Island Studios with the considerable production skills of John Wood, and that is the version on this CD.

"The two recordings differ in a couple of ways: firstly, three songs have changed from the UK set: 'All Boys Lie' - a Clive Langer composition from his days with Deaf School; 'Rubber Band Man' - a Thom Bell song that had been a massive hit for The Detroit Spinners with their wonderful singer Phillip Wynne in 1976; and 'Depression' - written by Glen Tilbrook and Chris Difford from Squeeze. These three songs were only released on the US version, and replaced 'Pyramids' 'My Little Red Book' and 'That's The Way The Ball Rolls' from the UK release. 

"The second change is that the US version has a much more energetic, confident and 'live in the studio' feel, with very few overdubs. The instrumentation is simple; mostly two guitars, bass and drums, with vocals from Brinsley, Steve and one from me. The only guest featured on the sessions is Glen Tilbrook, who added the organ part to 'Depression'."

Despite the availability of 2 versions of the same album and 2 singles, 'My Little Red Book' & 'I Don’t Want The Night To End' (a Nick Lowe cover!), sales didn’t improve, and the band decided to call it quits, sad but true.

The JOKONKY edition is (in essence) a double CD with 25 numbers total for your listening pleasure.  Tell us which version YOU prefer!