Catégorie : A lire

The Police est un groupe de rock britannique, originaire de Londres, en Angleterre. Il est issu de la génération new wave et post-punk, et formé en 1977 par l’américain Stewart Copeland à la batterie, le britannique Sting au chant et à la basse et par le français Henry Padovani à la guitare. Pendant la même année, le britannique Andy Summers remplace Padovani. Le groupe a été très populaire vers la fin des années 1970 et au début des années 1980 grâce à leur musique rock, mélangeant jazz1, punk2 et reggae.

Le groupe est connu pour ses titres phares comme notamment Roxanne, So Lonely, Message in a Bottle, Walking on the Moon, Don’t Stand So Close to Me, Can’t Stand Losing You et Every Breath You Take. The Police est classé numéro 70 dans la liste des 100 plus grands artistes de tous les temps du magazine Rolling Stone

Boston n’était pas, au départ, un groupe à proprement parler. Après la signature du contrat entre Scholz et CBS, il a fallu pour des questions de promotion, et notamment pour les tournées, embaucher des musiciens de studio qui sont d’ailleurs crédités sur la pochette du disque – d’où de nombreuses polémiques toujours vivaces puisqu’ils ont pu bénéficier de l’image du groupe alors qu’ils n’avaient pas participé à l’enregistrement de l’album qui les a rendus célèbres, à l’exception de Barry Goudreau qui a enregistré le solo sur ‘Foreplay/Longtime’, Sib Hashian qui a ré-enregistré certaines pistes de batteries, sur la base des versions d’origine créées par Jim Masdea (ce batteur ayant quitté le groupe en devenir en cours de route) et Fran Sheehan qui a enregistré la basse sur Foreplay.

Use Your Illusion I

Early Stages (Official Bootleg Box Set 1982-1987) is a box set containing six separate live albums by Marillion with their former singer Fish, recorded at various venues in the UK between 1982 and 1987 and released to retail by EMI on 17 November 2008. The packaging was designed by Mark Wilkinson, who had designed all Marillion covers of the 1980s and went on to work with Fish after his departure. A similar box set (containing different performances), titled Curtain Call, was released in 2004, but was only made available via mail order directly from the websites of Marillion and Fish.[2]

The set contains the following recordings:

Live at the Mayfair, Glasgow 13 September 1982 (CD 1)
Live at the Marquee, 30 December 1982 (CD 2 & 3)
Live at the Reading Festival, 27 August 1983 (CD 4)
Live at Hammersmith Odeon, 14 December 1984 (CD 5)
Live at Wembley Arena, 5 November 1987 (CD 6)

The album originates from a single track, titled « Voyage 34 », which was to be part of the Porcupine Tree‘s second studio album, Up the Downstair. Originally a 30-minute track intended to be the second disc of a double album, Wilson eventually decided to release « Voyage 34 » independently of the rest of the album. Instead, it was released in two parts, as singles, as « Voyage 34 (Phase 1) » and « Voyage 34 (Phase 2) » in 1992. In 1993, Voyage 34: Remixes was released, containing two remixes of the originals. « Voyage 34 (Phase 3) » was a remix by the British electronic music group Astralasia, while « Voyage 34 (Phase 4) » was a remix by Wilson himself, along with future band member Richard Barbieri. A voice sample of Dead Can Dance‘s song « As the Bell Rings the Maypole Spins » is repeated throughout all four tracks.

Voyage 34: The Complete Trip compiles all four « phases » onto one album. The cover art is inspired in Timothy Leary‘s record L.S.D (1966) cover.

Despite being mostly instrumental, Voyage 34 can be considered a concept album, where the LSD trip of a young man called Brian is told with spoken words. Musically it is a fusion of progressive rock, psychedelic rock and trance music.

During a 2002 interview before the release of In Absentia, Steven Wilson said the following in regards to the release of Voyage 34 after being asked why the band released a 30-minute single:

« It was an anti-single. It was a thirty minute single about drugs and it had no vocals in it. I thought that no one is going to play this. But it charted anyway. It was the ultimate ‘fuck you.’ We have released four minute singles since then. But for Porcupine Tree to release a single is like an oxymoron. It’s very difficult to take out a four minute chunk from an album and say ‘Here we are. This totally encapsulates everything Porcupine Tree are about.’ It’s never been satisfactory to me to release a single. If you know the group, you know that from one minute we go from extreme metal riffing to ambient texture, the next minute we’ll have a pop hook, the next minute we’ll have some avant garde sample. All of these things are part of the album. How do you take a chunk of that? To me it’s totally unrepresentative. »^[3]

Wilson said of Voyage 34, in reflection, in 2012: