There are many songs that, we’re sure, bands have written, recorded
and later realised were shit. We all make mistakes. That’s why these
tracks get thrown into the deepest hole possible. Yet for some reason
(can’t think why), bands and record labels like to dig into this pile of
scraps in the hopes of finding a nice little diamond in there.
Sometimes it works — and sometimes it doesn’t.
Last week, the long-awaited 70 track reissue of
Nirvana’s
‘In Utero’ was released. Among those 70 tracks, there is, however, only
one that’s “new”. Aptly named ‘Forgotten Tune’, it feels as though it
was forgotten for a reason. It is literally nothing more than a
rehearsal practice. When Krist Novoselic
et al are wracking
their brains to remember what exactly the track is and when it was
recorded (sometime around 1988 is the rough estimation), unable to even
give it a name, you know they are really scraping the barrel. ‘In Utero’
is a great album, no doubt, but why dig so deep as a rehearsal in hopes
of enticing a few more fans to buy it?
Nirvana are not the only ones to have their bins rooted through in such undignified fashion, however.
In 1995, 25 years after The Beatles
broke up, the surviving members unearthed a home recording made by John
Lennon in 1977, ‘Free As A Bird’. The rest of the band decided to
release it with their own contributions added to it. It felt to many
like a publicity gimmick, and it was. Released alongside a documentary
about the band, ‘The Beatles Anthology’, it was the Fab Four’s first
“new” single since 1970’s ‘The Long And Winding Road’. It was also a bit
crap, meaning The Beatles ended not with a bang, but with a whimper set
to an old, unreleased recording of John Lennon.
Re-recording
half-done tracks is something of a recurring theme with posthumous
releases.
Sometimes, this can be a good thing — ‘(Sittin’ On) The Dock
Of The Bay’, for instance, was released a month after Otis Redding’s
death, with the signature whistling refrain which Redding had intended
to replace with vocals at a later date. And we don’t want to imagine
‘(Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay’ without the whistling. Other times,
we have Drake getting his beastly paws all over an unreleased Aaliyah
track, recorded before she died in 2001, and vomiting out his only
contribution of an occasional “yo, what’s up” and a rap about Mario
Balotelli. ‘Enough Said’, released last year, is not terrible — the
Aaliyah parts prove exactly why she was coined the “Princess of
R&B”, and Noah ’40′ Shebib’s production is hazy and minimal. But
then everyone’s favourite Degrassi star-turned-rapper (that list isn’t
very long) decides to throw his own verse on top, which feels like he
has chucked barbeque sauce all over a meticulously prepared chocolate
dessert.
The same thing happened when meathead rapper 50 Cent – who was supposed to have quit music when he lost a bet to Kanye West – hopped into the studio in 2010 to record a verse on an unreleased Michael Jackson
song. The result was ‘Monster’ which, unlike ‘Enough Said’, was not
great in the first place… and only went downhill from there.
Of course, capitalising on an artist’s success occurs while they’re
still alive. Decca Records have a lot to answer for with their decision
to re-release
David Bowie’s ‘The Laughing Gnome’ not
once, but twice. This truly awful song was released as a novelty track
in 1967 where it was panned by nearly everyone as the heavy-handed,
cockney irritant it was. To get some idea of how astonishingly bad this
song is, you’ll have to imagine Crazy Frog going onto carve himself a
career as the most influential pop star of the early 21st century.
Luckily, this was before Bowie started making it big and we could
class it as a little misstep on the way to greatness. Yet, in 1973,
after Bowie had made his name, Decca re-released it and, somehow, it
became certified silver in the UK. The only explanation I can think of
for this tragic moment in music history is that the government were
stockpiling copies to use as instruments of torture. Then in 1982,
tragedy struck again with a re-release designed to commemorate the
track’s third decade of existence (and shore up Decca’s own flagging
sales). Luckily, this time it flopped in the charts as people tried to
scrub the idea that Bowie could be awful from their minds. Little did
they know that Tin Machine lay just around the corner.
Nick Drake was not especially given to releasing
singles, which was probably for the best given how many people paid
attention to his career during his tragically cut-short lifetime. In
2004, he managed the nifty trick of releasing his first single some 30
years after his death, when ‘Magic’ was used to promote the ‘Made To
Love Magic’ compilation. The track — which is a long way from being the
best or worst thing he recorded, to be honest — was originally left off
‘Five Leaves Left’ recordings until it was exhumed to satisfy a
burgeoning public appetite for unreleased Drake material which, in
truth, was pretty thin on the ground. By the time another comp rolled
around in the shape of 2007’s ‘Family Tree’, even Drake’s mum was being
pressed into service in the hope of shoring up a few more quid.
In short: it’s nice to hear unreleased stuff from your favourite
artists; whether it’s listening to John Coltrane mess about in the
studio or hearing a rough cut of one of your favourite tracks to see how
it has developed. You could even argue that, with the Aaliyah track,
Drake was trying to bring her music to a generation that might not be
aware of who she is, and that is commendable. But, really, if it was
utter tripe or could become utter tripe with further messing about, just
don’t bother. Burn it. Bury it. Throw it on a landfill in New Mexico.
Leave it where you found it. Just don’t tarnish the reputation of
artists we love for the sake of a quick buck!
