About
All feedback (76)
- simplybestprices-10to20dayshipping (482466)- Feedback left by buyer.Past 6 monthsVerified purchaseGreat communication. A pleasure to do business with.
- manatee_music (133903)- Feedback left by buyer.More than a year agoVerified purchase🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈 This buyer is welcome anytime ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Thank you! 🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈
- your_suitbag (25448)- Feedback left by buyer.More than a year agoVerified purchaseThank you for an easy, pleasant transaction. Excellent buyer. A++++++.
- *****- Feedback left by buyer.More than a year agoVerified purchaseHope to deal with you again. Thank you.
- ewook2014 (569203)- Feedback left by buyer.More than a year agoVerified purchaseThank you for an easy, pleasant transaction. Excellent buyer. A++++++.
- halo.living (4837)- Feedback left by buyer.More than a year agoVerified purchaseGreat communication. A pleasure to do business with.
Reviews (2)
20 April 2016
Timeless and of its time
There is something special about an album that received mixed reviews on its release, but is lauded much more positively - even a classic - many years later. As well as a left-turn (in this case, away from rock), that would disappoint rusted-on fans, it suggests something that was before its time, like a Van Gogh music project. Badfinger’s “Straight Up” is such a recording, full of contradictions but a joyous experience. The songs are brilliant in their own right, but make sense as a collection - even as the diverse styles that you get from three producers and as many songwriters hark at tensions from competing ideas. At one, it was influential - the classic powerpop “Baby Blue” predates Big Star’s genre-defining “#1 Record” by several months. “The Name of the Game” could have been a mid-70s stadium epic. Yet it also borrowed heavily from the popular music canon - producer #2, George Harrison, once was claimed to have called off recording because he claimed that the record was “too Beatlesy”. And clearly, he should know.
Yet, The Beatles influence is unabashed, everywhere you look. Harrison and the band began their association in trying to capture the spirit of Abbey Road. And Harrison’s own slide guitar makes Straight Up’s “Day After Day” such a moving song. Elsewhere, it’s almost a case of: What Beatles album are we trying to sound like today? “Sometimes” harks right back to “Beatles for Sale” or even “A Hard Day’s Night”, “Suitcase” references “Revolver”, and the more acoustic numbers such as “Perfection” get closer the so-called White Album. But if John Lennon - as he has meant to have claimed in the mid 1970s - said that if The Beatles were still together then, that they would have sounded like Electric Light Orchestra, perhaps if they were still together in 1971, they would have sounded like Badfinger?
Harrison’s work on “Straight Up” ended when his work for Bangladesh intervened. The also-legendary Todd Rundgren took over, and quickly finished the job. Apparently, Rundgren did not gel with the band, but the finished product is his legacy. And the bonus tracks on the 2010 remaster are well worth the effort - along with the successful US single version of “Baby Blue”, you get several tracks from the early Geoff Emeriick sessions - further proof that sometimes a great record has to be a sprawling mass of contradictions to be a classic. And in the current age of single-track digital downloads, the extra layers of complexity in bringing the tracks together into an album is what makes this recording well worth owning in its entirety.
16 June 2016
You've got to know how it ends!
Mad Dogs, with only 4 episodes of 45 minutes in each of the first 3 series, is clearly not for binge-watchers, although with the twists and turns, a lot happens in a short time. If you think of it more as a movie franchise - albeit one where the entire story is serialised - you do much more feel like you get your money's worth.
The finale, series 4, is even tighter with a mere two episodes - and my wife and I certainly did not help our cause by watching the second episode first (accidentally, of course). But you get even more worldwide locations, and some characters from previous series reappear along with our four reluctant heroes, wonderfully portrayed by John Simm, Phillip Glenister, Marc Warren and Max Beesley. No spoilers, though!!!
Being serialised, there is no way you should start with this series. But once you've seen the other three, you've got to have it.