The first thing I want to point out here is that
the big yellow circle that says 'The music of John, Paul, George and Ringo'
opposite where it says 'Strings For Pleasure play the music of John, Paul,
George and Ringo' is not a sticker. It's part of the design of the cover. Quite
why it was felt the need to tell us this twice in the space of a few inches I'm
not sure, but clearly someone was desperately keen to get the message across
that this was the music of the fab four, rather than a compilation of
the fab four themselves.* And I'm assuming the reason why it's not emblazoned
with 'The Beatles' is because amongst all the music of The Beatles, there's a
song each from their solo careers.
That in itself raises a point of comment. This
album came out in 1975, and if you'd asked the man in the street at the time to
name a solo John Lennon song, then like as not he'd have said 'Imagine'.
Similarly, 'My Sweet Lord' for Harrison and 'Photograph' for Starr would be
predictable choices too so fair enough that they're on this, but 'My Love' for
McCartney? It wouldn't have been my choice, either then or now; 'Another Day',
'Jet' and 'Band On The Run' had all been bigger hits by then so it's an odd
addition. But it is what it is I guess, so I'd best just get on with listening
to it.
And so what of it then? Well despite the 'Strings
For Pleasure' moniker, there's a lot more to this than just a bland string
makeover. In fact, the music here is played by a full band with a chunky guitar,
sax or Hammond lead. So that's one surprise, but a bigger one comes from
wondering why anybody would want to hear versions of
these songs compressed into hacky, instrumental arrangements. Even if you didn't
like the vocals and just wanted to sing along to the tunes then you'd be shit
out of luck too - the arrangements all too frequently mess around with the
familiar melody of the songs, missing beats and whole bars or repeating motifs
to no good effect other than making the once familiar incredibly difficult to
even hum along to, let along sing.
Ironically, the originals of 'Yesterday' and
'Eleanor Rigby' were already scored and arranged for strings, but the
folk at Strings For Pleasure can't resist adding a full band to the mix to make
them top heavy and drunk man clumsy until they're as weirdly off-kilter as a
scene from a David Lynch film or drawing a moustache on the Mona Lisa. Duchamp did
this in 1919 but he was making a statement of subversion whereas I get the
distinct impression that the folk behind this think that these little tweaks are
some kind of improvement. Well they're not, and have to report that this record is horrible. Pointless and horrible. I'd
like to think that cover photo of that woman is blurred due to the speed she's
moving toward the record deck to turn this crap off.
* Stop Press - I did a quick Google search for this
and I've found images of the cover without that yellow circle. So I'm assuming
my theory is correct and there were complaints from punters who bought this
expecting a cheap Beatles 'Best Of' and wound up awfully
disappointed.
No comments:
Post a Comment