Thanks to my friend Carol, who was travelling in Australia, I was able to snag a copy of Love an Adventure from 1985, and it's sort of an eye-opener. It was a used copy with just a plain insert, so no real credits, but the back cover showed a slightly different line-up than the later RCA reissue. Brian Canham and James Leigh are pictured, as is bassist "Pierre Pierre," which was a pseudonym for Pierre Gigliotti. Then there was drummer Anthony Argiro, who is pictured here, but on the RCA version James's brother Vince is credited. Even the wiki on this isn't clear, as it doesn't list Anthony at all, so who knows? Maybe he recorded the parts but by the time it was released was out of the band.
Regardless, this is a bit of a conundrum, as I'm listening to this one and it is an earlier pressing that doesn't include the dance mix of "Funky Town," a song that frankly isn't missed here. However, if it was to be shoehorned in, coming after "Living in a Dream" would have worked. I'm struck at how much song order can impact a listening experience.
The album kicks off with the title track, a song I really like, and is followed by "Don't Go," a song left off the RCA version that is really solid, and the first side closes out with another omitted RCA track, "Girl," that again was really good. Side two continues with one strong song after another, and I'm wondering if I'm just in the mood for this today, or if the sequencing is really making that much of an impact on my listening experience. Getting close to the end here, and "Lies Are Nothing," the song that closed out the RCA version, is positioned second to last here, and it's pure '80s cheese with the impossible kick-drum pattern. Okay, not impossible, just very electronic ... and then the album closes out with "Tell Me," the last of the tracks that didn't make the cut for the RCA reissue. It's really solid.
I get that when this was licensed for North America (and Europe), RCA had to make some choices. It may be that they had to cobble their version as they couldn't simply reissue the Australian release. I suppose the thinking was: take what they thought were the best tracks, insert a few solid songs from their debut Autumnal Park, add "Funky Town" and watch the money roll in. In doing so, they took a cohesive album where everything was fitted together and chopped it up and grafted on bits and pieces in an attempt to make it better. (I was about to put in an Oscar Goldman voice-over where I go on about having the technology to make it bigger, better - maybe not faster.)
The 1985 release has no jarring changes and nothing seemed out of place. This is the album that I'd stack up against just about anything else in the genre at the time. Yeah, Simple Minds, Ultravox, I'm thinking about you. Man, Brian really did sound a lot like Jim Kerr at times.
Now don't get me wrong, the RCA version I'm happy to have found, as it has almost all of the same ingredients, but if I'm going to play one or the other, I'll be putting this one on. These guys had all of the ingredients, but for whatever reason didn't catch their big break.
If you're curious, this is the version you can buy and download from iTunes, or stream from Spotify if that's your preference.
Getting this was a great surprise, as when I bugged Carol about maybe looking for anything by the band, I figured the actual chances of her finding anything she'd be able to bring home in her luggage was somewhere between slim and none. Well, she did it, and apparently it was an adventure looking through second-hand shops. To repeat myself from Part One, who doesn't love an adventure?
Author's note: This was written about a month later than the first post, but thanks to the nature of when I post things, I'm putting this one out right after Part One. So no doubt it'll read like a weird set of bookends, but to me, with the passage of time, the two posts feel very different.
Also, I don't have a lot of records from Australia, but do they use thinner material for the album jackets than they do in North America?
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