Newsletter September 2002

Update September 21
BETTY start their new off-Broadway musical BETTY Rules! at New York's Zipper Theater

It’s time to settle into real activity again after the torpor of a long August heat wave in New York City. Labor Day, September 2nd, is the traditional turnaround, so here we are. We've been quiet for a while, but all good things come to an end.

We’ve revised our site structure to separate Audio from Downloads, since we digital pack rats have accumulated a lot of each. When we started getting lost in our own site, we realized it was time to commission a search engine, which will covers all material at stereosociety.com. At present, it’s a little clunky in presentation, but we thought rather than put it up we’d give you smooth revision 1.1 in a week or so. There’s still the browsable site index, which we’ll also continue augmenting.

After some chaos and turmoil at Liquid Audio’s server administration, we’ve finally sorted out the snafu and all streaming and download links should be working soon after Labor Day, with most of them fixed now. We have previously provided both Liquid and Real formats for streaming audio, but since we could make a CD for what we pay annually in server rent we will from now on only present new Liquid files when there is a download (free or paid) involved.

Our Sex Pistols section notes grow a little more, with a memoir relating to the beautifully packaged and presented new set from Virgin to celebrate the newest Jubilee, QE2 now going gold. Thorne’s demos with the group from 1976 had only been heard publicly on an obscure Italian radio broadcast, apparently, although the master had been sitting on his shelf for 26 years. They’re now carefully transferred and published for the first time. They were never intended to be listened to as finished music, since that was record producer Chris Thomas’ job, but it’s interesting to hear the early, sprawling version of God Save The Queen (as No Future) with filler lyrics from Johnny Rotten. Thorne’s new production note gives the full background.

The set, incidentally, contains pretty much all the Pistols’ recordings up to their breakup in 1978 during their chaotic US tour: the tracks from Never Mind The Bollocks and related B-sides, the earliest set of demos recorded by Chris Spedding and the pre-EMI collection from Dave Goodman. The extensive sleeve notes make intriguing reading in their own right.

We’ll be extending this update as September wears on and the northern hemisphere cools down. Just needed to show some signs of life to you. The summer has been spent soaking up sun and cowering in an air-conditioned studio finishing some noisy music.....

That’s enough for now. If you’ve any comments, criticisms or ideas about how we might do things better, please direct them to us through our Contact page. We always appreciate that effort, thanks.