I don't like this day quite as much as I used to.
Where's my spy camera? Where's my spy camera? Where's my SPY CAMERA!?
Always seems like a bit of a risk ordering something from Amazon Marketplace rather than the main site. Yes, you can read the reviews and what have you but when they don't say they're going to post immediately it can be a bit worrying. And all to save a couple of quid. Was it worth it?
The item in question is a CD and DVD combo of a-ha's farewell concert in Oslo entitled Ending on a High Note. I went to see the Manchester leg of the same tour. A bittersweet experience. It's always a shame when a band you admire decides to call it a day. You can take some solace in their solo work, but it never seems quite the same. Think about it - George Michael was never much cop after Andrew Ridgeley packed up his goodies and surfed off into the sunset.
The top Norwegian songsters split for the first time back in the early 90s. Not long after Morten Harket brought out a solo album called Wild Seed. There are some good songs on there, and you've got MH's extraordinary voice (there you go. I bet you didn't know that the MH in Vin MH stood for 'Morten Harket', did you? Neither did I...) but it's missing something.
Mostly what it's missing is the song writing skills of Paul and Magne. Especially Paul. He went on to found the group Savoy along with his wife, Lauren. There's a real sense on their albums of him cutting loose with the stuff he really wants to do and has been unable to in a-ha. But the fact remains, as good as Paul's voice is it's not as striking as Morten's.
(Nevertheless, I think Savoy are the most satisfying of the a-ha spinoffs so my Second Music Recommendation is their 'best of' collection Savoy Songbook Vol1)
I saw that Queen documentary that was on over the Bank Holiday the other day. It was the same there too. There's something about the tension in these groups that helps produce their best work when they're recording together. The solo stuff is a bonus but it never seems to completely cut it.
A couple of compare and contrasts to finish off with.
The original Savoy version of Velvet from 1996 and a-ha's 2000 cover version.
Magne's song The Longest Night with a chorus added by Paul to make Foot of the Mountain.
More soonliest
Due to my iTunes ordering usually being by Artist, alphabetically, every time I load it I am greeted with a picture of a nose cone of a plane, with 'a-ha' painted on it.
ReplyDeleteI bought Stay On These Roads only a few weeks back on eBay, I was curious as to what their version of the Living Daylights soundtrack sounded like versus the John Barry version. Apparently they didn't like each, Barry and A-ha, not the two songs obviously. This bit of trivia is courtesy of that trivia spoiling site, Wikipedia. I say 'spoiling', as it has somewhat ruined the art of knowing arcane things, everyone now assumes that you have got it from the site, and usually their right.
As for Amazon market place, the amount of counterfeit copies of DVD's on sale is quite breathtaking, the only pictures of the Stargate SG-1 (I know mentioning it her maybe considered sacrilegious as you appear to be a die-hard Dr. Who, and perhaps British Sci-Fi, fan) box sets are those of a knock off, I reported it, but they're still there. I was sold a knock off box set on eBay, and played hard-ball to get the return postage refunded, not fun.