Monday, October 17, 2005

Beyond Belief

An age ago, before we went up to see our friend George in Aberdeen (talking of whom, hope you are settling into the new location, especially after all your excitement of going to see Ladytron) I had been on the phone to my friend Ian.

Whilst rattling away - honestly, Ian can put me to shame with the whole trail of 3-legged donkeys behind me - in the background Radio6 was playing and I vaguely recognised the track "Beyond Belief". Well, it took a while to get to that title to tell the truth. And when we did get chance to check it out at George's it resolutely said the track was by Elvis Costello and that was the version played.

But something continued to nag at us.

It was resolved when we travelled back from Cloud's parental aurevoir this weekend.

We were playing one of my infamous compilation tapes in the car: in this instance, a collection of various Lampchop songs. I'd opened the tape with various tracks we'd accumulated from several compilation CDs such as the "Beyond Nashville" and the classic Uncut collection "Sounds of the new West."

And that's where it was all made clear: both Cloud and I had been convinced that "Beyond Belief" was actually by Pere Ubu or some other random-generating avant-garde machine of popular music. Actually, it was Kurt Wagner in one of his cover moments taking on Elvis C and making him uniquely his own. In the US, you may best find the track on the Vinyl Junkie collection "Loose: New Sounds of the West Vol. 2" (Vinyl Junkie CD 111) 2/21/00. In the UK, try "Beyond Nashville: The Twisted Heart of Country Music" (Manteca) 10/30/01

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