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CD
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OPT4 054CD
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Expanded version of the 1987 mini-album released on Creation Records. Described as a "minor classic" by Luke Haines. Band features Luke Haines, Martyn Casey (The Triffids, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds) and Alsy Macdonald (The Triffids). Includes: Dave Westlake's Westlake album from 1987; BBC session recorded with members of The Go-Betweens plus two studio demos of unused songs. David Westlake's first album finally gets a new day in the sun in the wake of his brilliant current LP My Beautiful England. 36 years after it first appeared in 1987 on Creation Records David Westlake formed The Servants in 1985, who released two excellent singles and appeared on the NME compiled C86 LP. Searching for a stable Servants line-up to release an album he recruited Luke Haines (The Auteurs/Black Box Recorder) via an NME advert, who came on board, and stayed for five years. After failing to find a committed rhythm section, he enlisted the help of Martyn Casey and Alsy Macdonald and recorded the 1987 Westlake album for Creation. Overlooked at the time, the record was later described as a minor classic by Luke Haines himself. It is included here. It also contains the previously unreleased Janice Long BBC session recorded in the summer of 1987 featuring Go-Betweens members Robert Forster, Amanda Brown, and Robert Vickers. As chronicled in an interview in US music magazine The Big Takeover (issue 53, 2004), Belle and Sebastian frontman Stuart Murdoch was a huge Westlake fan and tried to locate him in the early 1990s in hope of forming a band with him, before launching Belle and Sebastian in his school class instead. Sleeve notes by Luke Haines.
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LP
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OPT4 054LP
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LP version. Clear vinyl; printed innersleeve. Expanded version of the 1987 mini-album released on Creation Records. Described as a "minor classic" by Luke Haines. Band features Luke Haines, Martyn Casey (The Triffids, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds) and Alsy Macdonald (The Triffids). Includes: Dave Westlake's Westlake album from 1987; BBC session recorded with members of The Go-Betweens plus two studio demos of unused songs. David Westlake's first album finally gets a new day in the sun in the wake of his brilliant current LP My Beautiful England. 36 years after it first appeared in 1987 on Creation Records David Westlake formed The Servants in 1985, who released two excellent singles and appeared on the NME compiled C86 LP. Searching for a stable Servants line-up to release an album he recruited Luke Haines (The Auteurs/Black Box Recorder) via an NME advert, who came on board, and stayed for five years. After failing to find a committed rhythm section, he enlisted the help of Martyn Casey and Alsy Macdonald and recorded the 1987 Westlake album for Creation. Overlooked at the time, the record was later described as a minor classic by Luke Haines himself. It is included here. It also contains the previously unreleased Janice Long BBC session recorded in the summer of 1987 featuring Go-Betweens members Robert Forster, Amanda Brown, and Robert Vickers. As chronicled in an interview in US music magazine The Big Takeover (issue 53, 2004), Belle and Sebastian frontman Stuart Murdoch was a huge Westlake fan and tried to locate him in the early 1990s in hope of forming a band with him, before launching Belle and Sebastian in his school class instead. Sleeve notes by Luke Haines.
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CD
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PICI 038CD
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The release of NME's C86 cassette heralded a new generation of artists who'd emerged since the preceding C81 assembled a set of acts who'd coaxed new dialects out of punk, rhythms, reggae and the avant-garde. What of another of the best from C86 -- the Servants, David Westlake's band Ambivalent about the invitation to be on C86, Westlake gave the NME a wrong-footing B-side, before keeping a distance from the noise around the compilation. Subsequent releases from Westlake and The Servants and Westlake attracted fine reviews but settled quietly into relative obscurity, despite musical involvement from various Housemartins, Go-Betweens, and Triffids, a quest by Stuart from Belle & Sebastian to find Westlake and form a band; not to mention Luke Haines's own five-year presence in the Servants before forming The Auteurs, Baader Meinhof, and Black Box Recorder. Westlake went first into the law, then spent years in literary academia. Now the surprise arrival of My Beautiful England. The album is a masterpiece of concept, composition and performance, a conceptual work of truths and reflections of difficult but deft and unflinching expression. "It is not only fashionable now to denigrate England and its past; it is heresy to recognize good in it. The place that made me is disappearing. Its values and traditions. Among them: good manners, humility and clemency, resilience and perseverance, good humor. History is being refashioned -- in spirit and material fact -- by ideologues unshakably certain they are in the right, and people are being distanced from their pasts. Some find themselves forced into passive acceptance of new distortions of the past, out of imitativeness or cowardice. I resist. This album is a memorial. Intentionally, a museum piece. It is a personal tribute to the England I knew."
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LP
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PICI 038LP
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LP version. The release of NME's C86 cassette heralded a new generation of artists who'd emerged since the preceding C81 assembled a set of acts who'd coaxed new dialects out of punk, rhythms, reggae and the avant-garde. What of another of the best from C86 -- the Servants, David Westlake's band Ambivalent about the invitation to be on C86, Westlake gave the NME a wrong-footing B-side, before keeping a distance from the noise around the compilation. Subsequent releases from Westlake and The Servants and Westlake attracted fine reviews but settled quietly into relative obscurity, despite musical involvement from various Housemartins, Go-Betweens, and Triffids, a quest by Stuart from Belle & Sebastian to find Westlake and form a band; not to mention Luke Haines's own five-year presence in the Servants before forming The Auteurs, Baader Meinhof, and Black Box Recorder. Westlake went first into the law, then spent years in literary academia. Now the surprise arrival of My Beautiful England. The album is a masterpiece of concept, composition and performance, a conceptual work of truths and reflections of difficult but deft and unflinching expression. "It is not only fashionable now to denigrate England and its past; it is heresy to recognize good in it. The place that made me is disappearing. Its values and traditions. Among them: good manners, humility and clemency, resilience and perseverance, good humor. History is being refashioned -- in spirit and material fact -- by ideologues unshakably certain they are in the right, and people are being distanced from their pasts. Some find themselves forced into passive acceptance of new distortions of the past, out of imitativeness or cowardice. I resist. This album is a memorial. Intentionally, a museum piece. It is a personal tribute to the England I knew."
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