Anyone who entitles a song Three Pages In Record Collector is guaranteed attention in this magazine, and is presumably a musician with a fascination for rock’s past (you can find it on The Times’ 1999 Creation album, Pirate Playlist 66). Ed Ball is a man of many parts: an O-Level, a Television Personality and a Beatnik Filmstar, not to mention his role at Creation.
The Times, though, were his Swinging 60s art-pop/pop-art incarnation and this was their (unreleased at the time) 1980 album recorded upon changing names from Beatnik Filmstars. Two versions appear here – the sharper original mono recording (which came out on Pastell in 1985) and Joe Foster’s somewhat fuzzy ‘simulated stereo’ mixes for the 1994 Rev-Ola CD, plus some previously unreleased demos. The songs are loaded with reference points: “My Andy Warhol poster is up there on the wall between my Dali painting and The Jam at the Albert Hall poster,” for instance, while Red With Purple Flashes appropriates a quote from The Creation’s Eddie Phillips describing their music. Nowhere To Run, You Can Get It and a mod-ified version of Generation X’s Your Generation are also covered. A new decade may have dawned, but a fantasy 60s sound was lovingly recreated. Fab.
