So Far Away - Observations On "Brothers In Arms" and "No Parlez"

Introduction

This is another post taken from Seven Days In from 2020. It is observations on the difference between a couple of vinyl albums and their compact disc counterparts, which then wanders off into the fact that in some ways technology has brought us much closer together while distance still keeps us far apart.

I do wish that our mobile devices were like Star Trek teleporters so I could meet Vocal and Facebook friends face to face. The thing is we can do phone calls and video calls but we always want to go that one step further.

Even in this country, I would love to be able to instantly teleport to places that I love.

So Far Away

When we got hit by CD I noticed something about two particular albums "Brothers In Arms" by Dire Straits and "No Parlez" by Paul Young. I'll talk about the latter in my next post, but the CD versions of these albums were longer than the vinyl versions, taking advantage of the fact that due to compression and dropping of frequencies you can fit up to eighty minutes of music on to a CD (though I believe a Mission of Burma one actually exceeded that).

The song "No Parlez" was written by Anthony Moore who I really need to write a playlist piece on, he has done so many brilliant songs but is probably virtually unknown to so many people so I will include one for you here as a taster.

Back to "No Parlez" and "Brothers In Arms", basically, the songs were just longer than the vinyl release.

The ideal length for a vinyl album is about 18 minutes a side, and making it louder shortens that, the early Led Zeppelin albums have virtually no run out as Jimmy Page wanted the maximum effect from his production.

Again, Todd Rundgren brought out a sixty-nine-minute vinyl album "Initiation" which came with a warning to use a new needle each time you played it (that may be an urban legend but you get the point). The album is almost all synthesiser and electronics driven but ironically contains an a cappella song called "Born To Synthesise"

Anyway "Brothers In Arms" while a decent album, I only liked every other song on it and particularly the opener and closer. I first heard Dire Straits playing the excellent "Sultans of Swing" laid back but with stunning guitar work from Mark Knopfler.

The opener is "So Far Away" and got me thinking, thirty years ago, everyone I knew was on this island apart from a couple of relations who had departed for the antipodes.

When I went to Mexico around the millennium someone told me that a bus from the Texas border to Mexico City took 24 hours. Mexico is BIG, but our maps show it as this little isthmus joining North and South America. Someone also mentioned about flying across Australia takes seven hours to fly! In Britain, I don't like travelling by train for more than three hours (though some journeys are far more pleasant than others).

Now thanks to social media and the internet I am in contact with people around the globe (remember messaging a friend to see if he wanted to come to a gig, He replied he had moved back to India) and the main problem is the time differential, but it does bring us much closer together in a way we couldn't imagine even in the nineties.

Conclusion

Every day we are growing closer to each other, and are able to share words and music together.