HW/OFF: Arthur Brown and Voiceprint

[Jonathan Jarrett]

        Dear All,
                  excuse me while I adopt a posture of false
nonchalance. <squeeze> There we are, it's on.

        Hey, bumped into Arthur Brown on the train the other day, got
chatting the way you do and so on...

        Subject of Voiceprint happened to come up because he's trying to
get his back catalogue out and I said how I'd not thought Voiceprint had
really done that great a job with the Kingdom Come discs (which have one
set of liner notes between the three of them, really lousy reissue artwork
and unnamed bonus tracks which on _Kingdom Come_ at least are just
out-take versions of the album tracks, which suggests that whoever did the
sleeve didn't actually listen to the album or he'd have known what they
were). He said, by way of reply, something very much like this: "Well,
it's an odd choice an artist faces these days... I mean you can sign up
with someone like Sanctuary who are very highly regarded, and get 40p a
CD; or you can sign with Voiceprint and get £1.20 a CD." I was quite
surprised by this, as I'd understood from I know no longer where that
their royalties were meagre, but apparently not. So there you have it,
there is *something* to be said for them after all...

        For those interested in such things, Mr Brown is recording a new
album at the moment, in Ely, more electric than the halfway-acoustic
stuff he's been doing of late (pity in a way, the cello, percussion and
steel line-up he had at Canterbury was really haunting) and trying to sort
out the new deal for his back catalogue and selling stuff through his
website at <www.godofhellfire.co.uk>, and expects all these things to get
somewhere quite early on next year. And he's a really nice bloke also,
civil to a fault and happy to talk to a nervous fanboy he didn't know from
Adam. So there we have it. Yours,
                                  Jon

ObLP: ST37 - _Secret Society_
--
        Jonathan Jarrett                Birkbeck College, London
                 jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk
        --------------------------------------------------------
  "The large print giveth and the small print taketh away." (Tom Waits)