The boxed set

When a I was a young and serious purist, I was strongly against 'best of' albums. There seemed - to my hardline junior, at least - to be something a little shallow and lazy in buying a compilation of a band's hits. If you liked them, you bought their albums and listened to everything. Indeed, if an album is an entity, then just lifting out one or two songs was to deny the value of the whole. 

I suspect the first time I broke my own rule on this would have been New Order's 'Substance', no doubt with the justification that many of the tracks included weren't actually on albums. Really, it was just an easy way to get all the vinyl 12" versions on CD. 

Indeed, I think the bigger transgression was buying a couple of 'complete works' boxed sets, when, to be frank, I wasn't interested in everything by the artists. The first two I bought (I can't remember in which order) were Madness's 'The Lot' and The Police's unimaginatively titled 'Message In A Box'. 

Both were flawed: the Madness set included all the songs, but some only as videos, not as music tracks. The Police one managed to include everything apart from the b-side of their last ever single (off the top of my head, a live version of 'Don't Stand So Close To Me'). Both struck me - and still do - as classic record label laziness.

Over the years, I bought more: just glancing up at the shelves, I can see the complete Velvet Underground (at least two CDs never played) and also Talking Heads (more thoroughly explored). Plus there are boxed sets of singles - The Beatles, Duran Duran, for example - and others focused on a single album: 'Automatic For The People'; 'New Gold Dream (81~82~83~84)'; and 'The Queen Is Dead'. Some are done well, some less so. Pretty much all of them deserved better. 

Today, this beauty landed: a four CD retrospective of James's twin albums, 'Laid' and 'Wah Wah'. The former is a bit too acoustic for me, the latter my favourite James album by a country mile. It is the best boxed set I've ever seen: so beautiful and so well done, such attention to detail. It feels like the whole undertaking was cherished by whoever did it. 

In fact, all that's missing, are Brian Eno's original sleeve notes, so I've reproduced them here:

"Improvisations are almost always the seeds for James' songs. Before we started our formal recording sessions for what became the 'Laid' album, I spent some days working with the band in their rehearsal room in Manchester, seeing extraordinary pieces of music appearing out of nowhere. 
It occurred to me that this raw material was, in its own chaotic and perilous way, as much a part of their work as the songs that would finally grow out of it. The music was always on the edge of breakdown, held together by taut threads, semi-formed, evolving, full of beautiful, unrepeatable collisions and exotic collusions. 
I suggested that, instead of working on just one record (the 'song' record, for which we'd already agreed a very tight schedule) we find two studios next to each other and develop two albums concurrently - one of structured songs, and the other of these improvisations. It seemed pretty ambitious at the time, but we decided to aim for it. 
Generally, we improvised late at night and in very dim light. We worked on huge reels of tape, so that we could play for over an hour without reel-changes. Strange new worlds took shape out of bewildering deserts of confusion, consolidated, lived gloriously for a few minutes and then crumbled away. We never tried making anything twice: once it had gone, we went somewhere else. 
Ben Fenner, who was engineering, attentively and unobtrusively coped with unpredictable instrument and level changes in near-total darkness, leaving us to wander around our new landscapes. I asked Markus Dravs, who'd worked as my assistant at my place, to come down and occupy one of the studios. I wanted him to look at the improvisations and see what he could make of them while we carried on with the 'song' record. 
We'd select a promising section from an improvisation and he'd investigate it. Using bits of processing equipment and treatment techniques evolved in my studio, he'd evolve new sound-landscapes located at the outer edges of aural culture. We were initially too busy in the other studio to bother him much, which left him free to work with the material in much the same spirit as it was originally performed - by improvising at the console. 
As the days passed and there became less work to do on the 'song' record, people spent more time in the wild studio, emerging from the jungle of interconnected equipment in the early hours. We worked very long days, but there was always enough going on to prevent any loss of momentum. Things happened very quickly. 
My mixes from the jams were all done in a single afternoon: I was trying to get a little of each jam onto DAT because there was so much new work flying around that it was hard to remember it all. I made fifty-five mixes that day and never mixed anything twice. I wasn't expecting that we would use these mixes in the end, but it turned out that this fast, impulsive way of working was right in the spirit of the performances, and the results often make a cinematic, impressionistic counterpoint to the elaborate post-industrial drama of Markus' mixes. 
They set each other off well: the combination feels like being at the edge of somewhere - where industry merges with landscape, metal with space, corrupted machinery with unsettled weather patterns, data-noise with insect chatter."

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Reading (and now determined to finish): 'Manchester Stories'