New Devo Compilation on Vinyl - Turn Around: B-Sides & More 1978-1984 (Released March 2019)

Turn Around: B-Sides & More 1978-1984

This looks interesting!! I think I'm going in on this one.

 

Has anyone heard this yet? I'm wondering how the mastering sounds. I have all these songs many times over on various formats, but if the mastering is good and the price is right, I may think about picking it up when I see it.

 

I ordered it months ago. It was supposed to start shipping in mid February but the last time I inquired they told me it will start shipping this week.

 

I bought this. Contains a sheet of stickers and an old school patch. Very cool package. Great liner notes, cool cover painting. It's a perfect complement to the new Devo 6-LP box set covering the same era.

 

Mine arrived a couple of weeks ago complete with a large 2" seam split on the bottom of the cover. ROG were great to deal with and very responsive in trying to get a new cover, though instead of just sending a cover as requested (to avoid a repeat problem) they have sent a complete replacement album (that has yet to arrive). I am hoping that the replacement does not suffer the same fate. While I do like the Stoughton cover and resealable cover slip sleeves, they allow for too much movement for goods in transit and the cardboard cover is not strong enough to deal with that movement. For shipping, they need to reasonably tightly shrink wrap the album to a slightly larger thick cardboard insert to prevent this from happening.

It is a very nice package though. Really well made with quality throughout. I don't know why they chose to put the "dance velocity" mixes of Through Being Coll and Going Under on the compilation because they are just the same as the album titles but slightly sped up (3 and 4 seconds respectively).

If there is to be CD release of the This Is The Devo Box Set, WB should either add this disc as a bonus and add some of the other single only edit tracks that didn't make it to the vinyl. The vinyl is ~47 minutes long so they could add the following to a CD release:

Uncontrollable Urge (single edit) - this has never been released digitally
Come Back Jonee (single edit)
Freedom of Choice (single edit)
That's Good (single edit) - this has never been released digitally
Here To Go (Go Mix Edit) extremely rare Australia only promo edit - photos correct, timings on both sides wrong in Discogs entry - never previously released digitally

Better still would be to add all relevant bonus tracks to each individual album given Devo's longest album out of these six titles is Duty Now For The Future at less than 39 minutes. There is ample room on a CD for all of the extras let alone previously unreleased tracks and demos.

 

I've gotten to the point that when ordering sealed albums overseas, I will request the seller split the shrink wrap and place the LP with inner sleeve outside of the album cover. I've had far too many seam splits from poor handling in transit.

 

Is there news about a possible CD box or are you just speculating? That would be great!

 

Unfortunately it's all pure speculation. Being the excitable spudboy that I am , I always try to be the eternal optimist that one day a comprehensive Devo box set will be released that mops up and includes all of the extraneous songs and rarities but obviously living in hope has never bode well for a Devo fan. Better to cling to a small twig of hope than be beat over the head with the large branch of realism .

In all seriousness though, given the effort put into the RSD box, you would think that it would see a more general release a few months down the track. I just wish that WB would take the opportunity to include everything in one fell swoop.

 

I couldn’t agree more. If I had a functioning record player I would have been all over that box. I did go for the B Sides LP, though. Someday I’ll have a record player again.

 

Was this commercially a 12" only release in Australia too? I know in the USA it was only on 12" and I have the Australian 7" promo. I think it charted in Australia, so I was surprised it was only available to buy on 12". Although I think it was fairly minor hit!

 

The Australian release was the same 12" EP only release as the US but without the picture sleeve, just a generic WEA cover. There was no general 7" single release. There is a bit of a backstory to it becoming a hit in Australia. The original US release was I believe in March 1985. It did not see a release anywhere else globally. I picked my copy up from a record store in the Melbourne CBD that specialised in disco/dance/club music. They always had multiple copies in stock. A bit later in the year, Molly Meldrum gave the EP a HUGE rap on Countdown saying how big the song was in clubs and proclaimed that even without a video, this could be a hit. I still have that on a scratchy old VHS tape somewhere. So what did WEA do? Absolutely NOTHING. No local release and the track continued to be huge in clubs. I believe that it was more than twelve months after that Countdown review that WEA finally decided to release it locally, sans the Mark Mothersbaugh cover art. And as far as I can remember, it still took a while for WEA to produce the compilation video clip for the Go Mix version. It hardly got played anywhere on television and the song got little to no radio play whatsoever. Yet it somehow managed to sell quite well and over a number of weeks managed to climb to a peak of 40 on the national singles charts and got as high as 10 in Melbourne on both the 3XY and EON-FM charts. I posted scans of those charts years ago on here somewhere. I daresay that some of its sale potential had already been absorbed by sales of the imported version.

I knew nothing of the promo only 7" single version until a store I used to frequent offered me a copy for sale a year or two later.

Going way out on a tangent here, but I think part of the problem with the release of the single locally in Oz was that Devo may already have been sacked by WB by that time so the local arm saw no benefit in putting any effort into pushing it locally, especially given the chronic failure of the parent album Shout. I think that it was just the sheer popularity of the song in clubs that saw them finally relent and release it. It was most likely also the impetus for WEA to release the Oz/NZ only The Best of Devo Vol. 1 for the Christmas season that year.

So the irony of two of Devo's biggest successes in Australia was that two EPs managed to chart so high in the singles charts with Dev-O Live reaching number 1 in August 1981 and Here To Go reaching top 40 in August 1986. As 12" EPs were more than double the cost of a single, this makes the charting positions of these more impressive.

I gave the US Here To Go EP to a couple of friends for their birthdays in late 1985 and I'm sure they probably never played them - I should ask for them pack if they haven't already turfed them.



This was the official video compiled by WEA locally to "promote" the EP. I think that the video came out after the track had already dropped out of the charts.

 

Sound quality on this is excellent, and the songs hold together surprisingly well as a collection.

 

Thanks for that @SpudOz . In the UK we only got the Shout / C'Mon single from Shout. I remember being on holiday in the USA in the late 80s and finding the R U Xperienced 7" - and was even more excited to find a non-album b-side (which is better than many of the tracks on Shout itself).

 

This thread deserves a more descriptive name.

 

Give us this on CD, for the love of G-d!