Exactly! And the press likes nothing more than to throw $$$ around and nobody talked $$$ in this instance... It was crystal clear with Springsteen and Dylan... So I doubt she sold her rights. I could be wrong...
Also, who knows what the future holds... Maybe Universal or Warner will buy Primary Wave at some point... And scratch the whole Olivia reissue plans... Or start all over again better... Maybe Chloé will rise up at some point being super involved and be unhappy with PW... We never know what will happen...
The only reason I believe it was a sale was because Vinny Vero stated so in a post some time back in the FB group. It was careless for him to divulge those details, but he did & would most likely be aware of the deal.
On a slightly unrelated note, I wonder if Chloe is living at Olivia’s house now? I seem to recall she moved out of that house she and James had.
Is John (the husband) American? I suppose he is living there... I don't follow Chloé at all... Does she talk? Does she spill the beans? Does she live her life in social media or is she too old to be from that generation?
She’s posting a lot on Instagram at the moment, but doesn’t really talk about anything you’d want to hear!
Share away, please! I've been off FB for a couple of years now, and neither @vinnyvero nor @primarywave bothered to mention the ONJ reissues in their Twitter feeds, so I'm not of much help with respect to social media.
A few days back, Chloe posted a reel on Instagram with herself, James & Matt that looked to be filmed in the property’s guest house, which makes sense. I recall the guest house interior from when ONJ briefly put the ranch up for sale in, I believe, 2018.
That’s a lot property for John to be all alone on. Don’t they have a lot of live animals that need attending everyday according to all the video clips from her ranch. He will need help. Plus all the plants he attends to, I’m sure will be used for other people who need it now that Olivia is not there. I know it’s personal but I still wonder if she’s buried on the ranch property? Or somewhere in a cemetery like Karen Carpenter?
Lovely notes from Olivia, I'm actually surprised by how detailed they are! (compared to Physical's at least). It's nice to see "new" notes from her.
It is, isn't it? It does make me wonder if this note - despite the March 2022 date - was actually written before the Physical one. Otherwise it's odd that Physical's was so sparse by comparison.
I’m not clicking on that above, I only have 1 more day to get my CD so I want to wait and read it all tomorrow. I only clicked on burning fool’s to see the blurry text. I still want to be surprised…
I suspect you're right. I think she was very business savvy - probably a combination of good advice and guidance early in her career (I believe her manager Peter Gormley gave her lots of good business advice) and her natural entrepreneurial flair. Apart from the various entrepreneurial initiatives she set up over the years, she seems to have had a head and an appetite for real estate turnover. There were the houses she bought, lived in, and sold at a profit, and also other properties - like the beach house she sold to Madonna in the 80s, and the Gaia Resort. Musically, she seems to have been unusually well set-up for someone who was - at least in the early years of her career - purely a singer rather than a significant singer-songwriter. She ensured that what limited self-penned tracks she had were put on most of her official Greatest Hits releases (royalties!) as well as on a couple of significant single releases. (People always mention that Physical was the biggest-selling single of the 80s... but it's worth noting that that makes The Dolphin Song the biggest-selling b-side of the 80s! I wonder how much THAT made her...?) And of course, much of her music - including music written by others - was published under her own imprint, ONJ Productions. (That always impressed me when I was a kid!) There was a post in the FB group recently about her net worth - it led to lots of people ranting about how irrelevant it was, and how tasteless it was to discuss such matters - but I actually find this stuff quite interesting! Looking online, her net worth is often pitched at between $40-60m, but when I consider her various career and business interests and compare her career and profile with others, I get the feeling her net worth was probably considerably more than that - although, as Bobby has pointed out, her medical bills in recent years must have been stratospheric. I doubt she'd have sold the rights to her musical legacy outright. I'd be very surprised if her inheritors (presumably John and Chloe) didn't retain a significant ongoing interest. She'll have been thinking ahead to Chloe's future, and the possibility of her having children. And I'm sure she'll have wanted to ensure that her estate could go on having the capacity to contribute to her various charitable causes.
I'm not sure he would be aware of the details of the deal, I think he's more of an 'employee' of PW rather than a partner - and he may have been speaking generally, in the sense that he had access to all her material through the PW deal.
I know I've griped as much as anyone about PW's faux pas with these two key deluxe edition releases - but it is quite noteworthy just how recent the PW deal is. I had forgotten it had only been put in place after not just her most recent cancer diagnosis, but also after her fractured sacrum and recovery from immobility (2018 into 2019). She must have known the chances of her being around for a long time were very limited by this point, so she and the PW team covered quite a bit of ground in a short space of time in terms of agreeing what was going to happen. And then of course, that all had to be handled sensitively and managed alongside her variable - and then declining - health. More recently, of course, they've had to navigate her passing (and for all we know, it may have been on her instruction that they haven't made a big thing of that, and have instead just quietly pressed ahead with the release schedule, so as to be sensitive to her family who she knew would be grieving). I haven't go my INFY and Greatest Hits CDs yet, but I'm already excited to see what's coming next!
I found myself wondering where Olivia's final interview was filmed (the same location she filmed her final Christmas message). You can see in the long-shots that it seems to be a room with a window and external door. Was this the guest house? I remember at the time wondering if she was actually in some sort of care facility, or if she'd had to move into a more accessible part of her home. Most of her other videos up till this point had been filmed in her living room next to the piano.
I bought the vinyl remaster of If Not For You and Am really pleased with how it sounds and the pressing quality. I listened to the deluxe edition online today and by comparison the bonus tracks sound really poor quality and mp3 quality. Is the CD equally disappointing?
I imagine Olivia was thinking of 'Banks Of The Ohio'. It's quite sweet that we have a typical Olivia faux pas in the notes! I spoke with her just before the release of the 40th anniversary of 'Physical' last year and, delightfully, she said 'more than 40, isn't it? I'm so bad with time, I have no idea the concept of it'. This is more a result of the differing source material. The studio offcuts that appeared as B-sides ('The Biggest Clown', 'It's So Hard To Say Goodbye', 'Would You Follow Me', the Cliff duet 'Don't Move Away') sound great. The two songs from the 'Toomorrow' soundtrack ('Walkin' On Air', 'Goin' Back') are fuller sounding than the Real Gone Music remaster from 2014. Olivia's Decca single is fine but 'Till You Say You'll Be Mine' has always sounded like it was recorded in a bathroom (!) and we've discussed the poor quality of the Toomorrow Decca single, which apparently sounds that way on the master tapes. As for the four acetate recordings, it's a miracle these have survived in the quality we now have them in considering that an acetate degrades each time it is played (as explained beautifully in this thread by @Burningfool). The bonus tracks really do have to be taken as just that, additional recordings from the era to be appreciated separately. Credit where credit is due, Primary Wave/Vinny has got the selection spot on as I can't think of a single track we know of that could have been added. I'm glad they are all collected on the one release even if the integrity of the sound does vary. x
I'm pleased to report that my replacement copy of INFY has arrived, and the printing in the booklet is crisp and perfectly printed. I hope that none of you get the blurry booklets.
