Four years ago today....

It's hard to believe it's already been four years since Michael Jackson's untimely death. A very sad and shocking day in musical history. I come from a family of life-long MJ fans. Seriously - my family have pretty diverse musical tastes. Like really diverse. Yet we're all very big fans of Michael Jackson. I'd have to say he's my favourite male solo artist, and my favourite solo artist ever along with Madonna. In fact - only myself and one younger cousin have never witnessed Michael Jackson live. The rest of all my family all attended various dates of the Bad and Dangerous tours. And my house still has old VHS tapes of Moonwalker, Making Michael Jackson's Thriller etc. Completely battered of course due to age and sheer usage but that's part of the charm.The two tour programmes that we have in the house of the Bad & Dangerous tours are two of my most prized musical possessions even though I wasn't born until 1994. Honestly, his music has been such a constant in our family, since well before I was even born. And even in death that continues to be the case very much so. And it shall always remain that way. RIP <3

Michael Jackson - Thriller 25

I love album reissues, but they can be so hard to get right. Some people feel that tacking on demos, outtakes and assorted oddities can detract from an album; the already completed piece of work. Personally I love hearing demos. It's always fascinating to me to hear an album as it develops into a finished piece. It's because of this that I have to say that the 25th anniversary reissue of Thriller was sadly a let down. It could have been so much more.

I won't bore you discussing the original Thriller album. You know it, it's iconic cover and the fact its the biggest selling album of all time. You'll also know the classic singles: Billie Jean, Beat It and Thriller. That's not important whilst discussing the reissue. What's important is: what does the reissue offer in terms of bonus content. Disappointingly, not a lot. The reissue offers an excerpt from the Thriller voice over session, four remixes of tracks by contemporary artists such as Akon, Fergie, Will.I.Am and Kanye West, and one unreleased track called For All Time. As you can tell, it's very sparse. It's very much a let-down when you consider that it's well documented there was a wealth of tracks recorded for Thriller. Spend a little time on Youtube and you will discover tracks such as Nite Line, Trouble, Hot Street etc. The demo of The Girl is Mine was released on the The Girl is Mine 2008 CD single too. There's definitely no shortage of material they could have used. As for For All Time? It's a beautiful ballad, but the recording of the song is actually from the Dangerous sessions! You can tell by Michael's voice - its too deep. As far as I know, the song was merely written during the Thriller recording sessions but was never actually recorded during them. That would be more acceptable if there was a shortage of material to be used. The fact is though there's not.

Certain editions of the Thriller 25 remaster also comes with a DVD. If anything - this is the biggest let down of all. The DVD contains the music videos for the album's singles, and the Motown 25 performance of Billie Jean. That's it. Nothing that even the most casual MJ fan won't have seen - and to make matters worse - its already been released! The History VHS/DVD sets contain everything on this DVD. Of course, there was other material they could have released. For instance, The Making of Michael Jackson's Thriller has never been released on DVD. Or they could have released a recording of The Jackson's Victory Tour (which was the Thriller tour sort of). Realistically though Michael Jackson wasn't pleased with that tour, so I guess that was never going to happen. Although I don't know why The Making of Michael Jackson's Thriller was never released. I've also read that he video recorded most of his studio sessions - why not even release some footage for those?

All in all, I have to say that this is a let down. The hardback book case packaging (I have the zombie cover edition) does look lovely, but sadly for such an iconic album the content on this reissue is lacking. I have to admit, I'm a huge Michael Jackson fan but I do think his perfectionism may explain why this is so sparse. My theory is that he probably wished that demos and uncompleted tracks would never see the light of day. It's an admirable viewpoint, but it has its downsides. If you buy this hoping that you'll get content which will shed light on the making of an iconic album then you'll most likely be disappointed. Those of you that wanted that - purchase a copy of the official Thriller 25 book, it's very informative on the album's recording sessions etc. Thankfully, the Bad 25 reissue was a lot better, and I certainly hope that when the inevitable reissue of Off The Wall comes out its handled better than Thriller 25. I love the original album, but as a re-release its one of the weaker ones in my collection, in terms of content.

Michael Jackson - Live at Wembley (DVD)

A great performance from a most excellent tour. It's excellent that a show from the Bad tour has finally been given an official release. The tour is far superior to the Dangerous tour. This particular performance comes from the second leg of the tour, which took place in 1988. I personally prefer the first leg of the tour (particularly the easy to find Yokohama shows) so given the choice I would have rather an official release of one of those shows. Two tracks from it do turn up on the DVD though as part of the extras. That's personal opinion though, the Wembley shows were still excellent. More songs from the Bad album were actually performed on the second leg shows so perhaps its more fitting for the Bad 25 package anyway.

As I said earlier, the show is excellent. It's Michael Jackson at pretty much his peak as a performer. It was also his first solo tour, so its history on a variety of levels here. It's also a real treat to hear songs such as Another Part Of Me (one of my favourites) and Dirty Diana performed live which weren't part of the officially released Bucharest show from the Dangerous Tour. Seeing him mess around on stage with the band - like at the end of Bad for instance - is also quite lovely to see given how sad things would end up for him. The reason I prefer the aforementioned Yokohama show is purely because of the setlist. I absolutely love the performance of Shake Your Body Down To The Ground although sadly this track wasn't part of the second leg setlist.

My only criticism of the whole thing really is the picture quality. Obviously its not going to be blu-ray - this footage is 25 years old - but it does look poor in places, especially on the distance shots that show the whole stage. Its very blurry in those shots. It doesn't look like its been restored in any way which is a shame. This performance was sourced from Michael's own personal VHS copy he had of it, perhaps they didn't want to tamper with it out of respect. Really though I think they could have justified it: you do feel like you're watching a VHS tape in places. Another thing they could have added in maybe is some more extra features. The Way You Make Me Feel wasn't performed on the night of the main concert due to a late start, so the performance of the song from the night before is added as an extra. Also there is I Just Can't Stop Loving You and Bad from the Yokohama shows too. I do find that a little bit pointless because they were performed in the main Wembley concert. I think they should have added the various songs that were cut from the second leg setlist instead. Also the Grammy's performance would have been a nice addition too.

All in all though this does remain an essential purchase. I recommend purchasing it as part of the four disc Bad 25 boxset. Its not perfect, but considering how much amazing footage still hasn't been given a DVD release yet (Making of Michael Jackson's Thriller for instance) then we fans should still be grateful all the same. Recommended!

Bad 25

So after three months (and it did feel like longer if I'm honest) I finally got Bad 25! This was a Christmas gift from my brother. Surprisingly, I hadn't actually seen this boxset in town at all, only the basic 2CD remaster edition. Anyhow, this boxset is terrific value. I have to confess something first of all: Bad is actually one of my least favorite Michael Jackson albums. Don't get me wrong, I still love it as an album but I do prefer both Thriller and Off The Wall. This package is absolutely brilliant though, and it isn't even the most expensive one you could get! The bigger one came in a case (which looked brilliant) with a tour programme & ticket replicas. It was lovely looking but incredibly dear and my mother saw Michael Jackson on the Bad tour so we already have a copy of the tour programme so there's no real need for us to purchase the bigger boxset. Anyhow, this also comes with a second disc of unreleased tracks and remixes (some of the unreleased tracks have become favourites of mine if I'm honest) and a recording of the Bad tour from Wembley. I would have liked some of the performances from Yokohama to be included on the DVD but that really is just splitting hairs. Its only the second tour of Michael Jackson's that has an official release on DVD and there's also a disc of audio from the tour too. It also comes with a poster and a sticker so its definitely recommended!

Michael Jackson - I'm So Blue

So in the last month or so Bad 25 has been released, which aims to be a fitting tribute to one of Michael Jackson's most revered albums. I'll admit that Bad isn't one of my favourite albums actually, but the Bad 25 package does seem terrific value. I've yet to actually get my copy but thanks to Spotify I have managed to hear the tracks on it (bar the live ones, I'm saving that for when I'm able to watch the DVD) and I have to say that the unreleased tracks really suprised me actually. Of the unreleased tracks, Free and I'm So Blue are my favorites. Actually, I think I'm So Blue is fast becoming one of my favourite Michael Jackson tracks! The lyrics of the song are rather simplistic, basically the narrator of the song's lover has left them for another man, and their coping mechnaism for this break-up is more or less to sing. The lyrics of the song are rather sad I think but what really makes the song more moving is Michael's vocal delivery. I absolutely love the little "dah dah dah's" that provides the song's main hook. For me at least, they sound like they come from a narrator who is obviously hurting following the end of their relationship. Although I do get an underlying sense of optimism from them as they obviously take such comfort from singing, (if that doesn't sound daft). The lyrics don't have the depth that makes songs like Man In The Mirror classic tracks, but they're not the main reason why I love this song. What I love about the song is that it has a much more organic sound that was disappointedly lacking in Bad. Whilst its still a very good album it's too polished and glossy in sound for me. I think I'm So Blue would have made a refreshing change from the highly polished nature of the other tracks on the record. Without sounding too harsh, I think the song has actually aged better than more or less every track that was on Bad. It could be just me, but I actually think I'm So Blue sounds like it could have fitted relatively well on Thriller if I'm being honest. Listening to this makes me wonder if there's any other tracks of a similar ilk (and knowing how frequently Michael recorded, its very likely there is) that have been simply left in the vaults for all these years. Really, it makes the posthumous Michael album seem like even more of a joke than it already was. A great song that I'm pleased has been brought to light!

Michael Jackson Canvas #1

This is the first of three canvases of Michael Jackson that I have on my wall. As you can see the canvas' main picture is that of a picture from Dangerous Tour, with a smaller image of a picture from the iconic Bad photoshoot. For once I actually bought these in a store. I got these about two or three years agoin a store called Wyse Byse which is near the shop my mum works in. Interestingly, Wyse Byse actually used to have a few Michael Jackson related items, I got all of my canvases and two money boxes from there. Its been a while since they've had any MJ collectables there though, but I've got loads of various MJ bits and bobs so that's probably a good thing!

Quirky clocks

These are probably the weirdest music items I own. I was in town with my mother a few days before Christmas 2011 to get some presents. I went into a market called St George's Market, somewhere I don't go very often that contains an array of stalls selling all sorts from fish to candles to clothes, in the hope we'd get my brother a really quirky present. On my way in I spotted a series of vinyls on the wall, and suggested to my mum we should have a look there. Much to our suprise, we discovered they actually sell old vinyls as clocks! They had a wide variety of artists I like such as The Beatles, Madonna, Prince, and to be quite honest I could have gone nuts! When I went to the box of vinyls to see what else they had, as the girl who ran the stall told me they could also make them up on the spot if I chose a vinyl, the first artist I seen was Pet Shop Boys! Finding anything Pet Shop Boy's related in Belfast is rare (I've only bought two Pet Shop Boy's CD's from town ever) so I was shocked to find them here! They had West End Girls, Always On My Mind, Left To My Own Devices and I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind Of Thing. Anyone who speaks to me will tell you how much I adore the work Pet Shop Boys did in the 90s in particular, so I went for I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind of Thing. I also spotted a vinyl of Billie Jean by Michael Jackson so I had that made into a clock too! It's funny, because I always said I wanted a vinyl of Billie Jean, and I ended up with it in a funny sort of way. Amazingly, it was the last day that the stall would be there at the marketplace, so I do feel very lucky that I picked these two up!

Michael Jackson tour programmes

These are the tour programmes my mum got after seeing Michael Jackson in concert twice. The tours here are the Bad Tour and the Dangerous tour. My mum and my Aunt and Uncle seen him live on the Bad Tour, during the second leg in Cork in 1988. We actually live about 2-3 hours away from Cork, but my mum who was actually the same age as Michael (there is actually only 18 days between them) had been a fan right since The Jackson 5 days and had followed his career the whole way through. My other aunt and uncle and their cousins seen Michael on the Bad Tour in Bristol on the same leg. In fact, me and my younger cousin are the only people in my immediate family that never saw Michael live. On my Dad's birthday, mum took him and my brother Colin who was 7 at the time to see Michael in Dublin for the Dangerous tour in 1991, 3 years before I was born. It was my brothers first concert, and to this day he can still remember the shock that went through him when Michael entered the stage simply by jumping up through the floor. He couldn't quite believe that it really was the man himself. We still have some pictures from both tours and a Dangerous tour T-shirt, but these programmes I will always treasure!

Michael Jackson Opus

By far my most expensive music memorabilia that I've got, I got this in May of last year. The Opus is a massive (and I do mean massive, the picture doesn't do it justice but I honestly can't lift it) book that is more of a tribute to the work of Michael Jackson, it was released in December 2009, six months after his untimely death. The the purple and pink thing at the bottom of the picture is actually my leg, so it is pretty huge. I loved the book from first sight, but initially had it down as one of those things I would love to have but would never get, my mother did tell me though that one day I'd have it. There was talk of me getting it as a possible present for finishing my GCSE's but due to money issues at the time that didn't happen. However, we had a stroke of good fortune at the start of 2011 and came out of those troubles, and my parents decided to give me and my brother a massive present to make up for the previous year or so which had been pretty terrible. So in May, I ordered my Opus online from the official MJ site, lets just say, it wasn't cheap. It was delivered by special delivery two days after it had been ordered, and needless to say when the gate went that day I nearly screamed with excitement! It is gorgeous, its very glossy, so the pictures (and there is loads of them) look fantastic, and the fan art section at the back is particularly adorable. It wasn't cheap but it was worth every penny

Christmas goodies.

I hope everyone had a brilliant Christmas and got all they wanted. I certainly got spoilt rotten this year with plenty of new musical goodies. So without further adieu.. 

CDs:

• Erasure - The Innocents (CD+DVD Hardback Book edition)
• The Jackson 5 boxset containing first four studio albums
• Factory Records Boxset
• Pet Shop Boys - Christmas EP
• Depeche Mode - Sounds of the Universe (Boxset)
• Queen - Greatest Hits (3CD)

DVD'S/Bluray's:

• Erasure - Hits!
• Talking Heads - Stop Making Sense
• Michael Jackson - Life of an Icon
• Kylie Minogue - Ahprodite Tour 

Books:

•  Shaun Ryder - You're Twisting my Melon Man (Autobiography)
• Queen - 40 Years of Queen
• The Creative Life and Work of Michael Jackson
• Michael Jackson - Stories You Were Never Meant to Read.

I'll post about some of them individually in the coming days, I think the first one will be on the Depeche Mode boxset, enjoy the rest of the holidays everyone!

First listen Impressions: Michael Jackson - Immortal

Listening to some samples of the new Immortal soundtrack for the Michael Jackson Cirque de Soeli show. Its not a full review, just some initial bullet point esque opinions. As it it just a soundtrack you could say its something of a cash in but on the whole, its not too shabby at all!

• One of the best things about it is its tracklisting: it has about 12 or so songs on it that wouldn't be familiar to people only familiar with his work with Quincy Jones. I say fair dues for not including just the big hits that everyone would know, so it may encourage people to investigate his 90's (which I thought was criminally overlooked) material more. 

• There's also a good number of mash-ups here, whilst they're all pretty good (and some are really good) my only greivance with that is that too often one song just kind of goes into another. The songs aren't really mixed together as such or played off each other. The Immortal Megamix sounds really good but Don't Stop Till You Get Enough just sort of goes into Billie Jean with no real build up which is a shame as a proper mixing of the two would sound phenomenal I think.

• The tracks aren't vastly different to the studio versions a lot of the time which is good, so I never heard a song and thought "What the hell have they done to this?". They've just tweaked the arrangements more or less. However, sometimes it doesn't really work. Human Nature has some new bits that don't really go with the original and it does spoil it slightly. Having said that, I'm hard to please with remixes of that song to be honest as I love the original so much. Also, you've got to give the people behind this some credit, remixing a body of work as iconic as Michael Jackson's would be hard and as the originals are so well known any tweaks are going to come as a bit of a shock

• It doesn't rip off any live arrangments from tours either which is nice. Listening to it, it feels like they've tried to make an individual soundtrack and a lot of the songs here had never been performed live.

• There is 27 tracks on the CD which is a lot. As such, basically all of the songs and mixes are much shorter than the originals or any live arrangment Michael would have used. Some of the songs loose mommentum for that I think, Wanna Be Starting Something is only half the length it originally would have been which sort of kills the build up to the "Mama se mama sa mama coo sa" chant. Its like they'

• The short lengths are a hindrance on the mash-up tracks too. A lot of them tend to be more focused on one track than the other. For instance, Speechless and Human Nature are paired up which I thought would be brilliant. In reality, 20 seconds in it goes straight into Human Nature and there is no more elements of Speechless used. Don't get me wrong, it sounds good but I do think some mash-ups would benefit from a mash up of tracks more

Overall its perfectly decent, even if it is a bit of a cash in. I hope his studio albums being remastered becomes a priority now, Off The Wall is begging for a deluxe edition treatment! Having said that, with Bad 25 next year it doesn't look likely for a while.

Reviewed: Michael Jackson - Thriller

Thriller is the epitome of a legendary album. So much has been said about this album it barely needs an introduction. Its been written about many many times over. Of course, it is the best selling album of all time worldwide, and when any album gets such a credit it leaves you open to considerable backlash. Its been hailed as Michael's masterpiece, containing such pop classics as Thriller, Beat It and Billie Jean. Personally, I love the album with a passion but it still has its very minor faults.

Michael was dismayed with the lack of awards he received for previous album Off The Wall. Once working on the follow up, he took the decision to create an album that would be impossible to avoid. You have to give him credit, and I think its fair to say he achieved that with flying colours, but if I'm honest I don't think even he could  fathom just how successful this album would be. He became even more of a perfectionist in the studio for the creation of this album, there was a finished album created but when he played it through once completed, he cried and decided to start the album from scratch, saying there was no way the album could be released. It has been reported that 300 songs were written for possible inclusion, although whether this includes snippet ideas for songs etc is unclear.

The album itself is different from Off The Wall, although there is one slight link between the two. Wanna Be Starting Something, which opens Thriller was written and recorded originally during the Off The Wall sessions. Personally, I think it fits in far better on Thriller. Thriller by and large is more pop/R+B, although some tracks have elements of rock and soul in them also.

The tracks here are all very strong (bar The Girl Is Mine which is rather cheesy and Thriller for me works far better when with the video) But you could say the album is a tad too diverse in a way. Even if you look at Billie Jean, Beat It and Thriller, which are the three most iconic songs from the album they all sound completely different. The album has by and large aged really well, bar Thriller and PYT, for me they haven't aged just as well as the others. Interestingly enough, having heard some of the unreleased tracks for the album I could see why Michael ordered it to be scrapped. The unreleased tracks whilst good, are even more dated sounding and if I'm honest, I don't think the album would have sold as well if they were still on it

Some of the best songs here though are some of the best Michael ever sang. For some strange reason Lady In My Life wasn't a particularly popular choice from the album, personally it could be my favourite MJ song. His voice on this album sounds impeccable, particularly on Lady In My Life and Human Nature especially.

All in all, this is a great album, but not perfect, then again I'd struggle to name a perfect album if I'm honest. Whilst a lot of the songs here are some of the best he ever did, I think the album could do with being a bit more cohesive.As it stands, its my second favourite MJ album purely because the best songs here are some of my absolute favourites ever. Never the less, this is such a legendary album everyone should hear it at least once!

Duet

Just been confirmed that the duets that Freddie Mercury worked on with Michael Jackson in 1983 are due to be worked on by some members of Queen for a release, no confirmation though what they will be a part of or any release dates though I don't think. Really pleased about this, the demo I heard called There Must Be More To Life Than This sounds really good. I'm hoping any alterations needed on the tracks are done tastefully though out of respect for both Freddie and Michael.