In Case You Missed It: INXS’ Wembley Show Lives Anew in Digital Reissue

If you’ve ever wondered why so much INXS catalogue activity centers solely around 1987’s Kick, there’s something new and different for you available: a live concert from the early 1990s, instead.

The Australian band have recently released Live At Wembley Stadium 1991 to digital retailers. This 22-track album features audio from the band’s July 13, 1991 concert at London’s famed stadium, which exactly six years prior held a rapt audience for Live Aid. Their Summer XS tour promoted the previous year’s release of tenth studio album X, another polished collaboration with Kick producer Chris Thomas that yielded more global success with singles like “Suicide Blonde” and “Disappear” becoming worldwide Top 10 hits.

Fans will recognize this program as identical to what was released on the videotape Live Baby Live that same year. A live album of the same name was recorded throughout the tour, and added one new studio track, “Shining Star.” (That same track features here, as well.) The audio from that video is here newly remastered by producer Mark Opitz, who produced the band’s Shabooh Shoobah (1982), Welcome to Wherever You Are (1992) and Full Moon, Dirty Hearts (1993) as well as the original Live Baby Live album.

So far, only iTunes seems to be the place you can get Live At Wembley Stadium 1991, although the band’s official site is selling a two-disc edition of the set, ostensibly to tie into the recent Australian broadcast of INXS: Never Tear Us Apart, a miniseries about the country’s favorite musical sons (the critical reception of which actually bought Kick and a recent compilation back into the country’s Top 10). The track list for this vintage show is below.

INXS, Live At Wembley Stadium 1991 (Petrol Electric, 2014)

1. Guns in the Sky
2. New Sensation
3. I Send a Message
4. The Stairs
5. Know the Difference
6. Disappear
7. By My Side
8. Hear That Sound
9. Original Sin
10. The Loved One
11. Wild Life
12. Mystify
13. Bitter Tears
14. Suicide Blonde
15. What You Need
16. Kick
17. Need You Tonight
18. Mediate
19. Never Tear Us Apart
20. Who Pays the Price
21. Devil Inside
22. Shining Star

All tracks except Track 22 recorded live at Wembley Stadium, London – 7/13/1991
Track 22 first released on Live Baby Live (EastWest 9031 75630-2 (AUS)/Atlantic 82294 (U.S.), 1991)

Rock ‘N’ Roll Stars Revisited: Oasis Announce Catalogue Expansion

Britpop band Oasis may never be reuniting again thanks to the hilariously toxic relationship between brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher, but the band’s 20th anniversary will be celebrated with several deluxe reissues, the first of which was announced today.

This year, all three of the band’s albums released in the 1990s will be remastered and expanded, starting with 1994 debut album Definitely Maybe, to be reissued in May. (The set’s being referred to as the “Chasing the Sun Edition,” to quote a lyric from the band’s “Slide Away.”) Their next two albums, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? (1995) and Be Here Now (1997), will be expanded at an unconfirmed later date.

With perhaps the keenest ear for pop hooks in England since Morrissey and Marr and a confident, optimistic lyrical bent that stood in direct contrast to the dominant grunge trends in rock and roll, Oasis essentially helped revitalize interest in the country as a supplier of rock music. Though commercial reaction in the States was modest at best, Top 10 singles like “Live Forever,” “Cigarettes & Alcohol” and the non-LP release “Whatever” became touchstones of a generation.

The band were rarely out of the U.K. music press since, whether for their music or their offstage antics The notorious feuds between lead singer Liam and guitarist/songwriter Noel could be withering but also bizarrely entertaining, such as a 1996 taping for MTV Unplugged that saw Liam opt out due to throat trouble – only to sit in the audience with beer and cigarettes, heckling his brother’s voice from a balcony in between takes. A backstage altercation before a festival date in 2009 led Noel to finally quit; Liam reformed the remaining lineup as Beady Eye while Noel put together a solo band under the moniker Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds.

What can fans expect from the newly expanded Definitely Maybe? Find out after the jump!

I’ll Have Popcorn With That: Eclectic New Compilation Offers Jerry Butler, Eartha Kitt, Johnny Nash, Frankie Laine

What is Popcorn music?

Bob Stanley of the band St. Etienne and the new Croydon Municipal label wants to tell you.  “Popcorn is a genre after the fact, built by curation rather than creation,” the author of Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop (soon to be retitled The Story of Pop Music from Bill Haley to Beyonce for its upcoming U.S. edition) writes in the liner notes to his new release Sweet ‘n’ Salty Popcorn.  “Its narrative was formed by Belgians in the seventies from records made in the fifties and sixties – there was no such thing as a Popcorn artist because no one had set out to make a Popcorn record in the first place.  It was all in the rhythm, which had to suit the unusual ‘slow swing’ dance, and it could be Latin boogaloo, an orchestrated Italian ballad or an early Tamla Motown single.”

Despite sharing that atmospheric, “slow swing,” soulful rhythm, the twenty tracks selected by Stanley to introduce Popcorn to an audience outside of Belgium make for a diverse lot.  Popcorn could emerge from crooners (Tony Martin), theatrical vixens (Eartha Kitt), early rock and rollers (Jo Ann Campbell, Larry Hall), and bona fide soul men (Jerry Butler, Roy Hamilton).  Popcorn songs could hail from the pens of writers Burt Bacharach and Hal’s brother Mack David (Dean Barlow’s “Third Window from the Right”), Phil Spector (Johnny Nash’s “Some of Your Lovin’,” not the Goffin and King tune of the same name), Curtis Mayfield (Butler’s “Find Another Girl”), Billy Sherrill (future evangelist Jackie Weaver’s “The Tingle”) and the team of Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman (the offbeat “River in My Blood” sung by future “I Love New York” jingle writer Steve Karmen).  The earliest days of Motown even were incorporated into the Popcorn sound, as heard on Little Iva and Her Band’s recording of the “Continental Strut” co-written by Brian Holland.  In other words, the Popcorn genre is rather catholic; Stanley counts “gritty R&B…film themes, ska, tango, Spector-esque girl groups and loungey instrumentals” from the fifties and sixties among the tracks you might hear in a Popcorn club.

After the jump, we have more details on Sweet ‘n’ Salty Popcorn as well as the complete track listing and order links!