Spurts-New Richard Hell Compilation

[schwenko]

from richardhell.com:

The other major news is that in August Sire/Rhino will release a new compilation of Richard's top songs and performances, called Spurts: The Richard Hell Story. The CD is one that Richard has wanted to do for a long time, the best versions of his best songs, drawn from each of the albums/CDs he has made. There were no restrictions on availability, now that Hell has recovered the rights to Destiny Street, and because the record is being released by Warner's (which owns rights to Blank Generation). When Time appeared in 2002, some reviewers treated that collection as a "career retrospective," but it wasn't. It contained nothing from any of Richard's studio-recorded full-length releases -- neither the above-mentioned records, nor the Dim Stars CD (Richard's 1992 one-off made with Thurston Moore, Steve Shelley, and Don Fleming). Time was the best of Hell's available unreleased odds and ends: outtakes, live material, demos, etc. This new record is the unrestricted 21 finest recordings. All but two songs on the CD have been painstakingly remastered, and eight of them have been remixed (notably the Dim Stars songs). The earliest recordings are two Neon Boys songs from 1973, and the most recent is a song Richard wrote and recorded with Ivan Julian last year. Richard regards the collection as the finest single CD of his available. It contains two Neon Boys studio recordings, one Television (live), three from Time (including "Chinese Rocks"), four from Blank Generation, one, "The Kid With the Replaceable Head," from the Nick Lowe produced single on Radar, three from Destiny Street, five from Dim Stars, plus the 2001 re-formed original Voidoids' "Oh" (remixed with improved vocals), and the previously unreleased 2004 collaboration with Ivan Julian called "She'll Be Coming (for Dennis Cooper)." The booklet will contain rare and previously unseen photos, as well as a long interview with Richard by Robert Christgau and Carola Dibbell discussing every song on the disk.