The back of the “Hanna Hanna” 12″ sagely featured this back catalog and a collection was sparked

Yesterday when posting about one of my projects, a reader commented “where can I get one of these?” and I flippantly answered him with a bullet list of the process I underwent, but I thought, since work like this is why I’m The Monk, maybe a little more light could be shed on the process. Starting today I’ll take you through the process to show how a project like that one comes from inception to fruition. Like any complex project, the first step is defining the scope of your project. This entails discographical research as the first, basic step.

Discographical Research

It was some time in 2008 that I happened across Discogs.com, now my go-to site for any research. It’s a crowd-sourced database of recorded music that knows no boundaries. Any recording in any format released in any nation is fair game. But I did this project in 2007, before I became a member of that site. So in this case, research entailed looking at the many China Crisis records in my Record Cell first. I started collecting the band in earnest in 1984, on the release of their first US album release. I quickly worked back to their debut UK album and with the help of a connected friend, I started buying their 12″ singles mail order from England from a dealer who had been given my want list. The Possible Pop Songs vols. 1-7 as trumpeted on the back of the “Hanna Hanna” UK 12′ [which I bought new] soon began filling my racks.

I also had the following releases in house for this project:

That takes care of all of the vinyl and CD singles I had at the time of planning. But there was one huge asset to also consider. In 1990, Virgin released the first China Crisis greatest hits CD, called “Collection – The Very Best Of China Crisis,” it came in a limited edition 2xCD first pressing that contained gold in the form of a second disc of China Crisis B-sides. Let’s look closely at that release.

Virgin | UK | 2xCD | 1990 | CDVX 2613

China Crisis: Collection [The Very Best Of China Crisis] UK 2xCD [1990]

Disc 1

1. African And White
2. No More Blue Horizons
3. Christian
4. Tragedy And Mystery
5. Working With Fire And Steel
6. Wishful Thinking
7. Hanna Hanna
8. Black Man Ray
9. King In A Catholic Style
10. You Did Cut Me
11. Arizona Sky
12. Best Kept Secret
13. It’s Everything
14. St. Saviour Square

Disc 2

1. Scream Down At Me
2. Cucumber Garden [ext.]
3. A Golden Handshake For Every Daughter
4. Some People I Know Lead Fantastic Lives
5. The Instigator [Italian Fuzzbox Version]
6. Little Italy
7. Greenacre Bay
8. No Ordinary Lover
9. Dockland
10. Forever I And I
11. Performing Seals
12. This Occupation [Extended Mix]
13. Watching Over Burning Fields
14. Animalistic [A Day At The Zoo Mix]

All of these tracks except for “Some People I Know To Lead Fantastic Lives” were cogent for this project. That was a track from the first China Crisis LP that was remixed on the “Wishful Thinking” 12″. Who knows why Virgin included it here in its non-remixed form. Still, disc two is clearly gold, and with this info in hand, I could make the first cut at a spreadsheet of the tracks and sources. I prefer to have the releases included in order release going from each single in 7″/12″/CD increments. By the late 80s, multiple remix formats meant that singles often had more than one or two versions of a track, and we try to avoid remix fatigue when programming one of these BSOGs, so in instances where more than one version of a track is present and they would follow one another in the track sequence, I tend to mix the flow up with a later single A-side remix perhaps buffering two versions of the same track that were released concurrently.

Next: …We build the spreadsheet