REVO | US | CD-R | 2017 | REVO 085

Visage: Fade To Grey – The Singles Collection | Special Limited Edition Dance Mix Album

1. Fade To Grey [Dance Mix]
2. Mind Of A Toy [Dance Mix]
3. Visage [Dance Mix]
4. We Move [Remix]
5. Tar [7″ Ver.]
6. Der Amboss [4:34 edit]
7. In The Year 2525 [Remix]
8. The Anvil [5:04 Remix/Edit]
9. Night Train [6:24 Dance Mix]
10. Pleasure Boys [7″ Ver.]
11. Damned Don’t Cry [Dance Mix]

The arrival on the scene of the mojo 7xCD Visage BSOG compilation last year simultaneously spurred me on to digitizing the 1984 ltd. ed. dance mix version of their first compilation, “Fade To Grey: The Singles Collection” as well as kept me from doing it for at least a half a year. As much as I am willing to fall down the rabbit hole of monomaniacal fandom [see looooong threads on Simple Minds and David Bowie] and compulsively blather on about bands I really love, I was also aware that I did not want PPM turning into a de facto Visage blog. As much as I could probably do it.

It was earlier this year that I digitized this and prepared it as one of my homegrown CD reissue projects. The remastering process revealed just what this album that had been on my racks since around 2004 really had to offer. Let’s outline exactly what’s on offer.

• Fade To Grey [Dance Mix] – This was the US John Luongo dance mix as on the “Visage” US EP.
• Mind Of A Toy [Dance Mix] – The dance mix of “Mind Of A Toy” was the same as on the UK 12″ single. There was a looped percussive segue at the beginning that John Luongo added.
• Visage [Dance Mix] – A slight edit of the UK 12″ remix with another looped percussive seque as the intro.
• We Move [Remix] – The short remix from the earlier version of FTG: The Singles Collection. Hard cut into the drumbeat outro of the previous track.
• Tar [7″ Ver.] – The original UK 7″ from 1979 with with another looped percussive seque as the intro.
• Der Amboss [4:34 edit] – A unique edit of “Der Amboss” which is usually a minute longer.
• In The Year 2525 [Remix] – Version on other copies of this album, cross faded into next track.
• The Anvil [5:04 Remix/Edit] – Unique edit of 6:14 dance mix of “The Anvil” from “Pleasure Boys” UK 12″ single.
• Night Train [6:24 Dance Mix] – Appears to be UK 12″ mix re-edited to be 0:20 longer than the one of 12″ single.  Possibly longer intro. Fades out.
• Pleasure Boys [7″ Ver.] – Common 7″ version of “Pleasure Boys” which fades up on brief silence from previous track. Cross faded into final track.
• Damned Don’t Cry [Dance Mix] – UK 12″ dance mix from single.

The vinyl I had sourced back in the early noughties was from an eBay seller in England. I had only just learned of the existence of this album at that time, perhaps in the pages of Extreme Voice, the Ultravox fanzine. I had become aware of Extreme Voice when Billy Currie had told me about them when I had ordered his “Stand Up And Walk” cassette when it came out. I had asked Billy a few questions and he said that EV had all the answers. Copies of this album were thin on the ground then. The new mix was primarily on the cassette version of “FTG: TSC” but they also pressed up some LP copies. Due to the longish 52-53 minute running time, it’s a little groove crammed.

Worse, my copy was about a solid VG, with plenty of noise and pops throughout. For years I was afraid to play it, since it looked like what it probably sounded like. As I recall, it cost me around $30+ back then when copies were months apart from each other on eBay; the only game in town, apart from GEMM. When I played it, I got about exactly what I was expecting. Had I been able to buy a VG+ copy of this, it might have cost me $60 in the market of the time.

The constant pop and crackle throughout was substantial. To manually remove the noise using my beloved interpolate filter in Sound Studio would have taken days per track. And there’s no guarantee that using the filter even discretely, hundreds of times per second would not turn the music to much. There are limits to these things! My salvation was definitely going to be the ClickRepair software I bought a few years ago. It’s expert at removing pops without affecting the music afterward. Sure enough, I ran the capture of each side through the filter and the noise was removed. What was left was all that the vinyl was capable of providing at this late date.

The intro to “In The Year 2525” was such a welter of noise that even ClickRepair came up short on it. But there were hundreds of ways to skin a cat. I thought that I could splice in the intro from a clean vinyl copy of the song to better match EQ and the like. After all, I had the US edition of the standard version of this album since day one. I digitized the intro then noticed something very peculiar as I began editing the intro splice into the recording from the Dance Mix album. It had its channels reversed! The intro to “2525” had a very distinct, almost binaural, stereo spread with no crosstalk. It was very easy to determine if the channels had been reversed or not. Fortunately, we have computers for just this sort of thing, so I reversed the channels of the track, but not before determining if the whole side of the LP was in fact, reversed.

Next: …Reversing the Polarity of the Neutron Flow