The Best of the Studio Rarities
soundboard recordings (quality: VG+ to EX)
Track notes:
01 You're a Hurricane, I'm a Caravan (demo, undated)
02 Ship of Fools (demo, partial 1984)
03 Holy Water (vinyl-only B side)
04 The Little Man Within (demo 1985)
05 All the Young Dudes (edit)+
06 Penny Lane*
07 Martha My Dear*
08 Piece of Mind
09 Little Bit of Perfection (outtake - Dumbing Up)
10 Nowhere Man*
11 All You Need Is Love*
12 The Long & Winding Road*
13 A World Without Love (P. McCartney)
14 Your Freedom - Rainy Days (demo 2018)
15 Sunset
All songs by Karl Wallinger, except:
+David Bowie (by way of Mott the Hoople)
*Lennon-McCartney
ROB SEZ: The sprawling 5-CD Arkeology is a great thing, and every self-respecting World Party fan needs to have it, at least digitally. That said, I was uncomfortably aware that it left out a lot of strong material. So I did what I typically do: I hauled out my archive and looked for Karl's gems that didn't make it to the box set or the streaming services of Apple Music, Spotify, etc. So what you have here is about a disc's worth of RARE FINDS that you might be hard-pressed to locate anywhere else. Most are sourced from my own CD singles and vinyl, but a few are lossless captures of lossy webstreams of one sort or another. (Purists take note: the FLAC set does contain some lossy-sourced material.) I strongly doubt that even the most fervent fan has heard all of these. Track 14 is something I found recently when I was picking & choosing what to include. One quick sidetrack: did the man have a Beatles fetish? Obviously so! But I challenge you to find another artist who consistently pulled off Lennon-McCartneyt cover versions of such high quality and feel — even when he radically revamped the music, as he did on track 12. There's plenty more out there that didn't make it into Arkeology. But I am convinced this is the rarest and best of the lot.
FLAC some lossy-sourced material
