Fw: HW: WOTEOT

[Jon Jarrett]

On Fri, 7 Mar 2003, Chris Purdon wrote:

> Hawkwind should take a leaf out of Deep Purple's book: Simon Robinson
> at Purple Records has a fabulous back catalogue of well-produced
> re-issues and offshoot bands.

        Purple Records is a really good example of how this sort of thing
can work, another obvious one being the various Gong-related releases
under the GAS umbrella. But Purple has a few major things going for it
which Hawkwind, for one reason or another, don't. Firstly, they have a big
fan-base and a long-lived fanclub which provides the initial operating
capital for these things.  The closest Hawkwind has had to Purple People
or whatever it's called, and certainly GAS, is Brian Tawn's Hawkfan
organisation, which was capable of releasing records but not at this sort
of level. Hawkfan was tied up with Flickknife of course; had it been tied
to EBS in the same way, had it been functional in the same way when EBS
was, it could have been the way to do it. That would mean the band placing
a great deal of trust in Brian, as Purple seem happy to do with Simon
Robinson, and Gong with Jonny de GAS. Brian is unfortunately not in as
good a position to do this stuff as those two, I don't know where Jonny
gets his money or his energy from but he's an impressive example of
expenditure of both. Failing him the band would have to do it, though
obviously there's a lot of band involvement with both Purple and GAS as
well.

        The other thing that really makes the difference, and which is why
you see Purple releases in shops but not GAS ones, is this: Purple handles
ressiue stuff for EMI. I don't know how Deep Purple swung that, but all
EMI's DP reissues are mostly or entirely the work of Purple Records. It
means you get a very high-class job, because these people are
perfectionists, and you get decent distribution and, at the moment,
startlingly low prices outside of the chain-stores. A more exact parallel
here would be the work Dale Churchett did on the EMI Hawkwind
remasters. Now it's been my impression that that was mostly the work of
Doug Smith putting that project together but Dale did for them what Simon
Robinson has done for DP and the same label marketed the results. If it
wasn't Doug, I don't know how it was done, but I don't have any proof that
it was.

        Now, as to why Dale wasn't retained by EMI to get the rest of the
albums EMI now owns (the old Virgin ones) and indeed to start getting out
the EBS reissues, that's got to be down to either poor sales of the
remasters (and let's face it there are a fair few of the digipak versions
still in racks most places one you start looking, at least in London and
Cambridge and Brighton where I have been looking) or a break-up of
relations at some point in the long chain between Hawkwind and EMI
management. But that is what we need; a massively enthusiastic project
supervisor who's willing to do a *hell* of a lot of work (as Jonny or
Simon), and major-label backing and distribution to make the whole thing
sell well enough to be worth their doing. At the moment I don't think
Hawkwind have either and for once I don't think it's their fault, just a
pity. But I'd love to know why EMI didn't keep on with _Warrior_, ASAM,
and so on until their vaults were empty; as it is I can only presume what
they thought would be a cash cow didn't milk that profitably. Yours,
                                                                     Jon

ObCD: Monster Magnet - _God Says No_
--
"I recognise that I have transgressed many of the precepts of the divine
law, and that I am subjected by various vices and iniquities, disobedient
to the words of the divine mystery brought unto me and a worshipper of the
delights of this military age." Marquis Borrell of Barcelona, 955 A.D.

             (Jonathan Jarrett, Birkbeck College London)