Customer Reviews

A World Without Love/I Don't Want To See You Again

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Peter and Gordon have been unjustly ignored in the annals of rock history in general and in the assessment of the British invasion in particular. This could be attributable to the sorry state of their recorded canon on CD, which up until the three Collectable twofer collections, comprised a long series of very nice but generally redundant greatest-hits CDs. Unfortunately, Collectables barely exceeded the minimum amount of effort in creating their reissues, for whatever reason.

As is obvious from most of their product, Collectables doesn't have a lot of money for graphics or design. Their approach on licensed product from major labels indicates they also try to save on the total number of tracks, rarely exceeding 24. (Sadly, Capitol never did a P&G "Definitive Collection" like they did with their other British invasion acts, which took full advantage of the CD capacity, often with 30 or 31 songs.) Each of the three discs in their Peter & Gordon reissues adheres to this rule of thumb, as if this will somehow fulfill any possible collectors' needs. Collectables obviously chose to only consider reissuing the six Capitol LPs that charted on Billboard's Top 200. Their other four Capitol albums were skipped: their fifth, 1966's "Peter and Gordon Sing The Hits of Nashville, Tennessee" (which preceded "Lady Godiva" by about a month) and their final three, 1967's "Knight In Rusty Armor" (featuring two of the "bonus" tracks from these three CDs, "Knight in Rusty Armor" and "To Show I Love You") and "In London For Tea" (featuring the other two "bonus" tracks, "Sunday For Tea" and "The Jokers"), and 1968's "Hot, Cold and Custard," (their final hurrah, an adventurous LP which was critically acclaimed and incredibly hard to find). That the bonus tracks are all we will be getting from these four albums is hardly indicative of either their quality, or any dearth of rare tracks they could easily have added to those first three CDs in their stead.

Although more popular in the U.S. than in their native England, the first two Peter & Gordon albums appeared there first, and when Capitol imported them for release, they were no kinder to their running order than they were to the Beatles. In particular, their second LP "In Touch With," featured three songs never released in America: "Barbara Allen," "Ain't That Lovin' You Baby," and "Leave Me In The Rain." Additionally, the '64 UK EP "Just For You" featured "Roving Rambler," while the '64 French EP, "Nobody I Know," contained "Leave My Woman Alone." A 1966 45 appeared only in Germany: "Wunder" b/w "Liebe, Gluck und Treue," while a four-song French-language EP also appeared in France that year, "Chantent En Francais." Two B-sides fell through the cracks: 1966's "Start Trying Someone Else" (B-side of "To Show I Love You," later used in the UK as the B-side of "Sunday For Tea"), and 1967's "The Town I Live In" (the quickly withdrawn original B-side of "Lady Godiva"). The final single tracks that never appeared on LP or CD were also their final record as a duo: "I Can Remember (Days Gone By)" b/w "Hard Time, Rainy Day." The first Gordon Waller solo single "Speak To Me" b/w "Little Nonie" appeared only in the U.S. while the pair were still together in 1967; four more 45s by Gordon alone appeared on EMI labels (two in England only, one in Europe only, and one, the Buddy Holly song "Everday" b/w "Because of a Woman," came out in America, England, and presumably the rest of the world--all in 1968. (Two more Waller singles appeared on Bell in '69 and '70, but that would require two separate licenses.) Live versions of their early hits appeared on both 1964's "Tribute to Michael Holliday" ("A World Without Love") and 1990's "The Sullivan Years: The British Invasion" ("I Don't Want To See You Again.") So there are fifteen released studio tracks, ten solo Gordon Waller EMI songs, and a couple of live tracks, sufficiently spread out over the years to provide quite appropriate bonus tracks which wouldn't have stood out production-wise for the proposed five CDs which would have contained the original ten LPs. And except for that final single and the solo Gordon songs, all of them appear on British or Japanese CDs which are still in print!

Instead, we got the still-quite-enjoyable three discs featuring only a portion of the team's output, restricted (except for those "bonus" tracks) to their first two years' work, and rendered non-essential to anyone who has the original LPs. Because of the way Capitol spread out the recordings, many of the tracks left off the final two British albums "'66" and "Somewhere..." appear on the 1967 albums Collectables chose not to reissue. And we're all deprived of the experience of hearing "Hot, Cold and Custard," which those of us who couldn't find the money to buy it at list price on LP in 1968, really can't afford it now when it generally goes for in excess of $50 at a minimum.

Oh, what should have been. I still believe that both Peter & Gordon and their fans deserve far better.

Believe it or not, I'm actually a Peter & Gordon fan, and I actually thought that they released quite a bit of well performed, well recorded music. Collectables is nice enough to package 2 original albums on 1 CD; it's too bad they didn't bother to do a decent remaster or give any consideration to the packaging. The sound is all midrange and you can barely discern what the original 12" covers looked like. Go find the original vinyl. It will cost you more, but you will be much happier.

Hello,

When I was a child ,Peter and Gordons album ,I DON'T WANT TO SEE YOU AGAIN ,was the first album I ever owned. While the album sports 2 fine LENON/McCARTNEY originals ,the song that haunted me for about forty years is ,THE LAND OF ODEN. That song was the reason for my purchase.

The service/delivery of this product and others ,is good. I live in a complex that has very small personal mailboxes. Usually ,I have to wait for a note from the mailman ,telling me my packages have been delivered to the main office. One of the albums I ordered came packaged without the bulk, and fit nicely into my personal mailbox. Sounds trivial ,but to me it was a final detail that made online shopping a good experience.

Thank you

ClassWar

Peter and Gordon recorded six albums together in the mid-sixties. Collectables have released them all on three CD's, including as bonus tracks some singles that didn't appear on any of those original albums. This is the first pairing, containing the first and second of the six albums, with one bonus track (To show I love you). The songs are mainly soft, mid-tempo ballads. The major hits here are A world without love (number one in Britain and America), Nobody I know ( a top ten hit in Britain and a top twenty hit in America) and I don't want to see you again (a top twenty hit in America but a miss in Britain. Nevertheless, if you're thinking of buying this, it's the other tracks that you will be interested in, because you can buy a greatest hits collection if that's all you want..

Apart from the three major hits, this CD includes one minor American hit, To show I love you, written by Tony Hatch who made his name writing hits for Petula Clark. They wrote five original songs here (If I were you, You don't have to tell me, Love me baby, oft as the dawn, Leave me alone), which are enjoyable without being exceptional, rather like all the songs that they wrote for themselves.

There are several covers, as you expect on original sixties albums - these include Lucille (Little Richard), Leave my woman alone (Ray Charles), 500 miles, Tell me how, All my trials and Freight train. They are from a variety of sources, yet they are all made to fit Peter and Gordon's easy going style, which contrasts nicely with a lot of the other (more generally upbeat) pop music of the time.

Those of us who grew up on the music of the Fifties and Sixties have been waiting a long time for our favorite albums to be available on CD. One of the problems was that "long-playing" records back them had about 10 or 12 tracks and the songs were all about two or three minutes long so that an entire album lasted about a half-hour. The good news is that this problem has been dealt with by the companies reissuing these albums on CD in two nice ways: tacking on some bonus tracks to the end of the album and/or putting two albums on one CD. This pair of Peter & Gordon albums does both, although there is but a single bonus track.

"A World Without Love" is the title of both Peter & Gordon's biggest hit and their best album. The single, written by Lennon & McCartney, hit #1 on the pop charts in 1964. It was the first song from the British Invasion by a group other than the Beatles to reach the top of the charts. How did Peter Asher and Gordon Waller end up with an original song written by Paul McCartney? Because Paul was dating Linda Asher, sister of Peter. This explains why three other songs the Beatles never bothered to record made it on to Peter & Gordon albums as well. Two of those songs, "Nobody I Know" and "I Don't Want to See You Again," ended up on their 1965 follow-up album, which took the latter song as its title. Both of those songs cracked the Top 20. This pretty much explains the Peter & Gordon formula: record a Lennon & McCartney song, make it the title of your album, and sing like a Merseybeat version of the Everly Brothers. The results are not great, but certainly enjoyable.

"A World Without Love" and "I Don't Want to See You Again" makes a nice combination of Peter & Gordon albums. The collection of tracks is not as good as one of their greatest hits collections (which usually put the three Lennon & McCartney songs up front) because you are missing "Lady Godiva" and "Woman," a McCartney song written under a pseudonym. But if you like the Peter & Gordon sound and want to get beyond the hits this is an obvious choice for your music library.