Over on the Al Stewart mailing list, there’s been a discussion of the forthcoming boxed set by EMI. Many of the list members already own everything in the set, including the “unreleased” and “alternate” versions, so the obvious question is, do you buy it, and if so why? My comment:
I used to be a completist – everything by Al, everything by the Legendary Pink Dots, everything by the Pet Shop Boys, everything by Faithless…. But as John Cleese put it in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, “I got better.” I think what did it was the torrent of “Dick’s Picks…” live recordings of the Grateful Dead; I realized that I didn’t need eight different versions of “Franklin’s Tower”. From there it was a short step to giving up my ambition of collecting every single different remix of “West End Girls”. Subsequent recovery was uneventful.
Besides, I couldn’t bear to think of myself as the kind of anorak whose Last Will and Testament proudly bequeathes: “my entire collection of Freddie and the Dreamers records to my dearly beloved grand-nephew Cyril, knowing that he will treasure them as I have”.
(You may recognize the subject line as the title of a CD by Underworld. I own this CD; in fact I think I have everything that they’ve released. Oh, well.)