The Bats are always busy. All have jobs and even other bands and solo projects on the go. Robert Scott has been in the USA with his other band The Clean as well as doing his own thing talking and playing around the Portland Oregon area. But Bat activity never ceases.
Paul Kean has recently re-mastered three albums from their back catalogue which were made available just this week. 1995′s Couchmaster , 1990′s Compiletely Bats which features material from the very early 1980′s EPs such as By Night, Music from the Fireside and Made Up In Blue and the long unavailable classic Daddy’s Highway from 1987 with all time favourites such as “North By North”, “Treason”, “Block of Wood”, “Treason” and “Mid City Team”. Paul is also about to start remastering work on another batch of albums over the coming weeks.
So while we have been active getting to gripes with running a record label again by working on some great new release projects over the last 6 months the catalogue represents the labels history, heritage and backbone. A big part of the thinking around buying the label back was centered on the idea of keeping the history alive by making it readily available in the best ways possible.
Generally it’s time to tidy up the Flying Nun catalogue and make long unavailable titles available again as well as ensuring that they are also available digitally. Some will be simple repressing, some will be re-mastered, others repackaged with unreleased material and new artwork. Some titles will be repressed on vinyl for rerelease next year. These reissued bats titles represent a small part of this process.
There is plenty of great material to get through, the question is where to start and what next?
Great news. Something I’ve always wondered was why the CD of “Daddy’s Highway” seemed to reverse side 1 and 2 of the vinyl edition. (ie. the LP beings with ‘Block of Wood’ and ends with ‘Tragedy’, the CD beings with ‘Treason’ and ends with ‘Daddy’s Highway’. Any idea which one is the correct (ie. what the band actually intended) running order?
Vinyl is correct. Forgot about the cd track mix up. Does your cd include bonus tracks?
nice one you lot!!!
Imagine walking into a JB Hi Fi store and being able to purchase Daddy’s highway & Compiletely both on CD. It doesn’t get much better than that. I now just need Law of all Things to complete my Bats collection. Bring it On for NZ’s greatest ever alternative pop band. “One Man’s view”
Barkers Flying Nun EP T-Shirts look great. The Bats 4 Songs epT comes with digital download of remastered versions of North By North, Get Fat, Straight Through My Heart and Best Friends Brain. Remastering didn’t require much tweaking from the copy taken off mint vinyl – original was FAT!!
Bats have just finished recording rhythm tracks for a new album. The session was done at Seacliff in the old blue stone stables where Dale Cotton set up his excellent studio and captured 15 new songs and a few “space” jams. We’re on cloud 9! Looking forward to completing vocals and mixing early next year.