I wonder if I'm beginning to have second thoughts about this Roy Carr business. He's been so ubiquitous here recently, that it's almost like those TV programme credits where 'Rostrum Camera' is always credited to Ken Morse — so frequently that you assume that doing Rostrum Camera must be a ten minute in-and-out job that requires little planning or skill. So Roy Carr is credited with 'compiling' this collection of four tracks from the 1984 NME Poll Winners. How much work goes into that? The poll winners are a given, so no work required there. It's just a matter of ringing up the record label and publishers and cadging a spare track that they've got lying around the studio, isn't it.
Nothing particularly remarkable on this EP. The U2 'dub mix' of Wire is most interesting for having more beef and more edge (no pun intended) than what I remember of the original: U2 are often best when they up the anarchy quotient.
Then there's a live performance by The Smiths of What She Said, a song memorable for its tattooed boy from Birkenhead and what she said, "She said I smoke because I'm hoping for an early death." Absolutely. Don't governments and health nannies realise that death is exactly the attraction of smoking for a lot of upset people. I can't be the only one that sees those big warnings on the packets — "Smokers die younger" — and thinks, "Yeah, just like James Dean." I smoke very rarely these days: I probably had no more than 30 all last year, and almost half of those were scrounged off you in one evening! But come July, when we can no longer smoke indoors in public, smoking will become so glamorous, so rebellious again; it's appeal buffed up and refreshed all over again like when I was 15. How will I be able to resist?
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