Music Arcades: Echo and the Bunnymen: Ballyhoo - the Best of Echo and the Bunnymen

Despite having no recollection of buying this CD, I can tell roughly when it must have been without looking at my database. After the point where catalogue CDs fell to the price where you could excuse yourself buying them for just one track plus change. That would be about 2001. Before the iTunes Store opened in the UK, making it possible to buy just the one track and ignore those you already had and/or didn't want. 2004.

Now to look it up: 6 September 2004, about 10 weeks after the iTunes Store opened. Maybe they didn't have Never Stop in their catalogue then. Or maybe it was just an impulse buy; I had, after all, been looking for a reasonably way to get Never Stop for 20 years.

I think it's a misnomer to call this a "best of", but that actually suits me, because I've already got all the songs that are genuinely the best of Echo & the Bunnymen (1, 2, 3). Never Stop is one exception, of course, and Nothing Lasts Forever might be another, but the latter is available, should I want it, for £0.69 from Amazon, and I can't really be arsed, so it can't be that great. The CD has, however, introduced me to The Game, a song from the end of the first incarnation of the band, which is no revelation, but is quite a decent song all the same. And to three songs from Heaven Up Here that I don't have. How can they have those three and not have All My Colours which is easily among the "best"? Never mind, I was sufficiently arsed to get that song in the early days of the iTunes Store.

p.s. Nice to have Bill Drummond doing one of his mini-essay specials in the booklet. It's poorly printed to the point of illegibility: is he really calling Mac a "parthenon drive frontman"?! Hmmm, I guess he is.