Tuesday, January 18, 2011

A Tomb With a View

And speaking as we were the other day of the late Gerry Rafferty, and how there was much more to him than the ubiquitous "Stuck in the Middle With You" and "Baker Street" -- from 1978, and the unreleased at the time original version of Richard and Linda Thompson's great Shoot Out the Lights album, here's the Rafferty produced version of the chilling title song.




I've been meaning to post this for a while, but seeing it over at Never Get Out of the Boat must have motivated me. In any case, I hadn't heard the Rafferty stuff for a few years, and I remembered thinking the later Joe Boyd version of SOTL, which is considerably stripped down by comparison, was rather more to the point. Listening to the above yesterday, however, has changed my mind; in fact, I now rather prefer the extra bit of studio sheen that Rafferty gives to Richard's melancholic minimalism.