Review originally published on Everett True's Substack, which is well worth a subscribe

Introduction

“Anticipation is so much better” – Delta 5, 1980

This blog is dedicated to vinyl: current releases and reissues. I am splitting each review into two parts: Anticipation and Realisation.

Anticipation is so much of the pleasure.

Speaking as someone who spends a ridiculous amount of time digging through charity shops, record fairs and water-damaged boxes labelled “Everything £2”, I’ve come to realise that expectation forms a huge part of my relationship with music. “How much of this stuff do you actually listen to?” someone asked me recently.

Not all of it. Not even half of it.

That isn’t the point.

Finding a classic Nick Lowe single for 50p. Spotting an original copy of Gaye and Other Stories by Clifford T. Ward. Bringing home a Springfields LP for less than the cost of a chicken bake slice from Gregg’s. Those moments provide a peculiar kind of reassurance. Proof that my life happened. Proof that the things I cared about 40 years ago still matter. The rush is immediate. Stronger than any substance or alcoholic drink I’ve encountered.

I pick up a copy of Black Sabbath Vol. 4. A Violinski album rightly disappeared in the mists of time. A rare Lone Justice single. Carmel (yet again, I cannot resist those Serge Clerc covers!). A Madonna single that’s eluded me for decades. Linton Kwesi Johnson. More Specials. Records I’ve loved for years. Records I’ve never come across before. The familiar. The elusive. The unexpected. And the music is already playing in my head.

I have aphantasia. I cannot conjure visual images in my head. I possess no visual memory. But music, I know. Sometimes it’s a record I know intimately. Sometimes it’s a record I’ve never heard before. It doesn’t matter. The expectations begin firing instantly. Possibilities. Connections. Half-remembered stories. Imaginary sounds. That’s where the magic lives.

And for me, the artefact has to be physical.

Vinyl, preferably (but CDs and cassettes work too). A stream on a screen does not. Fairly or unfairly, the spell refuses to work the same way.

People ask if I regret selling my record collection.

Mostly no.

I miss my copies of Au Pairs, Transmitters, Cassius Clay, Sonic Youth, The Mob records. But the thrill of rediscovery outweighs the regret. Finding a favourite again after 30 years. Wondering whether it will sound as glorious as it does in my head.

And if I never find it again?

So what?

There is always something else waiting. New, old, whatever. Another record to discover. Another possibility to imagine. Another expectation to nurture.

After all, anticipation is so much better.

31. Hole – Live Through This (Definitive Sound Series – One Step) (Interscope)

Anticipation

Imagine you’re watching Courtney Love perform live on stage, and every song appears to be aimed in your direction.

Imagine you’re watching Courtney Love perform on stage for the very first time.

Imagine you’ve been given control of Courtney Love at Reading Festival and every ‘decision’ you make just makes the situation more unmanageable

Imagine you’re down a seedy nightclub in Seattle and Courtney Love is sitting on your shoulders, engaged in a wrestling match with Drew Barrymore, who is sitting on your friend Eric’s shoulders.

Imagine you’re listening to Hole for the first time, long before their debut album, and all you want is whiskey poured down your throat and to meet this woman who is screaming out all this pain and hatred and confusion.

Imagine you always knew how iconic Babes In Toyland were.

Imagine trying to explain to someone who hasn’t seen Hole live why they were so astonishing, why the word magnetic doesn’t come close, why danger is such an integral part of the attraction when you aren’t entirely sure whether the danger is real or put on or if there is any meaningful distinction between the two.

Imagine telling Courtney Love that.

Imagine her telling you she wants to write a really good record and hasn’t done it yet. Imagine her sitting in a Chicago bar while Nevermind plays, drinking and getting angry because, as she sees it, no girl from the underground has been allowed to do that. Imagine arguing with her because ‘Teenage Whore’ is a great record too and why the f*** should she judge herself according to the accomplishments of a bunch of blokes? That isn’t what Hole are for.

Imagine her whispering softly back, “Yeah, but Everett, not many people remember that.”

Imagine remembering.

Imagine you’re talking on the phone, Christmas Day ’93, to Courtney Love and her husband cos they knew you’d be in and couldn’t think of anyone else to talk to.

Imagine Courtney Love phoning you at 3am from a toilet at a party, wanting to play you her new song, muted and rasped and tentative, not yet a song in the sense that millions of other people will come to understand it as a song, but you told her not to change a fucking thing about it. And she didn’t.

Imagine knowing some of the stories before they became lyrics.

Imagine knowing some of the lies before they became stories.

Imagine all the lies.

Imagine all the confusion.

Imagine all the jeopardy.

Imagine being there while Courtney Love is furious that her marriage has become more important to everyone than her band, while she is trying to articulate this furious belief that she hasn’t proved herself yet, that the world has already decided who she is before she’s been given the opportunity to make the record that might prove otherwise.

Imagine knowing that she is about to make that record.

Imagine not knowing anything else.

Imagine an album comes out the week after possibly the most seismic death ever to hit rock’n’roll and you haven’t been given a single credit on the sleeve, not one, despite the fact you know at least four of the songs were directly inspired by conversations and events and trauma you suffered with the main songwriter (“sleeping with my enemy”, anyone? “was she asking for it?”), and when the album lands on your doormat 32 years later, you find the slight still rankles. Her f***ing husband gave me a credit on his album and I never even knew him. It might have been because I had been quite vocal in my dislike of the way Eric’s guitar had been mixed down. Who knows?

Imagine all the hope.

Imagine all the lack of hope.

Imagine all the fun.

Imagine all the confusion.

Imagine all the ‘sex’.

Imagine holding the record now.

It’s beautiful. Of course it is. Ridiculously so. A great heavy artefact of a thing, housed in its own slipcase, heavyweight tip-on jacket, eight-page booklet, all the ceremonial trimmings bestowed upon a record once built from considerably cheaper materials: anger, ambition, guitars, jealousy, friendship, competition, sex, betrayal, confusion. Three thousand numbered copies, all lovely and pristine and authenticated.

I am slightly scared to touch it. Fuck it. I rip the shrink wrap straight off, knowing immediately that I am not going to be playing it any time soon, knowing that I have just immediately cut its re-sell value in half.

Some information for you: Eric found the original analogue master tapes in his storage locker. He’d assumed the oversized reels were digital backups until he took another look and realised these were the actual analogue mixes compiled for mastering the album. This edition has been cut from them by Chris Bellman at Bernie Grundman Mastering, pressed on 180g vinyl using the One-Step process.

This information ought to excite me enormously.

It does excite me enormously.

I am still not putting the record on.

Imagine the fact that when the album in question originally came out you found yourself quite unable to even listen to the f***ing thing because of the swirling darkness encroaching so rapidly upon you.

It doesn’t matter.

It never mattered.

I knew all these songs back and front. I must have heard pre-release tapes:

Maybe this ludicrously elaborate version has finally fixed the guitar mix.

I f***ing hope so.

I’m not finding out yet.

There is something about holding the record without hearing it that pleases me. The memories are allowed to remain memories for a little longer. The guitars in my head can remain louder than the guitars on the record. The songs can remain the songs I remember before they became Live Through This, before everyone else got hold of them and started explaining what they meant and who wrote them and what they proved and what they predicted.

Before history.

This is stupid, obviously.

Records don’t belong to the people who were around while they were being made. Records belong to whoever wants to use them for whatever they need. Somewhere, someone heard Live Through This years later without knowing or caring who spoke to whom at three in the morning, without knowing who was angry with whom or who was sleeping with whom or who felt slighted or betrayed or flattered or frightened, and Hole became their band. Quite right too.

But I am allowed this moment.

Surely.

I look at the track listing.

‘Violet’.

Oh f***.

‘Miss World’.

‘Plump’.

‘Asking For It’.

Here we go.

‘Jennifer’s Body’.

‘Doll Parts’.

Turn it over.

‘Credit In The Straight World’.

‘Softer, Softest’.

‘She Walks On Me’.

‘I Think That I Would Die’.

‘Gutless’.

‘Rock Star’.

There they all are. Twelve little titles printed neatly on an expensive object.

Thirty-two years disappear remarkably fast when you read twelve song titles.

The last 15 or so years I have tried so hard to be written out of history, I begin to wonder at myself. Perhaps that’s why this bothers me. Not the lack of a credit. Come on. Not really. Who needs another credit? I have enough f***ing credits.

Except apparently I do still need a credit.

Apparently, some pathetic small part of me is sitting here in 2026 thinking: I was there.

I was there.

Wasn’t I?

Was I?

And this is where everything becomes treacherous, because memory is a dreadful bastard and rock’n’roll memory is worse. Everyone remembers themselves closer to the centre of the photograph. Everyone remembers the remark they made that changed everything. Everyone remembers hearing the song first.

Except sometimes you actually did.

Sometimes the phone really did ring at three in the morning.

Sometimes Courtney Love really did complain to you that she hadn’t written the great record she believed herself capable of making and you really did tell her she shouldn’t measure herself against her husband and that Hole were already astonishing. In that 1993 interview she worried that her marriage had become more important than her band and talked about wanting to prove herself through her music.

And then she went and made Live Through This.

F***.

Perhaps that is what I have been avoiding.

Not the record.

Certainly not the sound quality.

The past is troublesome enough at normal fidelity. I’m not convinced I need it mastered from the original analogue tapes with exceptional clarity and depth.

Imagine all the hope.

Imagine all the fun.

Imagine all the jealousy.

Imagine all the stupidity.

Imagine all the accidental kindness.

Imagine all the deliberate cruelty.

Imagine all the arguments.

Imagine all the phone calls.

Imagine all the songs.

Imagine all the people who aren’t here anymore.

Imagine all the confusion.

Imagine all this.

Now imagine that none of it ever happened, and I am the biggest f***ing liar you ever met.

Realisation

Not yet. I’m not ready.