Various Artists - The Hitmakers Sing Donovan (2014)

By 1966, Donovan had shed the Dylan/Guthrie influences and become one of the first British pop musicians to adopt flower power, immersing himself in jazz, blues, Eastern music, and the new generation of counterculture-era US West Coast bands such as Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. He was entering his most creative phase as a songwriter and recording artist, working with Mickie Most and with arranger, musician, and jazz fan John Cameron, and their collaboration on Sunshine Superman was one of the first psychedelic pop records. Donovan's rise stalled in December 1965 when Billboard broke news of the impending production deal between Klein, Most, and Donovan, and then reported that Donovan was to sign with Epic Records in the US. Despite Kozak's denials, Pye Records dropped the single and a contract dispute ensued, because Pye had a US licensing arrangement with Warner Bros. Records. As a result, the UK release of the Sunshine Superman album was delayed for months, robbing it of the impact it would have had off the back of the hit single. Another outcome was that the UK and US versions of this and later albums differed, with three of his Epic LPs not being released in the UK, while 'Sunshine Superman' was issued in a different form in each country. By spring 1966 the American contract problems had been resolved, with Donovan signing a $100,000 deal with Epic Records, and he and Most went to CBS Studios in Los Angeles, where they recorded tracks for an album, much of which was composed during the preceding year. 

Although folk elements were prominent, the songs showed increasing influence of jazz, American west coast psychedelia and folk rock, especially from The Byrds. 'Sunshine Superman' was released in the US as a single in June, and reached No. 1 on the Billboard chart, and later number 2 in the UK. The US version of the album features instruments including acoustic bass, sitar, saxophone, tablas and congas, harpsichord, strings and oboe, and highlights include the swinging 'The Fat Angel', written for Cass Elliot of the Mamas & the Papas, 'Bert's Blues' (a tribute to Bert Jansch), 'Guinevere', and 'Legend Of A Girl Child Linda'. The driving, jazzy 'The Trip' was named after a Los Angeles club, and chronicled an LSD trip during his time in L.A., and is loaded with references to his sojourn on the West Coast. Because of the earlier contractual problems, the UK version of 'Sunshine Superman' was not released for another nine months, and as Donovan had released another record in the US by this time, the UK version was a compilation of tracks from the US 'Sunshine Superman', and its follow-up 'Mellow Yellow'. I think most of the better tracks on the UK version come from the US 'Sunshine Superman' album, so for this post I've used that as a basis, and every track has received a superlative cover version, all of which are included on this reimagining of arguably Donovan's best album. 

Track listing

01 Sunshine Superman (Mike Vickers 1967)
02 Legend Of A Girl Child Linda (Joan Baez, Judy Collins & Mimi Farina 1967)
03 Three King Fishers (Gabor Szabo 1968)
04 Ferris Wheel (Rick Wooley 1980)
05 Bert's Blues (Burnt Branch 2014)
06 Season Of The Witch (Brian Auger, Julie Driscoll & The Trinity 1967)
07 The Trip (Ryan Green 2013)
08 Guinevere (Paul Roland 1992)
09 The Fat Angel (Jefferson Airplane 1969)
10 Celeste (Scott McKenzie 1967)

Joyce Harris - I Cheated (1965)

Joyce Harris was born in Kentucky in 1939 and moved to New Orleans with her family when she was 13 years old. She learned to play guitar and write songs, and was soon performing duets with her younger sister Judy, as Joyce And Judy, releasing three singles – 'He's The One'/'Hey Pretty Baby', 'Washboard Sam'/'Nursery Rock (Beedle De Bop)' and 'Hey Little Baby'/'Rock And Roll Kittens' – all in 1958, until Judy got married and left the group. Joyce spent a year as part of a big band singing in restaurants in Mexico, and she released her first solo single 'It's You'/'The Boy In School' on New York’s U.T. Records at the end of 1959. A talent spotter saw her in Mexico and was impressed enough to secure her an audition with the Texas-based Domino label, and she was soon in the studio with Tommy Kaspar and Don Burch of Domino’s vocal quartet, The Slades. She wrote a lot of her own material, and her first single for the new label was an answer record to their local hit 'You Cheated', which she wrote overnight and recorded with The Slades. Her 'I Cheated'/'Do You Know What It's Like To Be Lonesome?' was released in October 1960, followed by 'No Way Out'/'Dreamer' in January 1961, which sold strongly enough to be licensed to Infinity Records. In 1963 Harris released the gospel-inspired 'Don't Knock It' under the pseudonym Sinner Strong (Strong was a family name, and the first name was a mis-hearing of her name Cina), and then a couple of years later she released her final single under her own name, with 'Baby, Baby, Baby' appearing in 1965. This was a more soulful recording and is now highly sought after on the Northern Soul circuit. In 1997 two previously unheard tracks recorded with the Daylighters surfaced on Ace Records' 'The Domino Records Story', and I can't leave those off as they are both prime slices of R&B, meaning that we now have everything that Joyce Harris recorded in her short career.   

Track listing

As Judy & Joyce
01 He's The One (single 1958)
02 Hey Pretty Baby (b-side of 'He's The One')
03 Washboard Sam (single 1958)
04 Nursery Rock (b-side of 'Washboard Sam')
05 Rock And Roll Kittens (b-side of 'Hey Pretty Baby' re-issue 1959)
As Joyce Harris
06 The Boy In School (single 1959)
07 It's You (b-side of 'The Boy In School')
08 I Cheated (single 1961, with The Slades)
09 Do You Know What It's Like To Be Lonesome (b-side of 'I Cheated')
10 No Way Out (single 1961)
11 Dreamer (b-side of 'No Way Out')
12 I Got My Mojo Working (previously unreleased, with The Daylighters)
13 Your Kind Of Woman (previously unreleased, with The Daylighters)
14 Baby, Baby, Baby (single 1965)
15 How Long (Can I Hold Back My Tears) (b-side of 'Baby, Baby, Baby')
As Sinner Strong
16 Don't Knock It (single 1963)
17 Nobody But Me (b-side of 'Don't Knock It')

Dwight Twilley Band - Fire (1975)

As I mentioned in the recent Dwight Twilley post for his 'Blueprint' album, the Dwight Twilley Band's first self-produced single 'I'm On Fire' became something of an unexpected hit, reaching #16 on the Billboard charts in 1975 with relatively little promotion. This was actually because just before it came out, Twilley and musical partner Phil Seymour had departed for England to record tracks for their first album, tentatively called 'Fire', with producer Robin Cable at Trident Studios. However, the success of the single prompted co-owner of Shelter Records Leon Russell to recall the band back to the US and to offer them the use of his 40-track home studio to record their debut album, and he also gave them the services of engineer Roger Linn, who contributed lead guitars and bass to some of the tracks. All the songs that they had recorded in England were put to one side, and new material written at Russell's studio, although the old songs were not completely junked, but were kept for use on a possible follow-up record, provisionally called 'The B Album'. In 1989 both Dwight Twilley Band albums were reissued on CD, complete with bonus tracks, by the audiophile DCC Compact Classics label, and they re-issued them again in 1990 with different bonus songs. In 1993, shortly before Phil Seymour's death, Twilley released 'The Great Lost Twilley Album', which collected a fraction of the hundreds of early unreleased songs Twilley and Seymour had recorded for Shelter, including several tracks from 'The B Album' and 'Blueprint', as well as a few alternate versions of released songs, and fans were at last able to piece together those two unreleased albums. To follow the recent 'Blueprint' post, here is the earlier 'B Album' otherwise known as 'Fire', from 1975, and you may notice that 'Dancer' features on both albums, but as it was included on the track listings for each record, I was torn about which album to remove it from, so in the end I left it on both. 

Track listing

01 I'm On Fire
02 England
03 Look Like An Angel
04 I Don't Know My Name
05 Lovin' Me
06 Rock Yourself, Son
07 Sky Blue
08 Shark (In The Dark)
09 Miserable Lady
10 You Were So Warm
11 No Resistance
12 Dancer
13 Please Say Please

Jessie Malakouti - Pretty & Gritty (2008)

While she was still a member of Shut Up Stella between 2007 and 2008, Jessie Malakouti was thinking ahead to a solo career, if and when the band broke up, and she was writing and recording her own songs. After Shut Up Stella was dropped from Epic Records, she flew to Sweden to work with production team Money&Stuff and other producers such as Arnthor Birgisson, Justin Trugman, Lester Mendez, Matt Rowe and Wayne Rodrigues, with the intention of producing her debut solo album, which was to be titled 'Pretty & Gritty'. The record was due to be released in 2008, but it was never completed, and so she uploaded some songs to her MySpace page, while others were consigned to the vaults, although two of her songs, 'Trash Me' and 'Outsider', appeared in episodes of MTV's 'The Hills', as well as being independently self-released as music videos and digital downloads. In December 2008 she signed a publishing deal with EMI, and the next two years were spent in London working on dance music with Fred Falke, as well as writing for UK production house Xenomania. In 2010 she formed Jessie And The Toy Boys, launching them with the  single 'Push It' in February 2011, and so all thoughts of a solo career had by then faded away. To fill in the gap between the cancelled 'Shut Up Stella' album and the cancelled' 'This Is How Rumors Start' by Jessie And The Toy Boys (can you see a pattern emerging here?), we have the cancelled 'Pretty & Gritty' by a solo Jessie Malakouti.  

Track listing

01 Trash Me 
02 Eyes Closed 
03 Bad Guy 
04 Check 'n Out 
05 I Need Love
06 Big Booty 
07 Commitment Issues
08 PS 
09 Upside Down 304
10 Lately 
11 Outsider 
12 Crash Bang Baby
13 You're My Viagra 
14 Things

The Big Reveal - Part 2

I hope that yesterday's post didn't come across as sounding a bit too needy, but I am genuinely interested in hearing what people think of what I post here, so that I know whether to keep posting that kind of thing or to scale it back. This was borne out by the reply from Anotherone Bitthe Dust, who mentioned that I seem to be posting a lot more pop stuff recently, and it would be nice to go back to the more rockier stuff. I entirely agree, as rock is my first love, but it just happens to be the case that the pop scene of the 2000's/2010's was very volatile, with artists having all their hard work dumped by their labels if just one single wasn't a huge hit, of if the labels were amalgamated and their rostas trimmed, and so I've discovered a huge stash of unreleased albums from that period, and they all seem to be pop/R&B stuff. I wouldn't say that I'm a huge fan of the genre, and don't know who most of them are, but I listen to them and read the comments on Youtube to see if they have a fanbase, and if I vaguely like what I hear then I assume actual fans of the artists would like to hear it as well, so I'm working my way through them. However, rest assured that I will try to post at least one or two 'rock' albums a week, as long as I can keep finding them, and there are a few crackers coming up. 

I'm also glad to hear that the Hitmaker series is fairly popular. That all started as a one-off post for a Tony Hazzard album, where nearly every track had been a hit single for another artist, so 'Hitmakers' was a valid title, but when it then became a series, not all of the covers have been hits, but it was too late to change the title. I admit that I sometimes have to trawl Youtube to find that elusive final cover, so some albums could include up to half the covers by completely unknown artists, but when this happened to the recent Bruce Springsteen one I thought that even though I didn't know the artists, their covers were excellent, so hits or not I still really enjoyed listening to them.   
And finally, I'm curious to know how many people who heard the 'Oasis' album actually thought that I'd discovered a stash of rare demos, as even I have to admit that they were very convincing.   

 
pj  

Is There Anybody Out There? & The Big Reveal

While I appreciate the kind comments which are sometimes attached to the download requests, when they come directly to me it does mean that no-one else ever gets to see them on the blog, and a new visitor to the site who see 'No comments' on nearly every post might think that hardly anyone ever visits. I'd love to know what people think of the posts, to see if what I'm posting is what people want to hear. I have quite a few (and I mean over 100) male, female and group unreleased R&B albums by more obscure artists ready to post, but I don't know if people are enjoying the ones I've posted so far, as only the more well know artists attract the odd comment. Or what about my Hitmakers series, as I thought that was a really good idea, but only a couple have every been commented on. And as a for instance, I thought that the recent Florence + The Machine album that I posted was one of my better efforts, but only one person seemed to agree with me. One post which I did think would spark a dialogue was the recent Oasis post, but it seems that I've managed to fool nearly everyone who's listened to it, as only two people have actually spotted that it was this year's April Fool, and wasn't by Oasis at all. It was in fact a band called Breezer, who recorded a few Oasis-sounding tracks and then programmed AI to sing the lyrics in the style of Liam Gallagher. Only Smash Addams spotted that the vocals were AI-generated, although jman was close in thinking it was a tribute band, so either it was my best ever hoax, or it's just that no-one could be bothered to call me out on it. I really hope it's the first option .

pj

 

Oasis - Coming Of Age (2009)

In 2007 Oasis were riding high on the success of their sixth album 'Don't Believe The Truth', and taking the top two positions in the Q magazine poll of the fifty greatest albums of the last 50 years. The recorded for a couple of months in 2007, completing work on two new songs and demoing the rest, after which they took a two-month break because of the birth of Noel's son. They re-entered the studio on 5 November 2007 and finished recording around March 2008, with the band's seventh album 'Dig Out Your Soul' being released in October. After recording had finished Zak Starkey left the group, and he was replaced by former Icicle Works and the La's drummer Chris Sharrock on their tour, but he was not an official member of the band and Oasis remained as a four-piece. The first single from the record was 'The Shock Of the Lightning', written by Noel Gallagher, and it was pre-released on 29 September 2008, and when the album appeared a week later it went to number one in the UK and number five on the Billboard 200. In June 2008, the band had re-signed with Sony BMG for a three-album deal, and in February 2009 they received the NME Award for Best British Band of 2009. Over the summer of 2009 the band recorded some demos for the first album of the new deal with Sony, and then played some festivals, one of which should have been the V Festival in Chelmsford in  August, but this had to be cancelled after Liam contracted laryngitis. Noel later stated that he had a hangover, for which Liam sued him, and Noel had to apologise in order to get the lawsuit dropped. The band were due to perform on 28 August 2009 at the Rock en Seine festival near Paris, however mid-way through Bloc Party's set at the festival, their frontman Kele Okereke announced that Oasis would not be performing. Two hours later, a statement from Noel appeared on the band's website:
It is with some sadness and great relief...I quit Oasis tonight. People will write and say what they like, but I simply could not go on working with Liam a day longer.
Liam and the remaining members of Oasis decided to continue under the name Beady Eye, releasing two studio albums until their break-up in 2014, while Noel formed the solo project Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds, and has released four studio albums. The tracks recorded for what would have been their eighth album were shelved, until they leaked online recently, and so here are eight tracks from the final incarnation of Oasis just before they ignominiously fell apart in 2009. 

Track listing

01 Out Of My Mind
02 Time
03 Alright
04 Forever
05 Bittersweet
06 Coming Of Age
07 Alive
08 Tonight

Nicole Scherzinger - Fire (2011)

As I mentioned in the previous posts from Nicole Scherzinger, before embarking fully on a solo career she dipped her toes in the water by appearing on other artist's records as a guest vocalist, and in 2006 and 2007 she graced quite a few songs with her presence. It was an eclectic mix, with 50 Cent sitting next to Shaggy, and Timbaland vying with P. Diddy for her attention, and if we gather up all the guest appearances that she made before the release of her official debut studio album in 2011 then we have a very enjoyable 45-minute album of prime R&B and reggae. Only one of these tracks eventually appeared on that debut album 'Killer Love', but as 'Heartbeart' with Enrique Inglesias was also released as a single in 2010 then I'm including it on here anyway.   

Track listing 

01 Don't Ask Her That (feat. Shaggy) [from 'Clothes Drop' 2005]
02 Come To Me (feat. P. Diddy) [from 'Press Play' 2006]
03 Fire (feat. 50 Cent & Young Buck) [from 'Curtis' 2007]
04 Heartbeat (feat. Pharrell Williams) [Madonna demo 2008]
05 Supa Hypnotic (feat. Shaggy) [from 'Clothes Drop' 2005]
06 Scream (feat. Keri Hilson & Timbaland) [from 'Shock Value' 2007]
07 Papi Lover (feat. Daddy Yankee) [from 'El Cartel: The Big Boss' 2007]
08 Numba 1 (Tide Is High) (feat. Kardinal Offishall) [from 'Not 4 Sale' 2008]
09 Lie About Us (feat. Avant) [from 'Director' 2006]
10 Heartbeat (feat. Enrique Iglesias) [from 'Euphoria' 2010]
11 Hotel Room Service (feat. Pitbull) [from 'Rebelution' 2009]
12 Coconut Tree (feat. Mohombi) [from 'MoveMeant' 2011]

Made In London - A Perfect Storm (2000)

Made in London were a pop group made up of three members, Brits Kelly Bryant and Sherene Dyer, and Norwegian Marianne Eide, and the band was founded by Melissa Popo and Peter Ibsen. Ibsen co-wrote the whole of their album with the lead singer/songwriter Sherene Dyer, with contributions from the rest of the band, while Popo left before they released any of their singles. Despite wide publicity, particularly surrounding their second single, 'Shut Your Mouth', combined with a certain amount of internet-based success, their most successful chart hit was 'Dirty Water', which reached number 15 in the UK Singles Chart in May 2000. The trio's debut album 'A Perfect Storm' was planned to be released after 'Shut Your Mouth', but as the single did not garner the anticipated chart success, only reaching number 74 in the UK singles chart, the album was cancelled prior to its release. Following the release of a cover of Terence Trent D'Arby's 'Wishing Well', the group disbanded, with Dyer carrying on performing under the name Sherii Ven Dyer. As so often happens with these cancelled album, the record company should have had a bit more faith in them, as it's a perfectly fine millennial pop record, with 'I'm Not' and 'We Don't Do No Wrong' even appealing to a heavy rock audience. 

Track listing

01 I'm Not  
02 Dirty Water  
03 24 Little Hours  
04 We Don't Do No Wrong 
05 Shut Your Mouth  
06 Ain't Another Love Song  
07 My Friend  
08 Believe  
09 Hit Or Miss  
10 If You Don't Wanna  
11 From The First Time  
12 Magic  

Various Artists - The Hitmakers Sing Gordon Lightfoot (1977)

Gordon Meredith Lightfoot Jr. was born on 17 November 1938 in Orillia, Ontario, and after his mother recognized his musical talent early on she schooled him to become a successful child performer. He first performed publicly in grade four, singing the Irish-American lullaby 'Too Ra Loo Ra Loo Ral', which was broadcast over his school's public address system during a parents' day event, and as a youth he sang in the choir of Orillia's St. Paul's United Church under the direction of choirmaster Ray Williams. As a teenager he learned piano and taught himself to play drums and percussion, holding concerts in Muskoka, a resort area north of Orillia, and performing extensively throughout high school, teaching himself to play folk guitar along the way. In 1958 he moved to Los Angeles to study jazz composition and orchestration for two years at Westlake College of Music, and to support himself while in California he sang on demonstration records and wrote, arranged, and produced commercial jingles. After his return to Canada he performed with the Singin' Swingin' Eight, a group featured on CBC TV's Country Hoedown, and also with the Gino Silvi Singers, and in 1961 he released two singles, both recorded at RCA in Nashville and produced by Chet Atkins, that were local hits in Toronto. In 1963 he travelled in Europe, and for a year in the UK he hosted BBC TV's Country and Western Show, returning to Canada in 1964. 

Around this time he began to develop a reputation as a songwriter, with Ian and Sylvia Tyson recording his 'Early Mornin' Rain' and 'For Lovin' Me', and a year later both songs were recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary. With this validation of his song-writing skill, artists such as Marty Robbins ('Ribbon Of Darkness'), Judy Collins ('Early Morning Rain'), Richie Havens and Spyder Turner ('I Can't Make It Anymore'), and the Kingston Trio ('Early Morning Rain') all achieved some chart success with Lightfoot's material. In 1965 he signed a management contract with Albert Grossman, and a recording contract with United Artists, who released his version of 'I'm Not Sayin'' as a single. 1966 marked the release of his debut album 'Lightfoot!', which brought him greater exposure as both a singer and a songwriter, and the record featured many now-famous songs, including 'For Lovin' Me', 'Early Mornin' Rain', 'Steel Rail Blues', and 'Ribbon Of Darkness'. On the strength of the 'Lightfoot!' album, he became one of the first Canadian singers to achieve definitive home-grown stardom without having moved permanently to the United States to develop it. The variety of artists featured on this collection just proves what a versatile songwriter Lightfoot was, with pop groups, folk bands, and R&B singers all covering his songs, and folk-rock legends Fotheringay rated him highly enough to include one of his songs on their debut album, despite having a number of renowned songwriters in the band. 'Lightfoot!' did include three covers, and so in a slight departure from the usual format of these albums I've included the original versions of those, so that all of the songs from the album are featured in versions other than Lightfoot's. 

Track listing

01 Rich Man's Spiritual (Ronnie Hawkins 1968)

02 Long River (Knoxville Grass 1977)

03 The Way I Feel (Fotheringay 1970)

04 For Lovin' Me (Chad & Jeremy 1965)

05 The First Time (Ewan MacColl & Peggy Seeger 1970)

06 Changes (Phil Ochs 1966)

07 Early Morning Rain (Peter, Paul And Mary 1965)

08 Steel Rail Blues (George Hamilton IV 1966)

09 Sixteen Miles (Bonnie Dobson 1972)

10 I'm Not Sayin' (The Ian Campbell Folk Group 1968)

11 Pride Of Man (Hamilton Camp 1964)

12 Ribbon Of Darkness (The Pozo Seco Singers 1967)

13 Oh' Linda (The Pacers featuring Bobby Crawford 1967)

14 Peaceful Waters (Ed Ames 1969)

Shut Up Stella - Shut Up Stella (2007)

In 2006 Jessica Eden Malakouti moved to Los Angeles following her graduation, and started an all-female punk band, Shut Up Stella, with Kristen Wagner, and Allison Jayne Lurie, otherwise known as Fan 3. Fan 3 had been recording and releasing music since she was 13, with one of her songs being featured on the 'Lizzie McGuire' soundtrack, and there were even plans to release her debut album in 2005. However, after a sampler disc was sent out for the tentatively titled 'Let Me Clear My Throat', she was dropped by her label and her album was shelved. In 2006 Fan 3 met up with Malakouti and Wagner and formed Shut Up Stella, and they were signed by Epic Records shortly after their formation. One of their first recordings was 'Watch Me Rain', which was produced by Greg Kurstin, and it featured in a few movies, including the 2008 film 'Baby Mama', starring Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. After a very short tenure with the label, during which time they did manage to record around a dozen songs for a proposed 2007 album, they were dropped by Epic, and their album was cancelled. Malakouti quit the band and decided to focus instead on her career as an actress, songwriter and solo artist, while Fan 3 helped out Kay Hanley with backing vocals on her second album 'Weaponize', before recording and releasing covers and original music on Youtube and Myspace under her given name of Allison Jayne. The 'Shut Up Stella' album has floated around Youtube for a while now, and so to start a short overview of Malakouti's career, which later continued with Jessie And The Toy Boys, and then as Eden xo, here is her first effort.  

Track listing

01 Welcome To My Party
02 On My Bed
03 Twister
04 Waiting For You
05 Cheap Champagne
06 Watch Me Rain
07 Postcards (Forgot To Remember)
08 These Are The Days
09 Light It Up
10 Country Lemonade (Sip It Up)
11 Pound Star
12 Oprah For President

Jesus Loves You - Popularity Breeds Contempt (1992)

After Culture Club broke up in 1986, Boy George started a solo career, releasing his debut album 'Sold' in 1987, and issuing a number of singles from it. For his next two albums, 'Tense Nervous Headache' in 1988 and 'Boyfriend' in 1989, he wanted to break out in a new direction by dabbling in electronic dance music, but the singles taken from these albums did not gain much commercial success, even though they were often played at clubs. In order to pursue this new direction, he founded the band Jesus Loves You, as a collective project with other musicians, and they were signed to his own label More Protein, which aimed to be an underground label and was not meant to release music for the charts. He adopted the pseudonym "Angela Dust", and the first single by the new band was 'After The Love', which was about the separation from his ex-bandmate Jon Moss, drummer of Culture Club. Two more singles followed, but 'Generations Of Love' and 'One On One' had only modest success in the UK Singles Chart. On a journey across India, George became interested in the Hare Krishna movement, being particularly impressed with their philosophy, and as a result he wrote the song 'Bow Down Mister'. This was a crucial turning point for the band, because it was their first religious song, and when it was released as a single in 1991 it became a hit in the UK, peaking at number 27 in the singles chart. Because of this success, the band's debut album, 'The Martyr Mantras', was rush-released the same year, and in 1991 remixes of 'Generations Of Love' and 'After The Love' were issued as singles. In July 1992, the band played a Hare Krishna festival in Moscow, in front of an audience of 35,000, and December was to see the release of their second album, 'Popularity Breeds Contempt'. The single 'Sweet Toxic Love' was pre-released, but Virgin Records was so disappointed in its chart position that they cancelled the album and refused to release it, with the band dissolving shortly afterwards. Some of the songs from the record eventually appeared in re-mixed form on 'The Devil In Sister George' EP in 1994. and in 2005 a white label 12" of a track from the 1992 sessions called 'Love Your Brother' appeared online, but that second album has stubbornly remained lost. Recently a six track bootleg appeared on Youtube, containing recordings from the 1992 sessions, and so by adding a couple of tracks from the same time period we can approximate what the second album from Jesus Loves You could have sounded like. 

Track listing

01 Am I Losing Control
02 Sweet Toxic Love
03 If I Could Fly
04 Love Your Brother (Supalaska Mix)
05 It Doesn't Happen Every Day
06 In Maya
07 Miss Me Blind (Return To Gender Mix)
08 You Are The Deal

Porcelain Black - Mannequin Factory (2015)

Alaina Marie Beaton was born on 1 October 1985 in Detroit, Michigan, and is known professionally as Porcelain Black. She had a troubled childhood, being expelled from two different schools, and feeling like an outcast as she didn't fit in with her classmates. At the age of sixteen, as soon as she was legally able to, she dropped out of school, and while on a road trip in New York she was approached by her first manager, who told her to move to Los Angeles. Three months later she did so, found her manager, and was signed to Virgin Records two weeks later. Recording under the pseudonym Porcelain And The Tramps, she worked with Tommy Henriksen and John Lowery in London, but she and the label could not agree on the music she made. Virgin wanted her to record pop music in the vein of Avril Lavigne, but she wanted to mix industrial rock sounds with dance pop, so she began posting the songs she recorded on Myspace, gaining upwards of 10 million views in a matter of months. This led to her being approached by Courtney Love on MySpace to provide backing vocals for a solo album she was working on, while a song she co-wrote with Billy Steinberg and Josh Alexander around the time Black left Virgin, 'How Do You Love Someone?', was recorded by Ashley Tisdale for her second album, 'Guilty Pleasure'. 

Through a mutual A&R friend, producer RedOne heard about Black and was interested in meeting her, and after that meeting in his studio in November 2009, they wrote her debut single 'This Is What Rock n' Roll Looks Like' the next day. RedOne helped her break away from her contract with Virgin Records and signed her to his Universal Republic imprint, 2101 Records. A name change to Porcelain Black followed, as it was causing confusion to people who thought Porcelain And The Tramps was a band. After appearing in a few music videos, she gained a cameo role in the 2012 film 'Rock Of Ages', playing the lead singer of a 1980's glam metal band. In 2011 she announced that the working title of her debut album was to be 'Mannequin Factory', and RedOne was said to have produced and co-written all but one of the tracks with her. A second single was released from the album, and 'Naughty Naughty' peaked at number 6 on the chart, but when 2102 Records became an imprint of Capitol Records when Universal Republic went under, this delayed the release of any new material by the industrial singer. During the summer of 2013, Black performed a private gig in West Hollywood, featuring all-new material, and several months later 2101 Records released five songs in five weeks, with her long-anticipated debut album expecting to be released after this five-week promotional period, with two brand new singles preceding it. 

After 'Mama Forgive Me' was released, she then confirmed that the album had no confirmed title, revealing she had considered the names 'Black Rainbow' and 'Mannequin Factory', but that those titles might not work as she had recorded more songs. After many internal conflicts between Black and her long-time collaborator, RedOne, she announced in 2015 that plans to release her long-anticipated album were cancelled, and that she wanted to record a new record in the vein of her previous project, Porcelain And The Tramps. This could be expected to appear in late 2017, and music from this new project would feature the same attitude as her previous work, with slower, mid-tempo songs and rapping. In February 2020 she posted on Twitter that she was almost done with her first album, which just needed mixing and mastering, and she tweeted every song title, ending with the claim that the untitled project was expected to be released in 2020. However, despite releasing three self-produced demos of new songs directly on her YouTube channel in December 2020, there is still no sign of Black's debut long-player, and so in its place here is a reconstruction of the abandoned 'Mannequin Factory', which could have appear way back in 2015. 

Track listing

01 One Woman Army  
02 This Is What Rock 'n' Roll Looks Like (feat. Lil' Wayne)  
03 La Dee Da Dee (Naughty Naughty)  
04 Mannequin Factory  
05 Swallow My Bullet  
06 Mama Forgive Me  
07 Pretty Little Psycho 
08 Rich Boi  
09 How Do You Love Someone?  
10 Too Much Of Not Enough  
11 Stealing Candy From A Baby  
12 Kisses Lose Their Charm  
13 King Of The World  
14 Fuck Like A Star  
15 I'm Your Favourite Drug  
16 Gasoline  
17 Curiosity  
18 Teeny Bopper Crack Whore