I had New Year’s day off – which was a surprise. I didn’t know that until I came back. The company didn’t have Christmas off and we had the previous Monday off for Muslim New Year. So I started off the day in bed until 1pm. Then I got up and did some work (I am behind). Then I had to bottle my new vintages of homemade vino (the white is a bit more insouciant then I would have liked, but it beats Thunderbird…).

While I was performing this delicate work, I took out my favorite Christmas present from the family – the newly remastered CDs by Mission Of Burma. Matador and Rick Harte have done a great job. These discs sound INCREDIBLE. The murk is out of the mix. Everything is clean and balanced better. You can hear it the difference from the first cut – “Academy Fight Song” – right to the end of the live record. Now I’m going to have to delete the Rykodisc versions from the iPod because these are definitive. PLUS each CD comes with a DVD of live performances. Signals, Calls and Marches has clips from shows at The Space in Cambridge (1979) and The Underground (1980). (And true to the Boston scene, it looks like they are playing in someone’s basement.) The quality is very good but they are very different videos. The songs from the Space were done with a single camera and is in color. The Underground is black and white and has a few different cameras and a lot of editing. The VS DVD is from Burma’s final show at the Bradford Hotel in 1983. This is the early set, while the live album Horrible Truth About Burma has the late and last set (the one that was a VHS tape for a while). And with a few exceptions, these are two totally different sets (and the later crowd is better behaved…) In the pantheon of live performances that flood the DVD market of your local Virgin record store – none of them can touch this. This is perfection of sound and images, totally timeless and fresh. Most bands lose something in the translation between live performance and disc – either one way or the other. Burma is Burma. Whether it is Roger’s seemingly effortless psychotic guitar runs or Clint’s machine-gun bass and good looks or Peter’s screams from behind the drum kit – the sound you get on vinyl is what you get on stage and visa-versa.

Toss in the booklets of pictures, interviews and ephemera and these are not so much CDs as documents of one of the best bands of their time. If you care about Boston rock or just the music scene in general, you must own these.

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