Hot City Tracks 8 and 9
8. Weights Made of Lead
Chris: You notice the different approach again - the guitar's quite far back, the vocal is right up, and there's lots of brass. Just like the last track, the effect is a lot more normal than what we were looking for.
Ted:But the song itself is more or less the same. Although I'm glad this version doesn't have that bit with the bass drum in it, where it all stops except for "boom-boom-boom". It sounded like Bob Blackman, that guy who sang Mule Train while he battered himself on the head with a metal tray...
Chris: I've always liked the whole song. A simple idea, kept flowing...
Ted: Simple melodies intertwining...
Chris: And the middle-eight reminds me of a Paul Rodgers middle-eight. You can hear him singing that.
9. Last Train
Chris: Anthem was called Last Train? News to me! I wonder why.
Ted: It's like the pipe band came in one door then went out another - and we're still playing in the middle!
Chris: See, that's an American approach, bringing in the pipes subtly. That's an unfortunate failure of communication. You can't do that to pipes. Then there's a subtle inversion to the second chord of the phrase which we could have kept. But I don't think Shel got the track to be honest - he couldn't get the Scottish connection. He thought we just wanted some bagpipes in.
Conclusion
Ted: It's difficult to imagine SAHB sounding any more commercial. But Alex's performance is brilliant, sitting over the top of it all. It's very well recorded, which is noteworthy for us, because I don't think anyone did a better job of it than Shel.
Chris: Yeah, if you're looking for definitive examples of Alex at the top of his game there's a lot of it on here. In the later albums, when we were all in charge, Alex didn't want his voice up high in those mixes - certainly not as much as I would have liked.
Ted: A lot of the things I thought at the time are still valid.
Chris: If we'd had Alex's vocal as loud in Impossible Dream as it is here, I think we'd have had the best of both worlds. As Alex would say, it really is a gas, and I'm glad it's finally coming out.
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