Too-Rye-Ay

To tie in with the 40^th anniversary of the multi-platinum selling album, we present ‘Too-Rye-Ay, as it should have sounded’.

Kevin Rowland was never happy with the final mix of the album, despite its huge commercial success. So with Helen O’Hara, and Pete Schwier they decided to mix it again. In recent interviews Kevin has stated…

“The songs and performances are great, but I always felt the mixes could be better. It’s my most successful album, but it doesn’t sound as good as the others”

“This is the director’s cut and it’s how it should have sounded…”

The album’s cover has also been re-modelled, using the preferred image from the Come On Eileen single sleeve.

• The super-deluxe box set features 16 tracks from the legendary shows at London’s Shaftesbury Theatre, in October 1982, remastered in stunning new sound and previously unreleased. It also features three unreleased out-takes of album tracks and the relevant singles and B-sides from the period. The box also includes a hardback book with new interviews and liner notes, rare archive photos and memorabilia. There is also a replica 1982 tour programme and two photo art prints.

All the material on the remix is from the original recordings, nothing new has been added. Some of the arrangements were changed, for example: on Plan B we moved the brass to come in earlier and the ‘girl’ talking was replaced with Kevin’s, which he recorded at the time.

On Liars A to E we brought the backing vocals down an octave in places, as Kevin felt they were too high and on Until I Believe In My Soul, we replaced the ‘penny whistle’ on the intro with Jim’s trombone, also recorded at the time.

The remix itself was quite straightforward – trying to bring as much emotion as possible to the songs, and because technology has advanced so much a lot of pops, noises and artefacts that were on the original multi-tracks we were able to clean up.

The brief was to create an alternative mix, keeping the spirit of the original recordings and shed new light on some of these great songs.

I hope this has been achieved…

Producer – Pete Schwier, January 2022

Tracklist: