Suicide’s Alan Vega Celebrates his 70th Year
Commemorative Limited Edition EP Series
Primal Scream
Lydia Lunch
Released 30/3/09
Alan Vega has recently celebrated his 70th birthday, to mark this occasion, blastfirstpetite is conducting a yearlong series of limited edition releases. The series kicked off with two releases, by Bruce Springsteen and The Horrors. Both limited editions of 4000. Both now sold out.
March 30th see’s the arrival of the next two releases in the series. For their contribution Primal Scream have covered Suicide’s ‘Diamonds, Furcoat, Champagne’, ”Suicide songs are so perfect and fully realized that it was hard to pick one and reinterpret it in a personal way. We chose ‘Diamonds, Furcoat, Champagne’ as we loved the lyric and also it’s sci-fi futuristic sound. We did a garage rock glam version with French electro chanteuse Miss Kitten in the end, and tried to bring out the pop song that lies beneath every Suicide track”, says Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie. This is a limited 10” vinyl pressing of 3,000, sleeve artwork by Fang Lujin.
For the second release Lydia Lunch chose to cover Suicide’s ‘Frankie Teardrop’, “My tongue around Alan Vega’s words… a wet dream come true”, she says. Also included is an unreleased demo version of the same song by Suicide recorded in 1976. This is a limited 10”vinyl pressing of 2,000.
The promo CD enclosed contains both A and B-sides of the next two vinyl releases of the series.
Each release includes:
• an established recording artist paying tribute to Alan by covering one of his songs,
• a previously unreleased Suicide/Vega rarity from the archives, and
• proving that Vega's work even now continues to inspire, a cover version by a young up and coming band.
Major artistes include Bruce Springsteen, Primal Scream, Peaches, Grinderman, Spiritualised, The Horrors, Klaxons, Liars, Gavin Friday & David Ball, Sunn 0)) + Pansonic, Julian Cope, Lydia Lunch and Vincent Gallo, Upcoming bands include Beat The Devil/Shilpa Ray, No Bra, HTRK, X-Vectors, Nik Void (ex-Kaito), Effi Briest, S.C.U.M., and Stephen Burroughs (ex-Head Of David).
The sleeve images are all by contemporary visual artists who have been inspired by Vega, including Edward Mapplethorpe, Alex Rose, Cary Kwok, and Colter Jacobsen.
Any of the series can be pre-ordered via links at blastfirstpetite.com and alanvega.com. Physical distribution is by Cargo (UK), Red Eye (USA), and digital distribution by State5.
