Soon...
Winter is coming, and just as Autumn is fading out so too are the activities of our favourite band. At least in public, anyway. There's no doubt all manner of arrangements, engagements and impending plans being shaped and moulded by careful hands. It just means that as their duties to further the cause of Black Gold draw to a close for the year, so the available memorabilia on Instagram and associated outlets will decline. Once we hit New year this will all begin again in preparation for the tour cycle that, if you examine what's been said in interviews lately, will probably gently draw a shroud over the second phase of Editors and clear the site for work on the third. What that will look/sound like is anybody's guess because not even the band appear to know. If you want to check out some of the appointments that were kept by all 5 Editors this month:-
Polskie Radio Trójka 3rd November 2019 (highlights)
Polskie Radio Czwórka 3rd November 2019
Empik Interview 4th November 2019
Russell and Ed on TalkSport 5th November 2019
Giulia Salvi Show 6th November 2019
Radio Freccia Session 6th November 2019
The Stephen McCauley Show 25th November 2019
In the spirit of Black Gold, Tom posted a picture of his own personal "Best of" tracklisting on the 26th of November. I wonder, though, if you came back to him a week later would we see a different set because music is such a fluid thing when it comes to opinion. It's unclear if this is just a randomised list of favourites or if they appeared in order of preference, but freed from the restraints of a committee decision and the length of a CD album's length, here's what he chose:-
The theme of this is obviously going to be the omissions. I won't start listing them because you know what they are, and it probably burns you that they aren't present. Note that as well as being in order of the album eras they came from, all three songs from the Jacknife Lee sessions are there. It also has b-sides on it, which are now essentially a thing of the past (damn you, Spotify!).
On a related note, Tom said in an interview recently that they wouldn't consider allowing the fans to put together their setlist for them, and it's with good reason. Firstly, there's the wacky factor. Do they really want to run the risk of a hardcore fans bringing out songs like the Camera remix that Junkie XL did (final version, not second draft please)? Or Disappear, or From the Outside? Or the full band take of No Sound but the Wind?
Because you know we would.
They've opened up the running order to suggestions before, most notably in 2008 at the Cheese and Grain in Frome, but that was an entirely different time. The song collection wasn't that big and they'd been touring to the point of collapse with most of the material they had anyway. So it was all still fresh. Now, there's the problem of Justin and Elliott having to physically learn the much older numbers and then get to a standard of performance that would make it seamless alongside the more modern ones they contributed to. I think that would apply to Tom, Russell and Ed too, because some of their back catalogue hasn't been touched in a long, long time. Evidence, you say? How about this excerpt from the excellent interview that Tom and Elliott did for Nothing but Hope and Passion on the 6th of this month. After randomly selecting it from a basket of potential choices, they're asked to talk about the track Colours:-
Elliott: This is way before my time. (laughs)
Tom: Do you even know the tune?
Elliott: Probably a B-Side from the first record.
Tom: I don’t know, mate.
Muscle memory only sustains if it's regularly activated. That's not the largest concern, however, as that would be an unavoidable bias that we all have.
I can assuredly state that each one of you reading this have your own idea of what an Editors greatest hits collection would look like. I have mine, which I put together just for fun. Needless to say if they had to play it, I would a deeply unpopular lemming. We all have our own intimate, context related connections to this music. It's often geographical too. We're conditioned by our own life experiences and music is part of that conditioning. It's why revellers used to come back from holidays in Ibiza every year, buy the records that they heard in the clubs, and they would in turn become massive hits at home. Sometimes, to others who were sober and not dancing semi-naked in a foam party at 3.00am (come on, we've all been there), those records would result in some serious head scratching and asking "What on Earth were you thinking?", but to the people that bought them it was an association to their experience, in this case happiness. And foam.
From reading the articles on the Black Gold Archives, for instance, you can see how some people have made very specific attachments to the music that would be irrelevant to others. Love, loss, joy and death in memory text (1000 characters max). So every setlist submission would be different, and each individual person would be annoyed if their own choice wasn't selected. In the end, all you can hope for (as someone once said) is that they take one or two suggestions on board and include them out of kindness. As a final note on the subject, consider this; whatever your own personal collection would contain, and however different it looks to Tom's list above, he wrote every item you'd ever have choose. That's a trip.
They finished up the month in Dingle playing at Other Voices, and while no complete footage has become available just yet I find it inconceivable that an event that was filmed and streamed, albeit very locally, doesn't have any evidence remaining that awaits its cyber freedom. Something that I am very willing to facilitate. We wait.
Lastly, the competition to win tickets to go and see Editors on one of the tour dates next year that was run out of the Black Gold Archives, is now officially at an end. As far as I know the winners haven't been announced yet so even if you're risking arthritis, you should keep those fingers crossed.
While November didn't provide much on Instagram, the quality of the other things we did get made up for it. Enjoy the memories ;)
Editors Instagram November 2019
download here or download here
For all of Editors' previous Instagram posts, go here.
brought to you with lots and lots of lemming-love :) x
