The Bedsit Tapes

by

Soft Cell

Edit

Well, my eyes nearly fell out of their sockets when I saw this CD on Amazon a few weeks ago. I didn't even know about it and I'm a long time Marc Almond/ Soft Cell collector. Lucky to have both the Mutunt Moments 7" and the original Science Fiction Stories boot CD in my collection, I am able to compare the Bedsit tapes to these other two items I just mentioned.

First off, there are a lot of songs missing from the Science Fiction Stories CD that are not on the Bedsit Tapes CD. Missing from SFS are the following: "facility girls", "living for today", "factory fun", "penthouse pet", "when we go marching", "I am 16" (a sinister take on the song you hear in the moving The Sound of Music!), "a man could get lost", "mix and match", "persuasion". Missing from the Mutant MOments 7" EP is "Frustration". These were probably unreleased due to legal reasons.

The good news is that what's missing from the S.F.S. demos is made up with a lot of songs that I've never heard in my life before like a cover version of Black Sabbath's "Paranoid" and a number of other goodies.

The sound quality on these demos is slightly better than the Science Fiction stories CD. The tracks are lightly mixed into each other and the annoying cut sound you hear at the end of Potentional track on the Mutant Moments 7" has been removed. Too bad "Frustration" was not included because comparing the Mutant Moments version to the one that eventually ended up on their debut Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret shows what clean production can due to a rough sounding song!

The Bedsit tapes CD clocks in a little under 46 minutes so there was plenty of space to include more demos. Maybe, there's be sequel to this release. I would love to see the Flexi Pop versin of A Man Could Get Lost and the live fanclub flexi of Say Hello, Wave Goodbye appear someday on CD. Enough said, just want to say thak you to David Ball and Stevo for putting this material out! Hopefully, David & Marc are getting the proper payment from this release. I've read enough about Stevo and his handling of Some Bizarre!

First off, I wanna say that this CD is NOT even in a typical CD case. It's basically just a cardboard flap over a CD. Also, when I received mine in the mail, the plastic center part that holds the CD down somehow got damaged or it was defective because it was broken! Now my CD won't even stay in the case, and because the case isn't a jewel case, I don't even have the option of switching it to a new one...so, I guess I'm stuck with this because Some Bizzare is cheap and can't afford jewel cases...

In addition, I believe the Worst Album Art Award goes to The Bedsit Tapes! What an unappealing, unimaginative, inartistic cover. And whoever thought putting size 2 pt. font in white over the cover was a good idea...WOW. I have perfect vision and even I could barely see it...

Besides the extremely cheap presentation of the CD, the song tracks are organized in a very "bizzare" way. Basically, the first 2-3 seconds of every song occurs at the END of the previous track. And this is obviously because Some Bizzare purposely had it edited that way. This isn't an issue if you listen to the album tracks in order, but I'm one of those people who likes to "shuffle" my songs on iTunes. Therefore, the songs sound really weird everytime it gets to the end of a track because you start hearing one song play, and then shuffle will bring you to a different track. It's all just really sloppy, and I don't understand why the distributors would intentionally have created it this way.

If you buy Demo Non Stop, which includes TWO of the same tracks from this album (Cleansing Fanatic and Tupperware Party), these versions of the songs are actually complete and do not have their beginnings on another track or another track at their ends.

Also, if you buy The Bedsit Tapes and Demo Non Stop, you will still be missing "Penthouse Pet", "Living For Today", "Purely Functional" (Vocal Version), and "I am 16." Luckily, very kind people have posted the first three of these songs on YouTube, so you will still have a way of hearing/obtaining them. As for "I am 16," I haven't been able to hear that one yet...

The actual quality of the songs is very, very good, considering the equipment used to record them back in the late '70s and early '80s. Also, all of the songs are genuinely GREAT songs. I really love the style that Soft Cell had during this period. All of the songs are catchy, and it's truly a shame they never got a proper release.

Overall, the songs are amazing (I give them 5 out of 5*), but they were organized in an extremely sloppy manner, which forced me to lower the rating to 3 out of 5*.