Big Big Train re-issue English Boy Wonders

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   From the band's Myspace blog:

Monday, February 04, 2008 

English Boy Wonders 2008 
Current mood:  excited 
Category: Music 
Hi everyone 

Just a quick message to let you know about some new news concerning Big Big Train. Our Russian distributers MALS have asked if they can re-release our CD from 1997, English Boy Wonders. This is great news for the band as EBW was deleted by our then record label GEP a few years ago and we've been looking at options for making this music available again. 

Rather than simply re-release the album as it was, we thought we'd go back to the existing tapes and brush them up a bit. EBW was a difficult release for BBT as it was recorded during a period when we were not sure about our future with GEP and, indeed, what direction we wanted to take with our music. We could only afford short periods of time in the studio back then before we had to stop and save some more money to progress the recordings. This led to the album being recorded over a protracted timeframe and, what, with all the uncertainty over the future of the band, EBW never quite hung together as an album. It was a compromised version what we were trying to reach for. This was frustrating, as the album included some of our best songs.

Now, more than ten years on, we think we can make EBW the album it should have been. We're currently going through the process of doing some additional work on each of the songs before we do a complete re-mix. We can now use real organ and Mellotron and, with our additional experience in arranging and recording we can make the songs sound as they should have done. There will also be some bonus material for further aural titillation.

An improved version of English Boy Wonders requires an enhanced CD package, so our artist Jim Trainer has been working on some additional paintings for the album. (A slide show of the draft images can be seen below).

English Boy Wonders will be released in the late spring / early summer. In the meantime, we are also working on a brand new album, which will be out in 2009. More news when we have it.

Cheers

Greg