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Move request
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Okay, I've looked up all the East-German Beatles releases by Amiga on discogs:
1964: Ain't She Sweet / Cry For A Shadow[5], single release
1965: It Won't Be Long / Devil In Her Heart[6], single release
1965: Sweet Georgia Brown / Why[7], single release of two songs from the My Bonnie album where "The Beat Brothers" backed Sheridan
1966: The Beatles - Big Beat[8], East-German LP compilation of Beatles songs, sourced from the first two albums Please Please Me and With the Beatles, plus the two singles She loves you and A Hard Day's Night.
1974: A Collection Of Beatles Oldies[9], the first time East Germans could legally buy copies of Beatles singles from the Help! up until Revolver period put on this compliation, first East-German Beatles release in stereo. The back cover holds a slightly ideologically tinted short essay about how their song lyrics basically represented and incited the British working class with revolutionary fervor and helped young people deal with love, with a few short quotes from the lyrics translated to German.
1974: A Collection Of Beatles Oldies[10], MC version
1976: The Fantastic Pop Power[11], random compilation of 60s and 70s Western pop music, included Ain't she sweet
1980: 1967-1970[12], basically the Blue Album with its own East-German cover
1980: 1967-1970[13], MC version with original Western cover
1980: Emerson, Lake & Palmer[14], this was an accidental pressing where the first side contained the according songs from the ELP album, but the second side was accidentally pressed with songs from the above 1967-1970 album
1983: The Beatles[15], basically a slightly extended re-release of the 1966 compilation Big Beat with a different track order, now extended with the 6 songs from the above three 1964 and 1965 single releases. The back cover held a text with reminiscenses of their Hamburg days that read a bit like a Wikipedia article, with a few technical notes on the recording sessions with Kaempfert/Sheridan, calling them influenced by The Shadows, followed by similar notes on their EMI sessions for Please Please Me and With the Beatles.
So that's basically three official East-German compilations (Big Beat, A Collection of Beatles Oldies, and 1967-1970, plus a slightly extended 1983 re-release of Big Beat under different title), three singles, and one accidental pressing all in all. According to
Mitteldeutsche Zeitung, they were hard to get at the time because of the deliberately low pressing runs for Western-Bloc music. After the fall of the wall, many East-German fans let go of their Amiga compilations for the original albums, but nowadays they're collector's items (even if they hardly cost more than 10 Euros). --
46.93.158.170 (
talk)
18:18, 15 February 2019 (UTC)reply
Release dates
I have found a few sites that indicate Parlophone released "Komm, gib mir deine Hand" b/w "Sie liebt dich" in Australia on 25 June 1964, catalogued as A8117. This shows up on Joe Goddenn's
Beatles Bible and on
Discogs. I have not found this sourced in any print authorities however. Given that Discogs has pictures of the label, I'm sure it was released, but until we find something authoritative it will need to be left off the page.
Next, I've included a lengthy footnote regarding the date of release in West Germany. Nearly every source I've read —
Walter Everett,[1]Barry Miles,[2]Kenneth Womack[3] and Margotin & Guesdon[4] (though Womack and M&G cite Everett) — say Odeon released it on 5 March 1964. This doesn't make much sense given that, according to
Mark Lewisohn, the songs were not mixed in mono and stereo until 10 and 12 March, respectively.[5] John Winn simply says that after the songs were mixed they were "sent to West Germany for rush-release..."[6]The Beatles Bible gives an even more nonsensical release of 4 February, only six days after recording. On the
official German charts, it indicates that both songs first entered on 1 April 1964, implying a release sometime in the second half of March. I can't narrow the range down any further than this (12 March – 1 April 1964).
^Womack, Kenneth (2014). The Beatles Encyclopedia: Everything Fab Four (Unabridged ed.). Santa Barbara: Greenwood. pp. 512, 839.
ISBN978-0-31339-171-2.
^Margotin, Philippe; Guesdon, Jean-Michel (2013). All the Songs: The Story Behind Every Beatles Release. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal. p. 74.
ISBN978-1579129521.
^Jones, Jaesen (2012) [2011]. An Overview of Australian Beatles Records (Revised ed.). Canberra: Blue Star Print. pp. 48, 129.
ISBN978-0-9871048-3-0.
Comments
I can't help feeling this article relies way too much on direct quotations. It becomes something of a George Martin armchair recollection. (Yes, he was the Parlophone boss and their connection with EMI worldwide, but he's not the artist.) Also, the amount of text relegated to notes – creating 16 notes in total – is quite a surprise, given the article's not at all long. It's especially noticeable under Background, where three consecutive sentences carry notes/asides.
JG66 (
talk)
15:18, 5 March 2021 (UTC)reply
Thanks for the comments. I removed two George Martin quotations that I now see don't really add much. I can definitely be a little overzealous with my notes; I moved several of them into the body of the text and removed others. Thank you for the smaller cosmetic fixes. I've made sure to familiarize myself with
MOS:DASH so I can avoid those issues in the future. Tkbrett (✉)15:42, 5 March 2021 (UTC)reply
The release info should come directly after the liberties sentence, plus move the German language versions info to being part of the opening sentence instead
The release sentence should begin with "The German versions were released..." then following the rest, plus add the US info here instead
Done. I began the sentence as "Odeon Records released the German version..." to avoid passive voicing. Let me know if this looks O.K. Tkbrett (✉)13:11, 16 March 2021 (UTC)reply
The commercial performance info is out of order; this should be directly after the recording info of the third para for both countries
Remove the sub section because that is redundant when all positions are weekly; mention in the table captions that they are for weekly chart performance of the songs
Thanks for the taking the time to go through this so thoroughly. I only have one FA under my belt and its in something completely different, so I appreciate your help here. I have gone through and made most of the changes you suggested. See my comments above. Cheers. Tkbrett (✉)13:11, 16 March 2021 (UTC)reply
Tkbrett✓Pass now, you did misunderstand my comment about the chart table so I fixed that for you and I also edited the lead after the last para stood out as too short. --
K. Peake18:11, 16 March 2021 (UTC)reply