I was looking at some of the releases over at SuperDeluxeEdition today, and two in particular caught my eye. One was the 50th anniversary special edition reissue of Elton John’s Honky Chateau, and the other was the 40th anniversary reissue of OMD’s Dazzle Ships.

I remember Honky Chateau well. I was in my 2nd year at school and one of our dormitory monitors was a big Elton John fan, as many of us were, and this was one of the albums he used to play in his cubicle. It was because of this album that I picked up a Jean-Luc Ponty album a couple of years later, purely because I remember his name from the credits on Honky Chateau.

I am nowhere near as familiar with Dazzle Ships. Even though I owned and enjoyed the previous album I was put off by the reviews which all said that it was a challenging listen. I have streamed it more recently and found that it is indeed quite challenging, but still an interesting record.

And then it struck me. Seeing “50th anniversary” and “40th anniversary” right next to each other, and the realisation that only ten years separated the two records. They seem a lifetime apart but it was only ten years, and I can’t quite get over that. It seems to me that things changed a lot faster in those days. In that ten years there was glam, punk, ska, disco, the start of hip hop, and that was just in the mainstream. By comparison, the music of today does not seem to be radically different from twenty years ago.

Or is it just me getting old?

All I do know for sure is that I should stay clear of the SDE website (and the Cherry Red website and the Soul Jazz Records website and the Burning Shed website). Too much temptation.