No Wave - ANOTHER Blatant Attempt To Influence Your Musical Taste

When Koen first shared his Propaganda project with us, I noticed that the second one was titled Propaganda (No Wave II). That parenthetical subtitle triggered a memory of the first A&M No Wave compilation album (with the  surfer on an ironing board). The title, of course, had nothing to do with Mars, DNA, Teenage Jesus, or James Chance. 

There's a picture disc version called No Wave To Go with the surfer on side one and a picture of a pizza on the flipside.  It was also released on "blue water" translucent vinyl.

Like its Propaganda sequels, there were other version of No Wave with different tracklists.  The Canadian version of No Wave drops the Stranglers' tracks and substitutes two songs by David Kubinec from his 1978 A&M LP Some Things Never Change. Kubinec's album was produced by John Cale, and it featured Chris Spedding and Ollie Halsall on guitar.  (The Stranglers were signed to A&M in the US, but not in Canada or the UK.)

There's yet another A&M compilation titled No Wave, which came out in 1979.  This one includes Kubinec as well as other artists featured on Propaganda -- Bobby Henry, The Secret, and Shrink.  In the UK, these artists were signed to Oval Records (which also released a version of Propaganda II). A&M had a deal with Oval Records, and promoted their artists through these compilations.  

Similarly, it was a deal between A&M and Miles Copeland which led to both No Wave and Propaganda featuring Squeeze, The Police, and Klark Kent. 

According to this interview with Dickies guitarist Stan Lee, A&M "had just kicked the Sex Pistols off the label and were wanting a punk band that wasn't so notorious."  The Dickies scored two hit singles for A&M in the UK. 

More trivia: Dave Murray from The Secret played guitar in Iron Maiden!  Bobby Henry was a member of a band called Bim, which included Stephen Street (who became a producer) and Cameron McVey (who cowrote "Buffalo Stance").

There's some overlap between the compilations, but now you have all the songs from the various versions of Propaganda, Propaganda II and the three versions of No Wave.  ELSEWHERE ON THE BLOG:  Stinky's Homemade Live Joe Jackson Albums.

Propaganda - A Blatant Attempt To Influence Your Musical Taste

It’s strange the way things develop at times, in this case reading an article about certain songs not being available digitally at all and the search for an old 1979 sampler collection…
I wrote the following to Jonder and Stinky:
This is an interesting article but unfortunately focussing mainly on songs from the 90's
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgl7ld1glk3o
I think there are loads of songs from the 50s, 60s, 70s & 80s still only available on vinyl (or CD in some cases!)...
Good example is an old sampler from 1979 I'm trying to put together digitally: Propaganda No Wave II
I bought the lp in that year, mainly for the great cover design, the Police & Joe Jackson live tracks and Squeeze's Wrong Way (later covered by Rockpile!), but the other tracks weren't bad either, some previously unissued as well!
A little later I found a slightly different version, just Propaganda, but with some other interesting tracks…
I requested my partners in crime’s help in finding these 2 for a new JOKONKY project.
The first Propaganda I found easily enough in a dark corner of the Internet, but the second one kept eluding me.
I searched 'everywhere' for "Propaganda No Wave II" & "Propaganda" lp 1979 but to no avail...
Jonder tried very hard too, he found some tracks separately, but not all, among others Bobby Henry’s "Hollow Sound" and Squeeze's Wrong Way…
That last one can be found on YouTube but ripped from a flexi-disc, very poor quality, utterly useless…
However I tried searching for "Bobby Henry" "Hollow Sound" which somehow led me to an old (defunct?) French blogpost which had posted the whole album… The logic escapes me!
As a result we proudly present the Deluxe Edition of Propaganda with all 17 tracks, enjoy!