The case against re-recording albums 

In 2012, Jeff Lynne released Mr Blue Sky: The Very Best of Electric Light Orchestra. Except it wasn’t. It was 11 new re-recordings of classic ELO songs – which isn’t the same thing at all. Lynne, bless him, believed that having gained more experience as a producer, he could now improve the songs that made him famous. ‘You know how to make it sound better than it did before,’ he said, ‘Because I have more knowledge… and technology.’ Sheesh. How wrong can one man be?

Pop music is all about the definitivearticle. Not only the bold prefix attached to its greatest practitioners – Beatles, Byrds, Wailers, Temptations, Fall, et al – but the notion of a defining recording of a song. The stage is the place for revision: to jam, change the words, the rhythm, the feel. The studio version, by contrast, is sacrosanct; these things are called ‘records’ for a reason, after all. They capture a moment by becoming a moment themselves, an aural photograph – sometimes sharp and clear, sometimes beguilingly out of focus. However much an artist might wish to recreate the original, or fix any perceived flaws, the results will always feel like Photoshop.

This week Taylor Swift continues the programme of recording new versions of her first six albums. She has got to 1989, for my money her best record, originally released in 2014. The planet’s biggest pop star has been up front about the reasons for this exhaustive and rather exhausting enterprise.

Swift signed to Big Machine Records in 2005, aged 15. By the time that contract expired in 2018, she had become a superstar yet Big Machine, not atypically, retained ownership of the master recordings of her albums.