Why a box set will never bring you what you seek
 
Of all the traps that the music industry set for music fans on the advent of CDs, the box set has proved the most seductive and dangerous.

Extravagantly packaged, fully-restored, bulging with rare and unreleased treats, something solid in your hands. New photographs, new sleevenotes, extra tracks; the music, oh yes, the music. It's all there - the live versions, studio out-takes, every singles every single album - usually in chronological order. A completist's dream, if you've got from £50 to £100 to spare.

But whether it's The Jam or The Velvet Underground, Miles Davis or Nirvana, it's easy to forget in the first flush of purchase that the box set's role isn't to remind you why like the music so much. There's already plenty of cheaper 'best-ofs' and 'greatest hits' littering the shelves of Tesco or Asda just along from the readymade curries and cheap chicken.
No, the velvet covers, large plastic fold-out wallets and white oblong boxes with the red pulsing light are there for other reasons.

For the record industry it's a cheap way of charging premium prices for old product to a guaranteed audience. Forget about the troublesome business of trying to make people pay money for a new band doing something new.
The costs of musical recycling are low and the risks even lower.

For fans what's really so enticing is the thought of following the act's entire career from start to present or, if the act in question is no longer with us which is even better when you think about it, from start to finish.

Once in your possession and safely back home in the bed room, once the box has been opened, explored and plundered, you can the sit and play the whole thing to your heart's content - one gorgeous CD after another. For five hours, more or less, it's just you and the band.

The aim isn't simply pleasure - what you're trying to do is spot how the music changes from band line-up to band line-up, era to era. As you delve deeper into the band's history, it starts to feel as if you've been with the band on every tour and every TV show, shared the airless claustrophobia of the smelly recording studios where genius was hatched in the wee small hours of the morning.

If you try hard enough as CD 4 is replaced by CDs 5, 6 and 7, you might even discover the band's very essence. For what's at stake for the music fan is more serious than a stamp collector's desire to complete his or her collection or find that rare Penny Black.

At its deepest, saddest level buying a box set is an attempt to hold time in your hands, catch lightning in a bottle. Suddenly, as one half-finished outtake is followed by another under whelming live version, you wake up to reality and realise with a flash that what the box contains really isn't that special.

The curtains are open, the lights on. What you've bought is just a collection of songs, an expensive one, too. The box isn't a magic lamp and the genie hasn't been set free.

A box set will never bring you what you seek.
 

Graham Chalmers
 

© Modern Music Review (2008)