May 082015

Way back in 1999 Sony finally released our first 2 albums on CD. It was a long project that we first started looking at as early as about 1994 maybe even earlier. Initially various parties were interested in licensing it and it was much simpler at that point but then Sony decided that they would release it. It took a long time as whoever was in charge of the project would come and go and everything would more or less start all over again.
The good thing was that along the way they became happy to hand over most of the artistic control to us, so in the end the package was probably 10 times better than it would have been otherwise. Ralph Alfonso gathered the tracks and did the booklet. I took charge of selecting and in some cases finishing off the unreleased extras and alternative versions. I also created the eps artwork for all the various Diodes logos and even did the eps version of the original epic logo that graces the CD. Sony hadn’t used it in almost 20 years and it wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve used it since they’re using my version!

So that’s a pocket history of the CD. To launch it we got booked for a single song performance on “Open Mike With Mike Bullard”, prime time Saturday night TV. We did the show with Mike Lengyell (now in Vancouver) on drums and John Hamilton so all the recorded members of the band were there. In fact as I recall every member who was ever in the band was in that room which is quite saying something.

Special shouts go out to:
The late Steven Davey who gathered together every reachable person (at that time) from the original Toronto Punk scene in the audience.
To the CITY broadcast sound engineers who let me take away a digital dump of the proper audio which years later has allowed me to restore this to better than broadcast quality rather than the diabolical sound on the VHS.
To Robert Godfrey who did the video transfer.

What’s funny is that at the time it never even occurred to us to do any more. That would take another 7 years.