MIDNIGHT WIRE

My first encounter with this album was in the LP (vinyl) era, early '80's. At the time the only way of finding out about new progressive music, new to me anyway, was browsing at record stores or word of mouth. I had already picked up the first two albums and maybe Phantasmagoria at the time and liked them a lot. As far as I knew, those were the only albums in the discography. I get this one home and what a major disappointment!

The only track I really cared for, and still the best one on here, was the instrumental Pipe of Dreams. As was my habit at the time, I'd record LPs I liked to 90-minute cassettes. If there was any space left over on a side, I'd add a filler track from an album I didn't want to waste a whole cassette side for. So that was the fate of this album in my collection for a quite a while.

Come 2002, I had started to convert some of my LPs to CD, stuff that hadn't been released on CD yet and didn't seem likely to. Usually when I do this, particularly if I go to the trouble to scan in the album cover art and make my own CD booklet, the thing gets released and I have to buy it, arrgh! So, I was making a copy of Air Cut and I gave Midnight Wire another spin to select tracks to fill up my CD. Turned out that to my current tastes this album wasn't quite as bad as when I first heard it.

Still, if you're going to explore Curved Air, put this one at the bottom of your list. I recently got an official copy, it was released in '95. Air Cut was just re-released last year (2006) and is much, much better.

Woman on a One Night Stand is utterly unimpressive. I do like Day Breaks My Heart's jazzy style, not something you'll not hear much from CA. The title track, Midnight Wire, isn't too bad either. The rest of the songs here are pretty good as pop tunes, but rather poor as prog.

Personnel wise, this album is interesting for having Stewart Copeland on drums, pre Police. Also, Darryl Way is back after his one album hiatus (Air Cut).