NuDisc

Well, well, well. A few months ago they finally released the John Lennon Signature box set on vinyl. I finally got a copy when a couple of stars aligned in my own universe: I got a good paying job again and the price went down enough to make it doable. Comprising all eight of Lennon’s studio albums, the 9-record set (one album is two records) puts almost everything John ever recorded as a solo artist in the studio together in one place. There are some singles missing, though. “Instant Karma!,” “Cold Turkey” and “Give Peace a Chance” weren’t on any of his albums until the best of compilation Shaved Fish (see a forthcoming review), so for those you’ll need to go back to your record library and dig out that or one of the many other collections (Lennon Legend, The John Lennon Collection) that they showed up on. (The CD version of this box set actually had a disc with these songs and some stray B-sides on it; they didn’t reproduce that here. And no, I don’t know why.)

What you do get is: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, Imagine, Some Time in New York City, Mind Games, Walls and Bridges, Rock and Roll, Double Fantasy and Milk and Honey. All are mastered from the digital 24-bit/96kHz digital files they used for the 2010 CD box, which, after The Beatles In Mono vinyl box of last year, seems like a bit of a let down – at least on paper. Those were all mastered in analog from the original analog master tapes. But put any of these albums on your turntable and you’ll find the blokes at Abbey Road did a helluva careful job making sure things sounded great. Aside from one colossal boo boo, this box set is amazing. Here’s the big oopsie: Rock and Roll has one song on there twice and another missing completely. This kind of thing can happen when you’re mastering from digital – the wrong song title gets linked to the wrong digital file in the workstation – so it’s not exactly unlikely, though you’d think they would have caught that in quality control. Have no fear, Lennonites. If you got the box set and yours is one with the bad disc, you can get a replacement. (Click here for details.) So don’t let that stop you from picking this up if you want all of Lennon’s studio stuff on wax.

Aside from Live Peace in Toronto and Shaved Fish, all of Lennon’s non-posthumous solo output is here and it’s a great addition to your Beatles vault. Having these eight albums together in a nice, simple but elegant box set is, ummm, just like starting over.
4.5/5 (Universal/Calderstone, 2015)