Dublin band Whipping Boy has announced full details of their forthcoming vinyl and CD re-issue of their universally acclaimed second album, Heartworm.
The re-release will be available on Double LP and double CD on the Needle Mythology label on September 3 and features a remaster of the album by Sean Magee at Abbey Road, a second record and CD of B-sides, two previously unreleased demos and live tracks, along with sleeve notes by RTÉ television producer and lifelong champion of Irish music Colm O'Callaghan.
Heartworm was originally released to critical acclaim in 1995 and is now regarded as a lost classic and is frequently was voted as among the best Irish albums of all time in critics’ polls.
The original vinyl of the album has been out of print for over 25 years and regularly changes hands for hundreds of Euro.
In May 1996, Needle Mythology founder and author Pete Paphides, who at that point was writing for Time Out in London, saw Whipping Boy play at late lamented Astoria in London.
"It was one of the most exhilarating gigs I've ever seen in my life. And, as it happens, one of the most heart-breaking ones," he recalls.
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"Whipping Boy’s second album Heartworm had been out a few months now, just enough to have allowed a deep obsession to take root. It was a record I evangelised about to anyone who was willing to listen.
"More so for the fact that in 1996, it was hard to see where this record was going to fit in. Which perhaps explains why, as the four members of Whipping Boy plugged in their instruments at the London Astoria, the venue was at best half-full."
Listen: Whipping Boy: When We Were Young - The Story of Heartworm.
Pete has spent the last two and a half decades telling anyone who will listen about that night and the magic of Heartworm.
"It was exhilarating - but also heart-breaking. Heart-breaking because you know that when a band who is signed to a major label plays to a half-empty venue in London - it won’t go unnoticed by their paymasters.
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"Certainly not, at any rate, when none of the singles from the record they’re promoting manage to scrape the Top 40. But those of us who were listening didn’t forget. We told our friends. And they told their friends.
"And the reputation of this magnificent album grew and grew, to the point where younger artists such as Fontaines D.C. were citing it as one of the greatest albums of the past 30 years - a view ratified by a poll in the Irish Times last year which ranked Heartworm as the fourth greatest Irish album of all time.
"Alas, this was all too late to stop Whipping Boy from dissolving. But it’s not too late for Heartworm to assume its rightful position in the canon."
The Heartworm re-issue will be on sale as a heavyweight vinyl pressing by Vinyl Factory and the track listing is: Side One: Twinkle, When We Were Young, Tripped, The Honeymoon Is Over, We Don’t Need Nobody Else.
Side Two: Blinded, Personality, Users, Fiction, Morning Rise. Side Three: When We Were Young, (Philo Version), I Am God (Demo of Fiction), Magnolia (Demo of Blinded), Caroline Says II, Tripped (Live). Side Four: We Don’t Need Nobody Else (Acoustic Version), Disappointed, Twinkle (Acoustic Version), As The Day Goes, A Natural.
