Laurie Anderson - O Superman

TRACKLISTING: A) O Superman, B) Walk The Dog,
OVERVIEW: More than 25 years after it originally became a surprise No.2 hit in the UK singles chart, Nonesuch Records releases Laurie Anderson’s ‘O Superman’ on June 4th, the day before Anderson celebrates her 60th birthday. The newly remastered version will be available on limited edition 12" vinyl and download only. The 2007 release features the original B-side track ‘Walk The Dog’. Both tracks are taken from the forthcoming remastered 25th anniversary edition of Anderson’s 1982 debut album Big Science, which will be released on June 18th. This new expanded edition of the album also includes liner notes by Anderson herself and the classic video for ‘O Superman’. In the early 1980s Anderson was already respected as a conceptual artist and composer, adept at employing gear both high-tech and homemade in her often violin-based pieces, and she was a familiar figure in the cross-pollinating, Lower Manhattan music-visual art-performance circles from which Philip Glass and David Byrne also emerged. But Anderson hadn’t exactly plotted a path to pop stardom. While working on her now-legendary seven-hour performance art/theatre piece United States, Part I–IV, which premiered over two nights at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1983, she’d cut the spare, mesmerising ‘O Superman (For Massenet)’, an electronic-age update of 19th Century French operatic composer Jules Massenet’s aria ‘O Souverain’, for the tiny New York City indie label 110 Records. In the UK, DJ John Peel picked up a copy of this very limited edition 33⅓ RPM 7" and spun the eight-minute-plus track on BBC Radio 1. The exposure resulted in an unlikely no.2 hit, lots of attention in the American press, and a worldwide deal with Warner Bros. Records. Anderson’s new studio album-in-progress, Homeland, is scheduled for release on Nonesuch Records in 2008

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