Howard Jones - The 12" Album & Action Replay [3CD Remastered Limited Edition Box Set] (2011)

Howard Jones has remastered and reissued his 1984 remix album The 12″ Album and the 1986 US-only mini-LP Action Replay. Available from early April 2011 on his own Dtox label, the two CDs are can be purchased individually or together as a strictly limited edition numbered box set which comes with an additional bonus CD of extended remixes.

The 12″ Album has been out-of-print for years and the hard-to-find original CD commands sizeable prices on ebay. Action Replay was only ever issued on vinyl and cassette making this it’s CD debut 25 years after the original release.

The 12″ remix, although pioneered in the disco-era of the late ’70s, is very much an ’80s phenomenon. 7″ tracks would be extended – normally to somewhere between 6 and 9 minutes – but crucially the song would remain more or less in tact within this extension. Modern remixes are normally by a ‘name’ remixer where the aim is to deconstruct and rebuild a track, or appeal to clubs by increasing the beats-per-minute (BPM) dramatically, regardless of whether this treatment suits the song.

In contrast, the remixes from the ’80s were normally done by the artist themselves (Pet Shop Boys did lots of there own) or an in-house engineer. Extended intro > song > extended middle eight break > more song > extended ‘outro’ seemed to be a rough template. Plenty of cowbells too. Record companies embraced 12″ vinyl, and often second editions would be released with a different cover and a different remix to that on the first issue. This means even today, there are a lot of tracks from ’80s artists that still only available on the original 12″ vinyl release.

Howard Jones embraced 12″ singles like many of his contemporaries, and he was an early adopter of the ‘remix album’ concept – compiling the remixes into a mini-album. Amongst those that would follow his lead were the Pet Shop Boys with Disco (1986) and Madonna with You Can Dance (1987). The 12″ Album contained remixes of 4 of his first 5 singles as well as a b-side and an unreleased track. Below we take a detailed look at the tracks on this album: