Hidden Tracks

[holyzombiejesus]

Just read this on Twitter...

Sometime in the late 90s my friends and I were in a cowboy bar that for some reason had Nevermind on their jukebox. I picked "Something in the Way" because it's a personal fave. Didn't go over great with the clientele. Even better though...

...is that nothing came on after it. This macho dude kept putting money in the jukebox—we was tired of us monopolizing with non-country—but nothing would play. He complained to the bartender but no one could figure out why the jukebox stopped working.

Everyone gave up and the bar was silent.

And then. AND THEN.

Endless/Nameless BLARED through the bar and EVERYONE acted like they'd just been attacked. The shock, the pain, the horror, the inability to turn it off.

https://twitter.com/sctttnnnt/status/1436424414900359170

... and it made me think about hidden tracks on CDs. I remember Kenickie had one on one of their albums - some bluesy song about Emmy-Kate, I think - and some Peter Hook project had him shouting "Turn it off!!!" about 10 minutes after the main music finished. Didn't The Second Coming have one too? Any others?

[imitationleather]

Think Tank by Blur had one where you had to skip backwards on the first track for a few minutes to get to it. It had Phil Daniels on it.

I don't really like the concept of hidden tracks, I've got to admit.

[sardines]

The one that immediately comes to mind is Ash 'Sick Party'

[madhair60]

I AM THE WARLOCK

I'M GOING TO FUCK YOUR LIFE UP

[Sebastian Cobb]

Not exactly hidden but korn front-loaded an album with a load of tiny silent tracks so the actual music started on 13. That was a right load of shite.

[DrGreggles]

Citizen's Band wins

[the ouch cube]

A good one is While I Pursue My Way Unharmed, at the end of Therapy?'s Suicide Pact album, about 16 minutes of Warren Ellis-style spectral violin, ambient supermarket noises, and Andy Cairns channelling Tom Waits and Day-Lewis' Bill The Butcher character (before the character ever existed) obviously having drunk fuck knows how much, at one point announcing himself to be God. It must have been intended as a piss take but comes out properly haunted and nasty. It also more or less invents its own genre.

[JesusAndYourBush]

Not a hidden track, but it was hidden in this instance...

Once my dad was in an Irish pub and he was putting a couple of songs on the jukebox.  He noticed a Dubliners album had track 5 blanked out so he chose that one out of curiosity.

"The Patriot Game" started to play, and after a couple of verses the barman reached under the counter and pulled the plug.

[Echo Valley 2-6809]

Prince's album 20Ten had 67 silent tracks lasting a few seconds each before the final hidden track 77, 'Laydown'.

Hard to believe a Jehovah's Witness would pointlessly waste someone's time like that.

[Shaky]

NIN's "Broken" had two songs on tracks 98 & 98 after 90-odd tracks of silence. Not really hidden as they were credited on the sleeve, but still.

[Magnum Valentino]

I AM THE WARLOCK

I'M GOING TO FUCK YOUR LIFE UP

Fucking yaaaasss, STARE DEEP, INTO MY SCEP-TERR

Fucking loads of these. The Music's second album had a re-record of an early b-side that they turned into something mature and beautiful. Sepultura has one that's just two drummers taking turns improvising in Ross Robinson's house. Diamond Bollocks by Beck is hidden on some pressings and listed as the last track on others.

Think Tank was mentioned above. The Music's debut also had a song hidden in the pre-gap, that you had to rewind from the first track to find. Interestingly enough, not all CD players could actually do this and I don't think software was able to see that data either so in the relatively few cases it exists, it's a case of something being well and truly hidden.

Endless Nameless not being on the vinyl reissue of Nevermind is a load of shite but.

[daf]

Think Tank by Blur had one where you had to skip backwards on the first track for a few minutes to get to it. It had Phil Daniels on it.

There are two of the buggers on the XTC 'Coat of Many Cupboards' box set - which are now impossible to hear as my new CD player can't rewind into the pre-gap! FFS!

disc 2 : "Wanking Man" (Live Studio Chatter) - 1:37
disc 3 : "Shaving Brush Boogie" (Live Studio Recording) - 12:26

[kalowski]

Think Tank by Blur had one where you had to skip backwards on the first track for a few minutes to get to it. It had Phil Daniels on it.

I don't really like the concept of hidden tracks, I've got to admit.

SFA did this on Guerrilla with the song Citizen's Band hidden at the start. The CD also gas Chewing Chewing Gum (Reprise) hidden at the end.
Those guys!

[sutin]

SFA did this on Guerrilla with the song Citizen's Band hidden at the start. The CD also gas Chewing Chewing Gum (Reprise) hidden at the end.
Those guys!

They Might Be Giants hid Token Back To Brooklyn before the first track on Factory Showroom.

[phantom_power]

SFA did this on Guerrilla with the song Citizen's Band hidden at the start. The CD also gas Chewing Chewing Gum (Reprise) hidden at the end.
Those guys!

Didn't Out-Spaced have one as well?

[Darles Chickens]

PSB's Very had a hidden song sung by Chris Lowe after a few minutes of silence following Go West. No one would put that on a jukebox though, so unlikely to suffer the same problem as Endless/Nameless.

There was an X Files compilation CD which had a hidden track 0 which you had to rewind backwards from the beginning to find.

I remember the NIN Broken CD with the 90-odd 1 second tracks - I think the only reason they mentioned them on the inlay was that one of them was an Adam Ant cover which needed to be credited.

I don't really like the hidden tracks thing much though. The title track of the Hooverphonic album Blue Wonder Power Milk was a hidden track, and also the best track on the album. There were UK releases which didn't include it at all (because "it didn't exist") and it took me ages to find a copy which did.

[Wayman C. McCreery]

SFA did this on Guerrilla with the song Citizen's Band hidden at the start. The CD also gas Chewing Chewing Gum (Reprise) hidden at the end.
Those guys!

And - magnificently - on the vinyl reissue, The Citizen's Band is hidden in a second groove. You can only hear it if you play side A from the inside out.

And they physically hid a bonus 7" of Patience/All The Shit U Do inside the gatefold of the original Rings Around The World vinyl. I don't own it but apparently you need to lie the gatefold completely flat to spot a gap it slides out of. If you go on Discogs you can find loads of comments from people who've owned it for 20 years but had no idea that it was in there.

[studpuppet]

This whole video about Jack Black's Lazaretto ULTRA LP is ridiculous but there are hidden tracks under the label in the centre of the record.

[Glebe]

Though of 'Endless, Nameless' the moment I saw the thread title. 'Tis a fairly famous hidden track tbh thought.

[McChesney Duntz]

I can think of at least two bands (whose names I can't recall) who put songs into the spaces between songs on their CDs (the 'twixt-tune countdown parts), which meant you couldn't seek them out to listen to them - you had to at least listen to the song preceding it or some such thing. I seem to recall Mercury Rev pulling such a trick on their Deserter's Songs CD, but I may be wrong. I know a lot of the interstitial bits on the Who Sell Out CD were relegated to that gap.

Question for the group: "Her Majesty" is basically the first-ever "hidden track," correct?

[Brundle-Fly]

On the original copies of the One Step Beyond LP by Madness, their cover of the ska classic 'Madness' that closes Side 2* is oddly not featured in the tracklisting. It was appended to the US Sire LP release and later releases on CD.

Is that an early example of a hidden track?

*I don't include Chipmunks Are Go as really it's an album skit

[Magnum Valentino]

Though of 'Endless, Nameless' the moment I saw the thread title. 'Tis a fairly famous hidden track tbh thought.

They even played it live.

[purlieu]

some Peter Hook project had him shouting "Turn it off!!!" about 10 minutes after the main music finished.

"Oi, you can turn it off now" at the end of Monaco's Music for Pleasure.

I think Robbie Williams always did one and then at the end of one of his albums there was a 20 minute gap before him saying "I'm not doing one this time" or something, which sounds far more entertaining than I'd expect of him.

Autechre's EP7 had a track 0 one, and LP5 had a 'traditional' one at the end, both just bits of digital noise rather than proper tracks.

Travis had a couple of notable ones, 'Blue Flashing Light' on The Man Who, a fairly loud, distorted guitar-led thing with Fran Healy singing "you're a slut, you're a bitch, you're a whore" which was relegated to hidden track as it didn't even remotely fit on the album; The Boy With No Name had two hidden tracks, with another silence between the two. If I recall correctly, Arnold's Hillside Album had a couple (mentioned on the sleeve, with information on how to find them, bizarrely). I think one of the discs of Mansun's Kleptomania was the same. And their debut album had the wonderful 'Open Letter to the Lyrical Trainspotter' as a hidden track.

Something post-hardcore bands seemed to do - and I'm sure others have too, but I've never heard other examples - was using a looped sound effect rather than silence, so you'd get the sound of traffic for ten minutes between Yourcodenameis:Milo's 'Audition' and 'Unfinished Drawings of Cats', or the final four notes of the last track of The Bled's Found in the Flood looped for about 20 minutes before they formed the basis of an electronic track (actually quite good, despite the quality of much of the band's normal output). I think Glassjaw's debut album did something like this too.

The Amorphous Androgynous did a faux-hidden track on The Isness, which was actually the last track split into two with silence in the middle. Of course, the original uncut version on the Abbey Road Cut of the album was far, far superior - to the extent that I can't even listen to the final mix - but I do like the idea of the hidden track actually just being the same song. I believe the hidden track on Kid A (known to some fans as 'Genchildren') is supposed to just be part of 'Motion Picture Soundtrack' or some crap, but it's clearly not.

On the same note, as FSOL, they did a hidden track on Dead Cities which incorporated a track Simon Wells (of Snuff) recorded for them called 'Dead Cities Reprise'; it must have been finished very late in the game, as the way the album was 'delivered' to the label was a staged terrorist attack (ah, the innocence of the '90s!), and in this video of the event, there's a slowed down bit with alarm and gunshots that's actually used in the hidden track. So even though they'd delivered the finished album to the label, they then continued to add to it. Which fits in with the ridiculous butchering of The Isness.

Idlewild's Warnings/Promises has a lovely extended country-esque acoustic version of album track 'Too Long Awake' as a hidden track. Although I've got the Japanese version with added b-sides and it's just listed as a normal track on that, oddly.

Loads of others over the years, Therapy?'s High Anxiety, Oasis's Heathen Chemistry, the Ernold Same reprise at the end of Blur's Great Escape, Mercury Rev's Deserter's Songs (actually located in the countdown to the silent, four second last track.

What's the earliest example anyone can think of? Would it be 'Endless Nameless'? Obviously there's 'Her Majesty', but that's not quite the same, it's more similar to CDs that simply have unlisted bonuses (Orbital's debut, Squarepusher's Selection Sixteen, etc.)

I also quite like when you get semi-hidden tracks at the ends of tracks mid-album. Blur's 13 has loads of them ('Caramel' in particular has two short instrumental pieces at the end), the Manics' Know Your Enemy had a couple, including an excerpt of a b-side (and a proper hidden track with their cover of 'We Are All Bourgeois Now'), Mercury Rev's All is Dream has a few little instrumental bits hidden in the track countdowns (so you'd totally miss them if you were skipping through tracks on an old player - modern players, especially DVD players, seem to ignore the countdown and just add it to the end of the previous track).

I can think of at least two bands (whose names I can't recall) who put songs into the spaces between songs on their CDs (the 'twixt-tune countdown parts), which meant you couldn't seek them out to listen to them - you had to at least listen to the song preceding it or some such thing. I seem to recall Mercury Rev pulling such a trick on their Deserter's Songs CD, but I may be wrong. I know a lot of the interstitial bits on the Who Sell Out CD were relegated to that gap.

Question for the group: "Her Majesty" is basically the first-ever "hidden track," correct?

Apologies, I didn't see this post and seem to have restated both of these remarks.

[Glyn]

Bag Lady on Journal For Plague Lovers is a good one. Williams Last Words plays out (or was edited to be, you can argue) as a gentle suicide note and then after a long pause you get squealing guitars and the opening lines 'I am not dead, I demand ,I know my rights'. They deny it was intentional but it's a nice way to end on a suitably ambiguous note.

[JohnnyCouncil]

Placebo hid the excellent Hong Kong Farewell on their debut, Evil Dildo on Without You, and (the forgettable) Black Market Blood on BMM. Thus ends my Placebo secret track knowledge.

[JohnnyCouncil]

Bag Lady on Journal For Plague Lovers is a good one. Williams Last Words plays out (or was edited to be, you can argue) as a gentle suicide note and then after a long pause you get squealing guitars and the opening lines 'I am not dead, I demand ,I know my rights'. They deny it was intentional but it's a nice way to end on a suitably ambiguous note.

Sadly missig from the vinyl and delux CD (I think). Love it.

[purlieu]

and (the forgettable) Black Market Blood on BMM.

Not only is it dull, but it also meant that my favourite Placebo song, 'Peeping Tom', was a pain in the arse to have on an mp3 player. Thankfully they stopped this trend afterwards.

Another question: what's the most recent example? With the rise of digital releases, the hidden track has become somewhat redundant. I Awake's The Core has a hidden track, and that was released in 2008, the most recent I've come across.

[Pete23]

Marillion had a double groove on the final side of the Brave album. It's a concept album about a girl found on a bridge about to jump and the album goes back through her life to show how she got there. On one of the grooves she survives and there's a lovely upbeat closer. However, on the other groove - splash.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Marillion had a double groove on the final side of the Brave album. It's a concept album about a girl found on a bridge about to jump and the album goes back through her life to show how she got there. On one of the grooves she survives and there's a lovely upbeat closer. However, on the other groove - splash.

Genius but 1994's a bit late to be pulling that sort of caper.

[AsparagusTrevor]

This whole video about Jack Black's Lazaretto ULTRA LP is ridiculous but there are hidden tracks under the label in the centre of the record.

He's slimmed down quite a lot