Angus Kidman – anguskidman.show

OK, so there’s a new deluxe CD edition of the eponymous first album from The Power Station coming out in January 2026. Before I start nit-picking, here are three things I really like about it:

• It includes seven previously unreleased “raw instrumentals”, the two tracks the band performed at Live Aid, and a complete 2-disc live concert, so we’re getting a properly enhanced release. (The main album is also remastered.)
• The original releases of this album back in 1985 were tagged ’33 1/3′ (LP), ‘XDR’ (tape) and ‘CD’ (compact disc). You can see this in the main picture above. In a neat tribute, the deluxe edition is tagged ‘DLX’.
• At $60 for 4 CDs in Australia, it’s excellent value. Australia was the band’s biggest market, with ‘Some Like It Hot’ reaching #4 and ‘Get It On (Bang A Gong)’ peaking at #7.

The Power Station was, in effect, a Duran Duran offshoot. Bassist John Taylor and guitarist Andy Taylor (nope, not related) joining up with Robert Palmer and Chic’s Tony Thompson. Fellow Chic member Bernard Edwards produced. Palmer didn’t want to tour the project, so for gigs his place was taken by Michael Des Barres, probably best-known as the co-writer of Animotion’s brilliant 1985 hit ‘Obsession’. Indeed, a live rendition of the track features on this collection.

The original idea was to have different guest vocalists on every track for the project, but once Robert Palmer recorded his vocal for ‘Communication’, the plan shifted. Ultimately 8 tracks were recorded, plenty enough for an album at the time. The “supergroup” (a term we tried to avoid at the time because of the 70s overtones) named itself after the New York studio where much of the material was recorded.

So what’s the issue? There was already a deluxe reissue of this album on CD back in 2005, which included all the known B-sides and remixes, as well as ‘Somewhere Somehow Someone (We Fight For Love)’, recorded for the soundtrack of Commando (and the only studio recording for the Power Station to feature Des Barres on vocals).

Comparing the track listing for the newly-announced release with that version, at first glance there are three tracks that don’t appear on the DLX edition which are on the 2005 version:

• The Heat Is On
• Communication (Remix)
• Communication (Long Remix)

However, we can see two suspiciously similar ‘Communication’ versions on the DLX release: ‘Night Version’ and ‘Night Version Edit’. It seems all too likely that the so-called “night versions” are the remixes which were issued back in 1985.

Duran Duran used the “night versions” label for many of its remixes back in the day. As far as I can see, that wasn’t the case for the Power Station, but the names for the remixes certainly weren’t consistent.

The 4:39 “long remix” of ‘Communication’ is also variously known as the extended or special club mix, and the 3.51 “remix” is also sometimes labelled as the 7″ mix. Regardless, I’m assuming these are the two mixes on DLX, just with different names.

So what’s definitely missing? ‘The Heat Is On’, which is an instrumental version of ‘Some Like It Hot’ (and appeared as the B-side on the 7-inch).

Why was this omitted? The most plausible reason is that the 15 tracks on the second disc take up all the available space. We aren’t given timings for the new release so we can’t 100% confirm this, but it’s a sensible guess.

That could easily be solved by appending a handful of tracks to the first disc (say, the single remixes for ‘Some Like It Hot’, ‘Get It On (Bang A Gong)’ and ‘Communication’). But there’s an increasingly purist tendency to only put the original album on CD1, which makes no sense to me. We have a stop button if we want to end there, people.

The other possibility is that as an instrumental (with occasional vocal bursts), ‘Some Like It Hot’ is thought to be too similar to the “new” “raw instrumental” version. But so what? You don’t have to place them next to each other. It’s meant to be definitive, so make it definitive.

Either way, in my non-humble opinion, it’s a daft decision. But of course I’ve already placed my order.

Side observation: ‘Communication’ is the only track from the original Power Station album that doesn’t get a “raw instrumental” mix on this reissue. I’d guess that’s because the master tapes couldn’t be found – possibly they went missing after the single remix was created.

For more CD nitpicking, check out what went wrong with the Wham! CD singles box, why we’re not getting more Spice Girls on CD or what’s still missing from the Tina Turner archives.