Why Is It So Hard?

First world problems and all that, but I've spent a couple of days rescuing my digital music collection. 

 

The good news is that I've managed to retrieve and restore it to a new external drive (and back up). The downside - which, having trawled forums for advice, seems to be a 'thing' with Apple Music - is that I've lost artwork on thousands of tracks and worse, seem to be missing over 500 songs. 

 

The difficulty with the latter is working out exactly what's missing, although ABC seems to have particularly copped it, with a large chunk of The Lexicon Of Love and several EPs inexplicably missing. I've been able to retrieve them from my 'old' back up but it's now a process of working out what's missing and trying to find and restore it.

 

In the meantime, I discovered a couple of clips of Talk Talk performing Why Is It So Hard? One is from (I think) Italian TV show Super Sanremo, the other unidentified but coming across like a very cheap promo. A bit of an oddity this song, as it was included on the soundtrack to 1984 film Firstborn (nope, me neither), starring Teri Garr and Peter Weller but not released as a single in the UK. 

 

I first heard/bought it on an import mini-album called It's My Mix, which featured half a dozen extended versions, including this one. The original version didn't (re)appear in the UK until the Asides Besides compilation in 1998. I like it, but it's very firmly rooted in their earlier synthpop style and I think would have sounded anachronistic compared at the time with their album It's My Life, where the band were already moving on.

 

Charles Bradley pondered the same question, although his seemed to be rhetorical. Here's "The Screaming Eagle Of Soul" with two blistering performances of the song for KEXP, both in 2011. Great stuff.