LABEL: DEMON RECORDS / FORMAT: VINYL / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
To celebrate the 42nd anniversary of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy, Demon Records created a Record Store Day release of the first two studio LPs. Combining The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, along with its follow-up, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, this remastered triple LP set on 180-gram translucent Vogon green, Magrathean blue and Pangalactic purple vinyl marks the first reissue of these recordings in decades, and it’s been well worth the wait.
Although the label states that, following the success of the BBC radio series, Douglas Adams adapted his scripts for these two full-cast albums, with incidental radiophonic music provided by Paddy Kingsland, that’s not quite the whole story. Given that the original radio series – The Primary Phase – featured so many different pieces of popular recorded music, releasing it would’ve caused a massive batch of copyright issues. Thus, Douglas Adams redid the scripts, Paddy Kingsland composed a bunch of new music, and voila!
Oh, and Cindy Oswin takes over Susan Sheridan’s role as Trillian for these recordings, because Sheridan was busy voicing Princess Eilonwy in the Disney adaptation of Lloyd Alexander’s The Black Cauldron.
Arguably, these are the superior versions of the original radio series, given that the recordings flow a little better, due to not having to fit within a prescribed timeslot, along with credits and the like. While it might not have the scrappiness of the original radio performances, these studio versions certainly make up for that in terms of polish, flow, and not being under the gun. They are stellar, in every sense of the world.
