Yeah, as a Norwegian I couldn`t resist saying it seems an album especially made for the Swedish people. It had an outward appearance as a follow up to Avalon, but alas...

-August Strindberg, Ingmar Bergman, Lars Norén... -they have their audience...

It’s been removed from HMV site now - I think they have simply pushed the button too early on getting the presales up.
Normally it would be an announcement along with the various links to retailers where it can be preordered from.
Hopefully a bit of activity next week and team BF makes use of his YT channel to start sharing snippets with us.

The track listing for Horoscope is interesting.
I dont know what Raga is , nor S&M , and it’s telling that loop de li was so long in gestation.

May just be that HMV jumped the gun ahead of an official announcement?

Exactly that; it has probably been only temporarily removed because HMV shouldn't get to steal a pre-order march on its competitors (Amazon would normally undercut HMV on price anyway...).

I'd pre-ordered and HMV hasn't cancelled that (at least not yet anyway!).

The only item which is exclusive to HMV (and Fopp, which is owned by HMV) is the blue vinyl These Foolish Things.

The Horoscope track list is using what were the 'working titles' at the time.

J.O'B.

Coming late to this but delighted by it and counting myself lucky that my two fave albums in BF's canon (Roxy's debut & now Mamouna) are the first two to get the special edition treatment. In saying that, I can't help thinking that they could have included even more in this package. The accompanying tour was amazing, for instance, so why not include a date from that. The full Wolverhampton date, part of which was broadcast on Radio 2, would be very welcome and/or the full Buenos Aires concert that was recorded for an abridged TV broadcast. Would also have been nice to see the excellent Making of Documentary included along with some outtakes from it. Surely the latter would have cost nothing to release given that it was an in-house production by Team BF.

S&M is what became Midnight Train on Avonmore.
Raga is an unreleased track that has had an assumed title of 'Blinded By The Life I'm Living'

J.O'B.

Which of course begs the next question of why on earth were they called that? Unless Raga translates as crap as it really is one of the worst tracks BF ever produced. Do we know what Robot is on the third disc btw or is this one that's never seen the light of day even on bootleg?

As a musician myself, when a song is no more than a backing track without lyrics, then the piece has to have a name or file name to store and recall it. For example, I have a song called 'Bm Firebird' because I wrote the riff in B minor on my Firebird. The singer eventually wrote lyrics and only then did it have a proper title.

These working titles will have some reference to the music to BF and that's why he gave them these titles.

As for what you may think of Raga, it has been left uneleased for a reason all these years, and is released all this time later not as a new album but as a historical document of the behind the scenes world of Mamouna. I am sure a lot of material in a lot of deluxe editions by many artists is more 'interesting ' than for entertainment.


I have many deluxe editions of many bands and if I can use Simple Minds Love Song as an example from Silver Box. The demo is pretty poor to listen to, but an essentially interesting example of the gestation of that song and the progress and development of the band.

J.O'B.

Well, you did insist on listening to something he never intended you to hear at the time!

I cantered through some of these years ago - the lot left me cold given their incomplete nature and I haven't revisited them since. Now that they're in a form deemed suitable for release, my interest is renewed. For me, it's good to approach this release unencumbered by adverse, rather premature conclusions.