Mr. Monopoly would like to brag that the image below is one of his very favorite designs. Unfortunately, the execution leaves quite a bit to be desired.
The problem I have with it today is this: that's a terrific, moody picture of Bry on the front, but of course the tan, brown behind him is not a solid. Mr. Monopoly never learned how to scale colors in quite the same way, so the extension of that image into a 4.75 x 4.75 square matches at the bottom, but is badly mismatched at the top. The actual layout I think works very nicely, with the bizarre color strip and happy-faced backup singers giving a gleeful intrusion to the "barricade" of moody monochrome.
Not long after this CD-R made the rounds as a tree, a fan asked Mr. Monopoly why he called it that. Mr. Monopoly explained that the 2001 Roxy tour had been extensively taped and traded - indeed, at least 22 of the 51 shows had been doing the rounds by the end of the year, with more to come - but audience tapes of the 2002
Frantic tour were considerably harder to come by.
The feeling among some newer fans, particularly in the USA, was that the older fans in the UK considered our excited, loud, participatory style of fandom somewhat distasteful, and our attention-grabbing CDs advertised everywhere possible on trade lists and in general CD-R trading fora really uncool. Theirs was a fandom that was much quieter, with audience tapes passed very discreetly among collectors without anybody drawing attention to them. Suddenly there were a lot of new kids who wanted to do everything very differently and very loudly. As weeks went by without anybody announcing they'd taped one of Bry's shows, it really felt, to impatient Americans, like the Brits had embargoed any circulation of audience tapes, and one Grand Dame in the area described it as "a barricade." This was the first audience tape to leak our way, months late and by which time Bry had rejigged the set list considerably, and so the album got this title as a joke between Mr. Monopoly and La Grand Dame.
