A mere three years earlier, mention of a Doctors of Madness compilation album would probably have landed the speaker with their own visit to a psychiatrist. The band was defunct, and good thing, too, nasty psychotic noise-mongers that they were, with their screeching fiddles and their post-glam hangovers and total sales lower than room temperature in an igloo. Ah, but times change, and attitudes with them, and one day the world awoke to discover the Doctors weren't simply undergoing a massive critical evaluation, they were doing it in full view of the public eye. Former frontman Richard Strange was operating one of London's best-loved clubs and igniting a much-lauded solo career; bassist Stoner was to be found in TV Smith's Explorers, one of the most highly rated new bands of the year, and some of the hottest properties of the post-punk afterglow were suddenly admitting that the Doctors were an influence. Oh, better put out a greatest hits album, then. 1975-1978 Revisionism is great if you don't have any of the other albums, and don't intend to buy them. It is fabulous if you like your influences in chewy little bite-sized portions. It is fabulous if you have such a brief attention span that even the band's piece de resistance, the churning, burning, 17-minute Mainlines, has to be sliced in two for you, to bookend ten other tracks seemingly selected solely for their resemblance to something which could be called commercial. Bulletin, after all, had been released as a single; Afterglow was once performed on national TV with model Twiggy....Of course, such statistics were, are, and always will be a smokescreen. Not only were the Doctors not commercial, which is why no-one bought them first time around; you could even say there are few major-label signings of similar vintage who were so purposefully, precociously opposed to anything which even smelled like a hit. Mitzi's Cure, with its lascivious line about time bombs and forearms (they don't mix), Marie and Joe, a timeless love tragedy to rival any Russian novel; Bulletin itself -- the title is a pun, naturally -- these were not a result of the behavior of a band who courted success, and they certainly weren't the actions of a group which wanted an epitaph. You want to find out what made the Doctors mad? You'll need the original albums after all. 1975-1978 Revisionism, on the other hand, is precisely what its title says it is. Cold, calculated revision. Ism. ~ Dave Thompson, Rovi

1		Mainlines (Prologue)
2		Waiting
3		B-Movie Bedtime
4		Triple Vision
5		In Camera
6		Network
7		Sons of Survival
8		Marie and Joe
9		Mitzi's Cure
10		Afterglow
11		Bulletin
12		Mainlines

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