The Visitor - Revisited - The making of a fan-club CD -
July 1999

After the release of Welcome Back To The Stage as a sequel to Welcome To The Stage, there’s now the logical sequel to The Visitor. CAGECD02 has seen the light under the name of The Visitor Revisited. As you have probably read in the mailing of last April, the CD consists of two, no actually three parts.

But first a bit of history:
After the release of The Visitor and all of the news about it, it actually was our biggest dream to get the leftover material on our CD. The readers’ poll also proved that this was something you would have liked. But things went differently. After the release of The Visitor a period of promotion and rehearsals followed for the band members. This also meant that there was absolutely no time to get into the studio and do some recordings for the fanclub CD. And the band was already getting claustrophobic enough as it was in the studio. So first the tour …

In May 1998, when the band visited Holland for promotional activities, Clive told us about his first plans for a second Cage CD. The biggest difference was that we had to arrange everything ourselves this time. The band would only provide the music. 
Several concerts would be recorded during The Visitor Tour, so a selection of songs would be made. Besides this there also was an acoustic set of several tracks of The Visitor as well as some older tracks, which had been recorded just before the tour. We could also use these recordings…

But things went differently …
When the tour had ended we kept ourselves in the background for a while, as far as the fanclub CD was concerned. The band obviously had a very exhausting period with more than ???? gigs right behind them. In the beginning of 1999 plans for a fanclub convention started taking shape as well as the idea to launch the CD on that same day. Deliberation, consultation and more deliberation followed. Yes, Clive would quickly take the time to listen to the tour recordings. We already had our ‘wish list’ ready: we really wanted The Hanging Tree and the rock version of Crying For Help VII.

Then the Mexican gigs caused another delay. But then things started happening very quickly. We received five acoustic tracks, but re-recorded ones. The reason was that the earlier versions were already sent to numerous people and therefore weren’t exclusive anymore. Later it became apparent that the problems with Paul had grown to such an extent that his departure had become inevitable. This also meant that The Cage would be allowed to release the first material with new vocalist Rob!
The second part of the CD also turned out to be a nice surprise. Initially, we were planning to use the recordings of Paris, but the tapes of Paradiso turned out to be better. Marvelous, because we had all been there and had seen Arena at their best! And yes, The Hanging Tree was included! Including Double Vision and Elea. Unfortunately a tape change had taken place during Crying For Help VII, so that one had to be dropped. We did however get to enjoy two ‘oldies’: Solomon and Jericho.
As a closer Clive had dug up another track from a shoebox. A so-called ‘ghost track’, which had once been used to help Paul get the vocals for The Visitor right. This meant a ‘nice-to-have’ on which Clive does the vocals. All of this together added up to almost one hour of music! I can assure you that we were very pleased. …

Besides all these ‘musicalities’ there was another thing to take care of: ‘the album cover’. Thanks to Jan-Jaap we got into contact with Mattias Norén from Sweden. After we had discussed the topic with him he spontaneously offered a remarkably beautiful design for The Visitor Revisited. For weeks there was heavy e-mail communication and the final result was amazing. In the end we even decided to include four extra pages in order to be able to use more designs. Clive was asked to write the band’s introduction and both old and new band pictures were used. 
All in all we ‘scraped together’ a remarkable CD. It has been produced with lots of pleasure and we hope lots of people will subscribe to The Cage now that we have another exclusive item for ‘members only’. So, just in case you don’t own a copy yet: it’s waiting for you! 

By: Marcel

Thanks to Clive, John, Rob, Mick, John, Paul, Ace and Mattias