I was working in a record store when New Order's Power, Corruption, and Lies was released. The first shipment flew out the door, then one by one people came back irate that the band's current monster hit was nowhere to be found. The presence of a near-soundalike track, the title of which escapes me at the moment, was little consolation. From that point on we affixed a little "Does not include the hit single Blue Monday" sticker to copies of the album, but people apparently did not notice the "does not" bit, and the problem continued. Another case of a misguided "value for money" approach backfiring and just pissing large numbers of people off.

the song pops up on Presence a couple of years after the album of that name. Same for Queen's Sheer Heart Attack.

I've always wondered (well, no, occasionally wondered) what happened there.

Sorry if misremembering but I think this was left off the debut Roxy Music album (until tacked on for later CD re-issues).

...which was the final song played by The Band at the Last Waltz concert (and which is shown in the film) isn't on the original live album. I found that odd, as it seems like a pretty good version.

Also Pet Sounds and Good Vibrations.

...& Rock & Roll on New Boots And Panties when originally released, though available 'on import' shortly after in gatefold sleeve

Queen's Seven Seas Of Rhye was initially previewed on Queen's 1st album, only to turn up in all it's glory on Queen II.

Wasn't it a marketing exercise, though. They wanted you to buy the album AND the single.

omitted from Oh Mercy which could have swung it from being ok to great. Or was that Dignity? Or both? Either way Bob has left a lot of amazing stuff off at the time. Neil Young too but I'm buggered if I can remember the details.
I'd imagine The Smiths, The Jam and The Kinks will figure in this thread too.

it don't make no sense to me.

...made a conscious decision not to include singles on their albums.

Hence, Going Underground not on Sound Affects, no Eton Rifles on Setting Sons, and at least a dozen other examples before and after these two.

But that was in the days when single releases actually meant something.

I'm biased, but I think it was an admirable thing to do.

— but that was in the era where it wasn't so much inexplicable as a strategy. Anyway, just look at the track listing to "Past Masters" and most of those songs qualify. "We Can Work It Out" and "Day Tripper" left off "Rubber Soul," "Paperback Writer" and "Rain" left off "Revolver," etc.

People always mention "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane" in regards to "Sgt. Pepper" but I wonder what it'd have been like if "It's All Too Much" had appeared instead of/along with "Within You and Without You"...

"Hey Jude" off the White Album... the list goes on and on.

the cracking blur single from just-before Modern Life Is Rubbish never ended up on the album*. it wasn't the smash hit they anticipated so their justification was pretty spot on; 'no one wanted it as a single, so no one's getting it now'. even the late 90s 'best of...' didn't have it on either. they've only just got over the fact that it wasn't a hit and have put it on the new CD 'MIDLIFE a beginner's guide to blur'.

*although you could always get PopScene on the japanese CD issue of Modern Life Is Rubbish.

was a b side i think i'm correct in saying. odd. who started that trend of calling a later song the name of the previous album?

The track Dear God was not on the original release of XTC's Skylarking - was originally a b-side, but when it was a hit in its own right it was put on the US release. The latest reissue in teh UK has it on....

OK Pet Sounds an excellent album anyway, but as a poor teenager, I would agonise about buying lps which legend told me were great, but didn't seem to have any tracks I recognised.

Houses of the Holy left off its namesake album 'cos it was a fairly weak track - yet it fits well on Physical Graffiti, the latter being full of earlier off-cuts.

I wonder whether AC/DC wrote the song 'If You Want Blood You've Got It' before or after they used the title for the live album.

is probably my favourite Genesis album, but why the hell they left "Inside & Out" off it is anybody's guess. It appeared later on the Spot the Pigeon EP but if it had been on the album instead of "Your Own Special Way" it would have been an even greater record. With CD, nowadays both would have been on I suppose.

(Similar question as to why "Evidence of Autumn" wasn't on "Duke", but I realise I'm navel gazing now so I'll just shuffle off).

... not sure that's a good example.

Wasn't Jumpin' Jack Flash a single just before Beggar's Banquet came out? No blooming sign of it on the album...

Primal Scream's very good Screamadelica was left off the album of the same name and later released as a 12" single.

Didn't the inclusion of the less than wonderful Wot Gorilla, instead of far superior Steve Hackett songs lead to his leaving. And it's then only a hope, skip and a jump until they started knocking out Invisible Touch, Misunderstanding and the key unrecorded Genesis classic 'Losing Our Musical Credibility (and trashing our heritage)'

Just my view on Wot Gorilla. The Hackett era post Gabriel albums are excellent.

Surely it should have been on Space Ritual?

I loved Martin Stephenson And The Daintees - Boat To Bolivia when it first came out, then they added the track Boat To Bolivia. It's a really clunky track and sounds completely out of synch with the rest of the album.

When Soul II Soul released their first album they did indeed include their No.1 hit, Back To Life.

BUT AS AN ACAPELLA VERSION !!!

Beyond bonkers.

couldn't have hurt Rum, Sodomy & the Lash, could it?
Mind you, it's on the CD reissue.

would have hindered the excellent EP containing Rainy Night.
Come on, singles is singles, EPs EPs and albums albums. They're different. Or should be.

Was that not originally on the Poguetry In Motion EP, released much later that year ?

Missing from both Up The Bracket and The Libertines.

The, effectively, Barat solo track, produced by Bernard Butler rather than Mick Jones, didn't fit the outlaw aesthetic. Still their best song by a mile.

Someone put the Smiths bullets in earlier - and I'm here to fire the gun.
"This Charming Man" - one of the greatest singles of the 80's was left off the UK release of the first Smiths LP.
"How Soon Is Now" wasn't on the original tracklist of "Meat Is Murder", though is on subsequent CD reissues.
The same goes for "Panic", "Sheila Take a Bow", "Ask" and more.

The Beatles had a long standing policy of not including single releases on albums (although, the American releases ignored that). So, no Penny Lane or Strawberries on Pepper.

Exceptions include Hard Day's Night and Help, but they were soundtrack albums. Apart from that, I think only the first two singes, Love Me Do and Please Please Me appeared on contemporary albums in the UK.

The two past Masters CDs gathered up all the non album stuff many years later.

Not on the original "It's A Shame About Ray" by The Lemonheads.

Jumping Jack Flash was also left off Beggar's Banquet and would have made this album even stronger.

Far less common occurence by the late 70s to miss off key tracks, yet neither Transmission nor Love Will Tear Us Apart appear on Joy Division's 2 lps.

A lot of the songs mentioned here were singles. A common policy was not to include them on albums. This is different from Bob Dylan discarding material like 'Seven Curses', 'She's Your Lover Now', 'Up to Me', 'Angelina',' BWM' or 'Mississippi'.

I can't think of any essential Beatles or Stones tracks that were discarded in the same way.

..for some reason left "the only one i know" off "some friendly"

are the only recent band who've followed the singles not on albums route - they released around 25 tracks as singles/EPs between 1996-2001, only one of which (The State I Am In) featured on an album (and that album was deleted at the time). There was great furore among their fans when they signed for Rough Trade and began to release album tracks as singles, although they've continued to use unreleased tracks as B sides - which is why "The Life Pursuit" album doesn't feature the song of that name but it does crop up as a B side.

A variation on the normal story - they omitted Q'ran from the CD reissues and remasters of 'My Life in The Bush Of Ghosts', and put on 'Very Very Hungry' which I think should always have been on the album anyway. It was a 'B' side. John Peel played it, one of those records everyone I knew at school seemed to have heard the next day.

Q'ran was omitted for very proper reasons of respect for a holy text that perhaps should have occurred to them first time round (though it is very beautiful) and I presume a desire avoid getting the record company offices inundated with angry post in changed times.