Friday 20 April 2012

SIMON FINN: a mystery

On March 27th an eBay seller named echo*beach sold a copy of Simon Finn's Pass The Distance, complete with its insert, for £183 to a member named rememberthethetis. The insert, however, had what the seller described as 'a diagonal cut on the top left' and 'what appear to be signatures across the three band members'. Here's his picture:


Barely a week later, another eBay seller named xxxrecords sold a copy of Simon Finn's Pass The Distance, complete with its insert, for £399. Bizarrely, this time round the insert had the same signatures as the other copy, but the lower right-hand corner was also missing. Here's his picture:


The description contained no reference to the insert having writing on it or a corner chopped off. Now, xxxrecords is renowned for his meticulous interest in being precise in his listings, and for carrying out painstaking research into his items, so he clearly believed this insert with his copy to be complete and untampered with. Therefore this question arises: are there three different variants of the Simon Finn insert? One that is square with no signatures, one that has signatures but the top left corner missing, and one with signatures and both the top left and bottom right corners missing?

By the way, here's the insert with no corners missing:


UPDATE: The eBay username rememberthethetis was torpedoed by its owner very shortly after this post appeared. He has now switched to another username.  

THE WCPAEB: "It's gone all pop art"

As is well-attested, in September 1965 the Oklahoma-raised and LA-based playboy Bob Markley hosted an end-of-tour party for the Yardbirds, at which he noticed that the kids providing music were getting more female attention than him. He therefore offered to buy them new equipment if they let him join them. Thus was born The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band. I was amazed to stumble upon this account, phoned in to Record Mirror from the bash itself.

Thursday 19 April 2012

JIMI HENDRIX: "I want to turn people on"

To promote his forthcoming European tour, Jimi Hendrix gave his last ever interviews to well-known journalists such as Keith Altham, Rob Partridge and Norman Jopling at London's Cumberland Hotel on September 11th 1970. Less than a week later, Jimi was dead. Jopling's piece appeared in Music Now on September 12th. I'd never seen it before, so thought I'd post it here.

Wednesday 4 April 2012

Mick Jagger: 'as he really is'

I doubt Mick was too thrilled when his spotty adolescent brother penned this for NME in June 1965:

Tuesday 3 April 2012

Beatles For Sale: 'a usually reliable source'

According to Record Mirror of October 10th 1964, the cover of Beatles For Sale was originally going to show the boys lighting their ever-present 'ciggies' under the Arc de Triomphe...