Posted 26 January 2012 - 01:16 PM
Back in the early 70s I owned a copy of Donnie Elbert's 'Without You' on a UK blank label. It differed from the various released versions on Deram and New Wave in that it had a nice vocal and guitar demo, by Donnie, of a song called 'Come See Me' on the flip (not the Pretty Things/J J Jackson/Sandy Edmonds 'Come See Me', BTW).
It was, and still is, the only copy that I've ever seen or known about, so I was particularly gutted when it was stolen from me in 1972. I knew that I would recognise my copy if I ever saw it again, as I had, er, 'embellished' the label with some unique decoration on the A side. Not that I ever thought I would see it, or any other copy, again...
Fast forward 15 years or so to a quiet Sunday morning in Record And Tape Exchange in Camden High Street. I'm in the basement, idly flicking through the 10p singles that stretch almost from one end of the room to the other when what should appear before me but my very own copy of this 45, looking much the same as it had done when last I saw it!
Needless to say I became reunited with it immediately - but to this day I still wonder where it lived between my two periods of ownership and how many hands it had passed through in the decade and a half that separated them...
Still in Camden, I once bought a copy of Wade Flemons' Vee-Jay album up there some years ago, with a sizeable length of masking tape stuck on the back cover. It took me a couple of years to pluck up the courage to try to remove it, fearing that I would either uncover a tear, or make one of my own. When I eventually pulled it off, wriiten underneath in ink was 'Release on BUY - Tony Hatch'.
In the early 60s Top Rank Records had a mid-price label with a BUY prefix, and Tony Hatch (the same one who wrote 'Downtown' 'Neighbours' and the 'Crossroads' theme, among others) was the label manager. That Wade Flemons album never did come out over here and it occurs to me, then and now, that I might have ended up with the intended dubbing source and that the release didn't happen because someone swiped the album back in the day...
...My opinion is not humble...