Sunday 23 February 2020

6 Night Stand

Last year for Record Store Day, Revelation released a new Youth Of Today 7". It wasn't 'new' in the sense of a new recording, more a new release of old recordings. It contains one studio song, 'One Night Stand', which was previously released on the 'Revelation 100' compilation from 2002. On the flipside is a cover of the Sex Pistols song 'Anarchy In The UK' recorded live in Vienna in 1989. There's also a weird spoken word track hidden in a 'secret' second groove on side A, with some babble from Ray Cappo.

Of course, everyone had an opinion on this record when it was announced. Some people were excited, some were outraged by the artwork and the vinyl colour, and others thought that this was a pointless release and a total cash grab. I kinda agreed with all of these views, but being a Rev collector, I wanted it anyway. I mean, things are what they are these days with record collecting. There's no point whining about whether this should have been released or not. You make a choice with your wallet. If you don't like it, don't buy it. Simple. My main concern was simply that I didn't want to have to pay inflated flipper prices, and neither did I want to wait 5 years to get the complete set. Fortunately it all worked out ok in the end...

There were two colours of this 7" available from record stores on RSD. The most common colour was 'magenta' (although I'd argue that this is closer to pink) which seemed pretty easy to find on the day. This was also the colour that seemed to annoy some people for being grossly inappropriate.

As RSD progressed, some people were also finding black vinyl copies, which at the time seemed a bit of a mystery as there hadn't been any announcement made about this colour. It felt that black could have been the most limited colour, as nothing was known about it, so I decided to grab one, even though I would usually leave black vinyl on the shelf.

Now, the story had gotten more interesting a couple of weeks before RSD, as Youth Of Today had played two shows in Brooklyn, and sold a small number of these 7"s each night. As pictures of them started to appear on instagram, it became clear that there were 4 different colours of vinyl made, each one having a different b-side label featuring a different member of the band. A few copies changed hands shortly after these shows for pretty significant amounts of money. People were starting to go crazy wanting to get a complete set. It felt that this was going to be a collection that would take a lot of time and money to complete. But fortunately, a few weeks later in June Revelation put up a few leftovers for sale in their online store, and I grabbed the 4 colours I needed to make a set for a very reasonable price. I'm really glad I did, because prices on discogs show that each of these individually have since sold for more than I paid for the whole set. My philosophy with new releases used to be 'buy now whilst you can or risk paying significantly more later', and whilst I don't buy as many new releases as I used to, clearly this tactic still makes sense.

Anyway, like I said, 4 members and 4 colours. So we get red vinyl for Ray Crappo:

Blue vinyl for John Porkle:

Purple vinyl for Where's Wally:

And yellow vinyl for Samantha Siegler:

Despite the wide ranging opinions on this record, I still think that from a record collector's perspective, this is a great 7". Different labels and vinyl colours for each band member is a great idea and really makes these worth collecting... although I still think it would be more fun if they kept it going and pressed more copies with a different label and vinyl colour for every person who had ever been in the band. That way there would be about another 12 copies to collect. Imagine that!

The pressing info states that there were 1,100 magenta and 880 black. The numbers for the other copies has not been released.

2 comments:

Nico said...

I actually bought a copy, since I loved the double groove thing. Love that kind of weird stuff.

Anonymous said...

The ripple effect...