New Age Records '77 Pressings' Explained

Just thought I'd knock together a quick post to explain why New Age Records seem to be cranking out these so-called "77 Pressings" of their latest batch of reissues, since I am sure that most of you won't know.

The story starts in 1995. Unbroken's final 7" was released, and the cover took a slightly humorous approach by showing a picture of the Sex Pistols & claiming this was "Unbroken Circa '77":

Then the back cover showed a picture of Unbroken with the caption "Unbroken Circa '95":

To this day I'm not entirely sure why they put a photo of the Sex Pistols on the front cover, but one effect that this had was to cause confusion over the title of the record. Some people refer to it as the 'Crushed On You' 7", others call it 'Absentee Debate / Crushed On You' whilst some seem to think that it is actually called 'Circa '77'. (Interestingly, the current New Age Records site refers to this 7" as 'Crushed On You')

Well, this 7" came on limited purple vinyl, or standard black vinyl. I don't know how many of each were made. But there was also a rarer version made which was mainly for friends and a few mailorder customers, which was a purple vinyl record with different labels (the same labels as featured on the first New Age release - the Walk Proud 7") and which came in a limited sleeve. There were 77 copies of this thing. Here are some photos:

As you can see, making 77 copies made sense because it was a reference to the front cover of the regular sleeve, with the reference to '77.

So now we find ourselves in 2010 and New Age have repressed three of their older releases on colour vinyl & continued the theme of a limited edition of 77 copies using the Walk Proud labels. Unlike the Unbroken record in 1995, the 77 reference doesn't really make sense in the same way, but at least you can now appreciate that it does make some kind of sense & its not some random number.

I hope you find this information useful.