The Pride and the Pain

While doing a little research for this blog, I ran across this curiosity. It would appear that Gold Standard might have released another bootleg.

From Roxy Art

From Roxy Art

Gold Standard had released one Roxy Music CD, the double-disc collection of BBC sessions called First Kiss, but it looks like they also put out this German For Your Pleasure show. I'd have thought something this would be an audience tape, and not of interest to a professional label, but maybe it is a soundboard...?

This album is not listed in the fascinating "Illegal Roxy Music Discography" that forms the booklet of Great Dane's Song for Europe bootleg CD, so it must have been released after that. On the other hand, neither is it listed at Roxyrama's Bootleg CD discography, which does list Gold Standard's First Kiss. So either this was distributed very poorly and managed to escape Roxyrama's considerable attention, or... perhaps it's a (very darn good) fan sleeve which pretends to be from Gold Standard?

(Whichever, any album which affords such a great close-up shot of Andy Mackay's "Dalek pants" is an album that should be celebrated.)

The Mysterious Affair of Rex Balfour

This is among Mr. Monopoly's favorite sleeves, in which he attempted to follow the methods of the classic bootleg designer William Stout and use somebody else's commercial design to "sell" a bootleg.

From Roxy Art

From Roxy Art

"Rex Balfour" was the pseudonym of Bry's friend Simon Puxley, who penned a gushing biography of the singer to sell to teenage girls. The design of this bootleg, a pretty lousy audience tape from the FYP tour, follows the work of Cathie Bleck on a series of British mystery novels published by HarperCollins in the late '90s. Apart from straight-out stealing elements of the Harper books, the layout and text are aping those. Another hat-tip to Stout comes from the names of the newspapers. Throwing some chuckling, schoolboy comedy was one of his trademarks.

This CD was only distributed among a few friends, never treed or weeded.