Nonstop Top 20 comes to a stop!

It's been a while since I went crate digging, but old habits die hard, and this weekend while attending a village fete, I had a rummage through an LP box at a brick-a-brack stall. Up popped this very rare record:

It's none other than volume 11 of the Plexium label's 'Nonstop top 20'. The fact that a copy had evaded me for so long is testament to its scarcity. If only there were more cover version fans out there, it would be worth something! (I grabbed it for 50p.)

This was the last LP in the series, appearing in the spring of 1973, as the cover version industry started to go into decline. There are no fake audience effects on this LP (as there were on earlier instalments in the series) but the tracks are closed up, so there is no pause between them.

Something which I wondered about was where these tracks came from. On the face of it, they are Plexium original recordings, but it was often the case that the smaller labels would share tracks or lease them in, especially when sales were dwindling and budgets were tight. What struck me reading through the listing, was the coincidence of so many titles to the mfp album, Hot Hits 17, which was one I had when I was a kid.

The two LPs have the following songs in common:

• Cum On Feel The Noize
• Tie A Yellow Ribbon
• The Twelfth Of Never
• By The Devil (I Was Tempted)
• Killing Me Softly With His Song
• 20th Century Boy
• Feel The Need In Me
• Pinball Wizard
• Power To All Our Friends
• Never Never Never

Yep, 10 of the 12 tracks on the mfp album also appear on the Plexium set. So they have to be the same recordings, right? Wrong. They are different - much to my surprise.

Not to be beaten, I next turned to Mike Morton's current RCA album, Non Stop Hits volume 5, to see if that's where they originated.

There's plenty of cross-over here too. Plexium and RCA both selected the following:

• Cum On Feel The Noize
• Killing Me Softly With His Song
• 20th Century Boy
• Feel The Need In Me
• Looking Through The Eyes Of Love
• Pinball Wizard

That's six songs in total - half the RCA LP, in other words. And once again, they are different.

Incidentally, I noted above how 10 of the 12 mfp titles were on the Plexium LP. The two that weren't - Gonna Make You An Offer You Can't Refuse and Doctor My Eyes - are also on the RCA album!

I must confess, it's a real mystery to me why the cover version albums so often duplicated so much material. Of all the singles in the charts, they repeatedly selected the same narrow set of hits, as illustrated again here.

I did also check the current Top of the Pops album - more cross-overs abound, but yet different recordings once again.

The shared titles between Plexium and Top of the Pops are:

• Cum On Feel The Noize
• Tweedle Dee
• Tie A Yellow Ribbon
• The Twelfth Of Never
• 20th Century Boy
• Get Down 
• Love Train 
• Power To All Our Friends

So, you can see all four albums contain their own versions of several identical tracks. Not exactly giving listeners a USP, but I suppose popular hits like Cum On Feel The Noize and 20th Century Boy were just impossible to skip.

As for the following, you can check them yourself to see if any of the recordings match up! I haven't done so - there aren't enough hours in the day...

So, there it is. The end of the line for Nonstop Top 20, with its sad-looking cover, which doesn't even carry a picture. And so far as I know, that was the end of the Plexium label too.

Nonstop Top 20 volume 8 - in Sweden

Holger Schoeler has sent us some images of a great edition of Nonstop Top 20 from Sweden. This is one of a set which appeared there, with racing cars on the covers. We've featured them before (see here) but until now, volume 8 has been a gap in our discography.

The track listing exactly matches the UK album, and here are the scans:

The cover art is fantsastic, and unusual for cover version LPs. Below is the UK edition, with its more familiar - although just as quirky - sleeve:

Thanks to Holger for the images.

Another Swedish Nonstop Top 20!

Just recently we posted some info on the Swedish editions of the Nonstop Top 20 albums (see here). Fortunately, Holger Schoeler was able to send us some great scans of volume 10 in the Swedish discography - an album we'd not seen before.

Here they are:

Another great cover, there. It follows the usual Swedish style of featuring photos of cars, but whereas all the others we know of depict racing cars, this one shows a stationary vehicle, with (more familiar) female model included.

The record itself matches the UK edition exactly, so far as we can tell. This fills in a gap in the known sequence - we now have positive knowledge of six successive volumes issued by Emidisc in Sweden - here they all are, next to their UK equivalents. (Only volume 8, which definitely exists, lacks a photo. Please contact us if you have one!).

Volume 5

Volume 6

 Volume 7

Volume 8 

Volume 9

 Volume 10

 

Nonstop Top 20 - Swedish style!

Last summer we were pleased to receive some scans and info from collector, Holger Schoeler, about some unusual Swedish editions of Nonstop Top 20 - the early 1970s covers series from Mike Morton. The albums contained shortened versions of the typical soundalike covers, linked together with audience applause to make for a 'nonstop' soundtrack.

Here's a reminder of the UK editions of volumes 6 and 7:

Now, here's what Holger sent us - editions of these two LPs, which we'd never seen before:

 

 

What fantastic sleeves! These are quite unlike the average UK editions of these, or any other budget covers series, featuring dynamic action shots from motor racing events. In fact we also have evidence of couple more of these - volumes 5 and 9 (although our images leave something to be desired):

A couple of others we have seen listed but don't have pictures - so it would appear that Sweden saw at least six of the 11-album set issued there, and in likelihood, several more stretching through most - if not all - of the series.

The label here is Emidisc (an imprint of EMI), with due credit to Plexium on labels and sleeve. Here are some more images of volume 6, which give a good idea of the anatomy of these releases:

Needless to say, we were bowled over by these! What great editions they are, and hats off to Emidisc and whoever decided on the fantastic sleeve art. Thanks to Holger for the images...

Nonstop Top 20 - rare late edition

Well, I thought I had the "Nonstop Top 20" series nailed - eight LPs running from early 1971 to mid-1972. Then this showed up - volume 9!

Like volumes 7 and 8, this one has a cover featuring the Shetland 570 Cabin Cruiser. But unlike the earlier albums in the series, there is no audience applause dubbed on between the songs, which are almost touching, with just the briefest of gaps between them.

There's a downside to this though - there is editing in evidence, shortening the recordings so that 20 can be squeezed onto one album, and the edits are sometimes less than subtle. "Starman", for example, has lost verse 1, and commences with the chorus, complete with a horrible bump as the tape edit clunks in. Normally this would have been concealed beneath the fake cheers, but not here.

So, we now know volume 9 exists. This surely has to be the last one, right? Or, is there a volume 10 out there waiting to be discovered?...