And the colours keep on coming...

Our recent discoveries that editions of both Pye Chartbusters and 12 Tops exist on coloured vinyl - which can only be seen when held up to the light - prompted blog reader, Clive Hetherington, to contact us with further info. What Clive had spotted, but we had not, is that several of the Avenue albums and EPs are of the same nature.

We duly dug out our vinyl and did some examination, discovering that in the collection of your blog-master, there are no fewer than eight Avenue albums and five EPs which all appear to be on deep cherry red vinyl. Here are a few examples, held up to the sun by my budget LP assistant, 6-year-old Archie:

The bottom one is of course a 7-inch EP.

Putting together a listing isn't easy. Although I have all the albums in question, some of mine are red, and some black (eg my copy of AVE 088 is red, the next, AVE 089, isn't, and then the next, AVE 092 is). Added to that are a few gaps in my EP collection which make it impossible to check them all.

For the record though, the following albums I can confirm red pressings for (Avenue didn't give them volume numbers, so we're stuck with the cat numbers for a point of reference): AVE 082; AVE 088; AVE 092; AVE 097; AVE 0102; AVE 0104; AVE 0109; AVE 0129.

These albums span the period mid-1971 to late-1972. All those before and after are conventional black pressings.

Lists are dull - here are some cover scans of the coloured editions in my set:

And so to the EPs...

The ones I have on red vinyl are: NUE 157; NUE 159; NUE 165 - and after the EPs were switched to the Forest label - FVA 2021 and FVA 2024. No surprise that these cover the same time period as the albums. I have checked many of the intervening cat numbers too, only to discover ordinary black vinyl.

Again, here are the sleeves for added interest:

Thanks to Clive for the heads-up.

I won't be at all surprised if and when more such examples are found. The most amazing thing to me is that this whole affair has slipped under the radar for so long!