Top of the Poppers ... featuring Alan Caddy ?!?

Surely some mistake? Well, read on...

Over in New Zealand, Top of the Pops recordings were originally issued on a local version of the Hallmark label. Then, in the mid-1970s, Music World took over - the label having been created by budget record entrepreneur, Hoghton Hughes.

Before and after the switch, New Zealand tended not to simply re-issue the UK albums, but instead create their own collections, many of which plugged specific artists in the titles - so, for example, we find albums with novel names such as, 15 Hits of Slade, T Rex, Sweet, 20 Hits of Abba and Other Great Groups, and 20 Hits of the Wombles and Other Pops for Children.

All good fun, of course, and fitting in with these was the 1973 LP, The Top of the Poppers Present Elvis Gold: 16 of The King's Greatest Hits. Here's the cover:

This album was issued by Hallmark New Zealand, before Music World became involved. What's odd, is that even by the close of 1973, The Top of the Poppers only had 13 cover versions of Elvis hits to compile. Yet the album promises 16 titles - so how did they do that?

The answer may surprise you - the album contains only three Top of the Pops recordings ("Polk Salad Annie"; "I'm Leavin'" and "Burning Love"). The rest of the tracks? One was borrowed from Hallmark's Revived 45s album (and was previously issued as a 45 on the Embassy label) - namely, "Surrender" - but the other 12 consist of the whole of this LP:

Yes, indeed. The bulk of the New Zealand album purporting to be by the Top of the Poppers actually had nothing to do with them! For those who don't know, Ross McManus was a modestly successful singer better known today for the fact that he was Elvis Costello's father. (This album was once re-issued on CD as Elvis's Dad Sings Elvis!)

(Bear with us, we're getting to the Alan Caddy bit...)

Come 1975, the Music World label had superseded Hallmark New Zealand, so far as Top of the Pops was concerned, and among the many interesting records which were issued, was this one - The Top of the Poppers Present Elvis' 20 Golden Hits.

Now, the proprietors of this blog, and the Top of the Pops fan website, have known about the LP for several years. But without full scans of the cover and labels, we did not know the track listing - until now. Buying Top of the Pops albums from such far-flung places is an expensive hobby, so when a copy turned up on Ebay from a UK seller, at a bargain price, we felt we should snap it up. What we discovered came as a surprise...

This LP contains all the material on the earlier New Zealand record, but contains four additional tracks: "Promised Land"; "Fool"; "You Don't Have To Say You Love Me" and "Rags To Riches". All of these songs were to be found on earlier Top of the Pops albums, so one might suppose they were the source.

Well in fact, that was true for three of them - "Promised Land"; "Fool" and "Rags To Riches". But when it comes to "You Don't Have To Say You Love Me", the Music World label eschewed the Poppers' recording from volume 15, and substituted a completely different soundalike cover version. Some intrepid detective work (ie, we listened to it) revealed this is none other than the recording by Alan Caddy, which was originally released in 1971 on the following Avenue label LP:

So what's the deal? We have to confess, we have no idea. Firstly, there's no obvious reason why the bona-fide Top of the Pops version would be ignored; and secondly, how did Music World manage to get the master tape of Alan Caddy's recording? And could the switch somehow have been a mistake? It's hard to see how!

Whatever the story, this is a possibly unique example of an Alan Caddy track being issued under the name The Top of the Poppers!

We might also mention that research into overseas releases is not always easy, and it's often the case that one discovery leads to more. In this instance, we were able to identify three other Top of the Poppers releases from the listing on the back:

 Hopefully, one day, copies of these will also surface.  Maybe they too hold surprises for us...

Take Aim – here come 100 number 1s of the 60s!

The Aim label isn’t exactly a household name, but it appears on our cover version radar as an imprint of the Artistry stable, who issued their monthly “Smash Tracks” series on cassette, from 1978 onwards (see here). Aim appears to have been introduced around 1980 and helped re-launch Artistry’s regular series under the tweaked name, “Today’s Smash Hits”.

Besides these regular tape-only albums, there were a number of related off-shoot cassettes. A full discography seems never to have been published, but on my travels I had previously discovered a cassette called “20 Fantastic Number 1 Hits from the 60s” – volume 5, no less – so there must have been others. Not a regular series of course, but of much interest anyway.

And then these appeared on Ebay:

 Wow – all five of the set in one go. Of course I had to have it. They were issued in a printed slip-case – fantastically presented, it has to be said. Here is the whole set together:

The final image above is of the bottom of the box, and you can see Artistry’s brand label still there, as originally sold.

The track listing is fascinating. I won’t type out all 100 tracks here, but you can see what’s included from the back of the box:

We know that the standard UK cover versions started in the early 1960s. However the tapes, “1960-1961” and “1962-1963” are early even for the first EPs, and we struggle to identify the origins of these recordings.

It gets easier for “1964-1965” as practically all were on the old “Top Six” EPs. For example, here’s where “A Hard Days Night” first surfaced:

“1966-1967" seems split between “Top Six” and the first Avenue EPs, which started up in 1967, so we can see where these come from too. Here’s where you first heard “Silence Is Golden”:

The final cassette in the box, “1968-1969” contains tracks almost entirely from the Avenue LPs, as well as the Marble Arch “Chart Buster” albums which often shared the same material. Check out the old Avenue albums for these tracks, for example, “Sugar Sugar”, "I'll Never Fall in Love Again" and "Love At First Sight", on the LP below:

Here are some images of that fifth cassette, which links in directly to the covers LPs we know and love:

This box set collection was the handiwork of Colin Richardson, and was sold by mail order. (It was also promoted on British radio.) We think it’s a fantastic item, and one which we are proud to have in our collection.

And just for the record, here are a few more of the Aim cassettes – please let us know if you have any others we can add to our database...

++++++++++++++++   UPDATE - MARCH 2017  ++++++++++++++++++

Since posting the above, we've spotted a variant on Ebay. See how the cassette shell is black, with print directly onto the plastic:

New CD issues from Artistry

Exciting news has come through once again from the guys at Artistry, with the release of more CDs compiling from the old cover version albums - "International Edition Tops In Pops"; "Tops In Pops of the 60s Vol 3" and a collection of "Instrumental Chartbusters".

There are some fantastic track selections on these latest discs, one in particular catching my eye, as we did a post on it recently - "Tops in Pops of the 60s Vol 3" contains the coveted version of "Love Me Do" by the Sparrows, which was the first cover version of a Lennon-McCartney song anywhere in the world! This, I believe if the first and only time it has been released on CD - so a little bit of music history there.

The rest of the tracks raid the Avenue vaults for vocals by Martin Jay, Danny Street, Peter Lee Stirling, David Byron and others - many of them familiar from the LPs released back in the day. Some are much older and a tad rarer - "Two Silhouettes" for example, was an Embassy label B-side for Paul Rich back in 1963.

Fans of Elvis Costello will also note the presence of Ross McManus on one of these albums - he's Elvis's dad of course! (And need we mention a certain Elton John?)

Below are some track details from the CD inserts. These should be available any time now, on EBay - head over and track them down. As ever, full credit to Colin Richardson and the Artistry team for preserving these fab recordings.

Those coloured vinyl EPs from Avenue - new images

A week ago we featured some info on coloured vinyl Forest and Avenue EPs from Holger Schoeler (see here). Holger has kindly sent us some scans - quite striking they are, too.

So without further comment, here they are:

6 Top Hits (EVA 2001):

6 Top Hits (EVA 2013):

Tribute to Beatlemania:

The World Top Hits - Six:

Avenue of America - new finds

A couple of recent discoveries here, from Avenue of America - not a US imprint of Britain's Avenue organisation, but a Canadian one. First up, we have an edition of a fairly obscure LP which came out in February (give or take) of 1970. First the front cover of the UK press:

And so to the Canadian equivalent - apparently a straight duplicate of the album but with subtle changes to the cover art (couldn't afford any yellow ink??):

The catalogue number remains unchanged as compared to the UK pressing. The fact that it is a duplicate in all but cover details stands it in contrast to the album below, a similar-looking package from Avenue of America, which has the sleeve art from the UK's AVE 034 but the contents of the UK's AVE 044!

The second new find was this 8-track cartridge:

"Avenue of America Presents 50 Top Hits of 72". Hmmm... not a title known from the UK discography, need we say. The contents are of interest - it's an Avenue comp of course, with several selections from the ongoing cover version series. There is, in fact, a Canadian vinyl equivalent - an extravagant triple album, to which this cartridge matches disc 1. (So presumably, there are two more such cartridges 'out there').

The closest Britain came to matching this release was the comp below, a comparatively meagre 20-track compilation issued on Avenue's side-label, Stereo Plus 3:

For more about Avenue's overseas editions, see here.