Led Zeppelin’s ‘Immigrant Song’ 7″ carried the words “Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law”, the four sides of The Clash’s London’s Calling incited fans to “tear,” “down,” “the,” “walls”, while Dead Kennedy’s Give Me Convenience Or Give Me Death proclaimed “THE SKULL IS THE SMILING FACE OF THE 80s” on one side and “DOLPHINS MAKE BETTER ANARCHISTS THAN PEOPLE DO”.
#Lps my secret identity code#
While it’s difficult to trace the exact provenance of unsigned cuts, by the ’70s and ’80s these hidden inscriptions were also firmly in the hands of the artists themselves, seen as a clever way to code a little bit of provocative meta-data into the disc. On Primal Scream’s 1990 EP Loaded, Porky cut the words “FREE SLY STONE!” onto one side and “FREE JAMES BROWN!” onto the other. Occasionally he’d respond to lyrics on the record with witty asides, while on others, like Elvis Costello’s 1978 album, This Year’s Model, he’d kick-start frenzied competitions by inscribing telephone numbers that fans could call to win prizes. Its chief architect is the legendary mastering engineer George Peckham, who signed off many of the hundreds of thousands of records he cut from the ’60s onwards with his nickname “Porky”, or “A Porky Prime Cut”. Far from an exact science, matrix numbers will often be taken into consideration by collectors, either as proof of first pressings or sought-after alternate takes and re-cuts.Īll this code though is rather formal in contrast to the hidden messages which have since jostled for space alongside their more conventional brethren in the runout groove. Extra digits often refer to the cut or take of a particular record, while some plants or cutting engineers will assign their own signatures to the space. Practically since day one, the inside track or runout groove of a vinyl record or 78rpm disc has been the domain of the matrix number, an alphanumerical code either stamped or handwritten into the wax to help pressing plants assign the correct stamper and label to each side of the record.
On The Long Goodbye, the band’s 5xLP swan song recorded live at Madison Square Gardens, the messages scrawled piecemeal across the combined 10 sides reads, “NEW YORK I LOVE YOU BUT YOU’RE BRINGING ME DOWN.”īut the history of the runout groove etching doesn’t begin and end with James Murphy’s subconscious. It’s also not the first time LCD Soundsystem have gone there, with editions of 2010’s This Is Happening etched with pithy phrases like “amateur dance music,” “beauty is a rare thing,” “get weird,” and the heartfelt “in loving memory of jerry fuchs” – a tribute to the band’s live drummer who died a year earlier. Sure it’s annoyingly oblique, but in the grand tradition of scratching secret missives, anti-establishment incitements or surreal aphorisms into the run-out grooves of records, it’s positively vanilla. “ROBBIE WILLIAMS IS SHIT”… and other profound notes from the runout groove.Ĭould James Murphy be losing his edge? Not one to miss an opportunity for a sardonic aside, the LCD Soundsystem mastermind had the words “SEE U IN 5 YEARS” cut into the D-side of new album American Dream.
0 kommentar(er)
