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AFTER LAST week’s epic of guitars and surf, it’s back to the more familiar format again with room for a batch of straightforward queries and more concise answers.
First, Kevin Graham of Letchworth, Herts, asks which of Elvis Costello’s singles have appeared in picture sleeves, as he has a few in plain covers and wants to know whether these were later pressings.
The simple answer to this is that (as far as I can gather) EVERY Costello single released in the UK had a pic sleeve at the point of its release. The problem is that by and large these sleeves have been limited editions, so that if you bought a later pressing of any single, you’re more likely to have found it in an ordinary bag.
This particularly applies to the four Stiff singles: ‘Less Than Zero’, ‘Alison’, ‘Red Shoes’ and ‘Watching The Detectives’, all of which are now deleted anyway, but which were sold in plain sleeves for some time after the original ones had been used up and which then appeared again in the Stiff box sets. The total number of pic-sleeved Stiffs is actually quite a small percentage of the total number of records sold, which in turn has made them collector’s items and therefore a pricey proposition for anybody out to particularly collect pic-sleeved versions.
Further complications could arise over foreign pressings too; I’ve just been reminded whilst sifting through some Costello singles prior to typing this that I have a copy of ‘Watching The Detectives’, for instance, which is a German pressing. This was around in a pic sleeve long after the UK pressing had lost its own; in fact, I don’t think they were even the SAME pic sleeve, which complicates things yet again.
The moral, then, is that all Costello’s singles (excluding freebies given away in his albums - don’t let’s get side-tracked into THAT one) had pic covers on their day of release, which was obviously the prime time to buy them. Some of yours, regrettably, old son, must be later pressings.
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