I've just started reading The Record Players, the latest book from Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton. It's a cracking good read. In the interview with northern soul DJ Ian Levine, he tells a great story about one of his record buying trips to Miami. He heard a song on a radio station while he was there by the Carstairs, and he tracked down the radio station to find it, as no one had heard of this record. They told him it had been sent in as a demo from the record company, who had then lost their distributor, so the record had never been released.
When he got back to the UK, a record dealer he knew got in a shipment of 100,000 demo records from radio stations and Levine eventually found three copies of the Carstairs record in there. Levine says he first heard the record in 1973, and found those copies in 1974.
I looked the song up on Youtube, and found a clip Levine had posted, with this story... "Back in the day,when there was no internet, we could never locate the group, despite many attempts. In 1998, for the unique one-off Blackpool Mecca reunion, I was just determined to find them, and after four months of searching, I did.
"Twenty five years after they thought their single had never even been released, they were on stage at Blackpool Mecca, singing it on the Saturday night in front of over a thousand people, in the Highland Room which was only supposed to hold seven hundred. They were moved to tears, especially Cleveland Horne, and founder member Ervin Langley.
"Tragically, within two years, those two of them had passed away. But at least they got to stand just once in the limelight. It could never ever happen again, it was a one time moment in history, and because of the iconic nature of the record, this footage is priceless beyond belief."
original...
BONUS: Listen to The Carstairs - It Really Hurts Me Girl - Tom Moulton mix (1979), over at Boogie Banger blog.
No comments:
Post a Comment