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  1. There used to be a shop upstairs on the Oxford Road in Manchester near the uni that had zillions of bootleg cassettes, many I had not seen anywhere else. And Camden and Notting Hill Markets also had loads. I still have a few, though mostly you can find them on-line between YT, SugarMegs, and the more specialist music blogs out there. The only thing I can’t find is any recording of Supercharge from 1976 – which is strange, as they were everywhere back then.

    • I remember that from my Uni days – Pandemonium Records. I never actually bought any records there – the owner would sell you a cassette copy of any album you were looking for (I got my initial copy of the Buckingham Nicks album that way).

      I recall an article quite a few years ago about its closure and looking for a home for the massive collection of albums he had – not sure what became of them.

  2. That’s a great read. I used to do a little taping myself, until I realised that I was focused mostly on recording and not actually enjoying the gig. But searching for bootlegs was enormous fun, if rarely that rewarding. The dross I ended up with. Much easier now to find stuff online, but not as engaging.

  4. On a bit of a tangent, if anyone is registered with Dime and fancies searching for Horslips or Bert Jansch BBC off-airs, I know a man with a project or two who’d be most grateful 🙂

  5. Bootlegs … hmmm … the one, it’s only ‘one,’ good thing about the 21st Century is the ability to not only be able to access the past, but to be able to access the past “well” … see “Basement Tapes,” “Smile.”

    The bootleg has surely gone the same way as the horse-drawn carriage?

    Funny thing, the coveted Beatles/Stones/Jimi bootleg of the 1970s or 1980s is now presumably worthless, but original pressings of Beatles/Stones/Jimi, that used to go for £5-£10 …?
    With them, it’s a name-your-price job.

    • The bootleg has now been consigned to history, as who now wants to pay ridiculously-inflated prices for badly-pressed vinyl or cheap-quality cassettes of what were often poorly-recorded shows?
      Now we have Recordings Of Independent Origin, free to download and try if you have the hard drive space. Still a possibility that it was poorly-recorded in the first place and not worth a second listen (although portable recording technology has improved immensely since the ’70s) but at least it didn’t dig a great big hole in your wallet.

      Although actually, if vinyl has now returned for good to the musical mainstream, how long before some enterprising but dodgy entrepreneur sets up a new vinyl bootleg operation in an unfussy foreign location?
      Well-heeled collectorist-completists would no longer have to wait for Neil Young to officially release some Live Old and studio rejects in an expensive box (with a book that will fall apart half-way through reading it). They could get it a year before in a plain cover at a more sensible price, from under the counter at a local record shop.

  6. @fortuneight that was my problem too. And people talking piss you off enough when just listening, let alone when you are recording.

    I still buy the occasional bootleg. Some are really good quality i.e. Krystal Kat – booklets, posters pictures on the disc etc. They have to to get people to shell out.

    Commercial bootlegs may have declined but people recording, editing, doing post production work and posting onto fan sites has never been stronger, especially with the quality and portability of recording stuff now.

  7. The story about Mike Millard destroying his tapes is just an internet myth. The truth is they remained untouched in his bedroom after his death and until recently his mother didn’t allow anyone to access them. Probably wise as someone would surely have hawked them off to one of the many Japanese bootleggers, who would no doubt have given an arm and a leg for a collection of Millard master tapes. Bootlegs might be a lot less visible than they used to be but they haven’t gone away – they’re still flourishing in Japan in particular and specialist boot labels like Empress Valley will pay big money for the right tapes, some eye-watering amounts supposedly changed hands for the slew of Zeppelin soundboards that have emerged in recent years. Amazingly there are still people who will pay the not inconsiderable asking price for these, even though they all end up on torrent sites for free eventually.

    But back to the Millard tapes, they’re now in the hands of a friend of his who is overseeing them being transferred to digital and distributed on all the usual torrent sites.

  9. Back to this bloke’s nakamichi recorder. A mate raised a good point. Unlikely that he just ran an extension cord to an available power plug on the auditorium floor, so how would he have powered this for some fairly long shows?

    • They made some ‘portable’ reel-to-reel machines for broadcast use. 7″ reels, unit the size of a briefcase, used a half-sized car battery for power. Must have weighed a ton, and been a bit conspicuous.

      Today we think ‘portable’ means it fits in your pocket. 40 years ago, it meant one or two people could lift it onto a trolley.

      I once designed a ‘portable’ radio for the army. I could barely lift it, but it did still work after I reversed a Land Rover over it.

  10. Society needs a criminal element for it to function as a more just and honest society for all, but the criminal element must understand where it is supposed to operate. Once it gets above it’s station, well, that’s when War breaks out, and what of the end result of that. Somebody wins for a while.

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