Bizzare Music Rant/Article

idlesupernova

Got this on the MOJO board, long but I 'enjoyed' it!

This was posted only 2 days ago and thousands of musicians/fans/collectors want to know the truth.

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“The music industry is a funny ****ing business, but behind the bull****, bitchslaps and free cocaine there was a fortune to be made so all i did was what i do best” ….

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I have sold over 20 million records world wide yet NME, MOJO , and MTV have never met me .
I have been in the top ten over 100 times, yet nobody knows my name.
Come to think of it these days i have to remind myself who i am, some joker once introduced me at a party in DC as the ‘Howard Marks’ of the record industry, ****ing insult if you ask me, Howard marks got caught, went to prison , and spent the rest of his life telling people how not to ****ing do things .

The story i am about to tell you is true, but to hide my identity i have changed a few minor details.
It took me a long time to think about how to write this without getting caught so trust me when i say by the time these words get posted around the world i will be long gone.
The way i see things now is i have all the money i could dream of thanks to music, so i thought why not give a little back by letting you all in on the biggest heist in music history.


This story will be a sledge hammer to the bollocks of music industry, Elvis himself will turn in his grave, the major labels will put a reward on my head, and die hard fans of music will want my nuts on a plate.
I was the first to do it, but i doubt i will be the last, the secret to my success was i kept my crew sweet and always kept my mouth shut, and for me those two rules kept me on top for fifteen years.
So i hope your sitting comfatably co’s this one will go platinum.

Totnes Devon 1989
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pissed out of our brains and high on some of the strongest ganja know to man i staggered home with a Swedish girl i pulled at ‘Clairs’ nightspot in Torquay i was eighteen years old.

Totnes is a strange ****ing place, full of hippies and tree huggers but a great place to get layed.
It was 2am in the morning and the heavens opened on us as we walked home.
Now until that night i was a nobody going nowhere, the only thing i had going for me was the gift of the gab and a way with women, i was ****ing skint and made what money i could working as a lifeguard in Newquay and selling drugs to foreign students.
I guess you could say what happened to me next proved i had an angel on my shoulder, the rain finaly stopped and we walked towards town, only to find a brand new fender strat propped up against a lamp post, it was 2oclock in the ****ing morning people , not a soul on the street , just me , a blond bird with pigtails who spoke **** all english and a black and white fender strat, so the way i saw things was with nobody to claim the ****ing thing i decided to donate it to the charity of little old me..

The Worm
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It took me no longer than the night passing by to work out what i was going to do with the guitar, it was worth a lot of money and cash was king on my street so i took it to ‘worm ’ in Torquay to exchange it for ecstasy to sell to the masses.

Worm was an old school acid house dj and good friends to my flat mate , ****ed up on acid all the time and knocking out dance music from dusk till dawn this guy was a picture to spend time with and talk about random bollocks whilst getting stoned.
Rumour has it worms old man was one of the guys who started up Glastenbury festival back in his hay-day with a fella called Michael Eavies , Michael went on to make millions running one of the biggest festivals on the planet but worms old man ended taking a bad trip and jumped off the multistory car park in Paignton Devon , sad but true .

Anyway if you had anything worth a toss to do with music in Torbay and needed to sell it fast then worm was just the man to take it to.
I told him the story about the guitar and it went down like a lead balloon , he came to the conclusion that i nicked it but to be honest i couldn’t give too ****s what he thought, he gave me fifty ecstasy tablets for it , back them e’s were twenty quid a time , so with a grand in my back pocket i felt like ‘cock of the wall’

when i look back now i wonder how my life would have turned out if i did’nt go to that house to get rid of the guitar, it was hear i worked out the future of music and i made more ****ing money in 15 years than the head of the bank of england.

The futures bright
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worm was a genius when it came to music and made a living as a top dance DJ, where ever there was an major rave or house party his name was at the top of the bill,
the guy was a legend in his own right, and the underground club scene rocked for years listening to his ideas of how dance music should be , he got a small record deal with a dance label in 1985 and knocked out weird and wonderful acid house promos for DJ’s across Britain.
His record collection was ****ing colosal, 4 bedroom house full of 12 and 7 inch vinyls, he was a wall to wall music library, from Bowie to Nina Simone , Elvis to Bob Dylan , worm had a record for everyone.
Truth is i had nowhere to go for a few hours so i decided to chill and get stoned with the man.

I couldn’t help but flick though some of worms vinyl, you never know what you were gonna find, being a fan of ‘Elvis’ i stumbeld across a 7 inch single on the ‘sun label’ , ‘baby lets play house’ never heard of this one worm i told him, and straight away he snatched it out of my hands telling me i never will either?
This is where it started for me, worm told me how much the vinyl was worth, it was unplayed, mint , and worth £80 to a collector , not a fortune but a ****ing lot of money for a piece of plastic in a paper bag , bells ****ing rang in my head but i didn’t share my ideas with worm.

Knowing what i new already about the compact disk revolution about to hit the high street, i asked worm if he thought these rare records would still be worth what they were in say ten years.
Worms answer was good enough for me, 'there will always be a market for iconic vinyl, i’ll collect it till i die’
so that’s where i started, it was an idea so simple, yet stuck in the past which is why i guess no body ever questioned me, just two lads going nowhere, getting stoned with an idea which would shake the music world in years to come.
The CD revolution was about to happen, who gives a **** about vinyl?

The Masterplan
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now if you have red this far you and i both know buying and selling the odd rare record ain’t gonna buy the mrs tiffany rings and send the kids disney land.
My idea was far greater than i had planned, and the stupid thing was nobody cared because of technology.
While joe public we’re out spending fifteen quid on the latest compact disks i decided to buy something else with my money.


In the early 90’s the cd revolution began just like worm said it would, slowly but surly vinyl was a thing of the past and so was the machenery that made it…..so i guess now you have put two and two together.

All the money i ever made over the years selling drugs, bootleg ciggerettes, and knocked of alcohol became a future investement , i bought 7” vinyl by the **** load on the cheap , you name it i had it , oasis , beatles , elvis , joy division , i bought the ****ing lot , not to sell , but to mass produce for the future. In time i established contacts in europe who would later sell me my very own vinyl pressing equipment for the bargain price of £21000 cash.
Today this old equipment is worth it’s weight in gold, but not half as much as some of the rare and deleted vinyls i pressed over the years.


The power of Ebay
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by the time the Millenium came round Ebay was colosul and i was the ‘king of vinyl’ , i was up and running pressing bootleg vinyls just like the real thing in an abandoned council storage unit in newcastle.
The same ‘Elvis’ 7 inch worm wouldn’t let me touch i pressed ten fold, infact i did 4000 copies and made over £28,000 , with my drug connections and the gift of the gab i had over 90 people working for me around the world selling my vinyl on Ebay.
7 inch vinyls became so sort after between 2000 and 2007 that sometimes i did’nt have the manpower or machinery to keep on top of orders, it was then i asked my self a question ?

I thought why not just send off other peoples music to foreign record companies, have them print thousands of vinyls under made up band names?
In a nut shell i would take the ‘Upholseters’ single for example , re-record it , send it away under a different band name like ‘billy bandit and the bollocks’ and the record companies would send them back to me a month later for me to change the name back to the ‘upholsterers’ , change the art work etc , and there you have it , vinyls that were costing me pence to make would now fetch ****ing hundred on ebay and nobody ever questioned it.
A record company in america actually pressed me 3000 copies of “all along the watch tower by Jimi Hendrix” and sent them to me to print the art work within a fortnight.
I did have an ace up my sleave though , my mrs if need be could mass produce money if she wanted to, what she don’t know about the printing business ain’t worth knowing, and within five years of trading she could copy any record sleave in the world to a perfect match.
It was a licence to print money, and ****ing money we made, **** loads of it
before the end of 2002 shops were selling my vinyl, online record shops were buying off me direct because i was cheaper than the majors selling there own product.

I think i red somewhere that Noel Galagher made 4 million quid with ‘Wonderwall’, great song noel, i pressed 40,000 copies of that song and made over quarter of a million , bought a pad in Ibiza with the money, and three gibson custom shop guitars to learn how to play the ****ing song..

The biggest earners were northern soul classics, i kept the pressings low, 250 copies selling for a grand a piece.
But the ones i had the most fun doing were early 90’s classics up to the millenium i guess it was because this was my time, music i would never forget because i really was a part of it.
You name it i pressed it, if a band in my mind was iconic, and the singles were selling like hot cakes in record shops i would simply buy the original , and mass produce it.
Blur, the white stripes, oasis, the Beatles, Hendrix, the Clash , The Jam , the list was endless.
When we did the maths on exactley how many records we pressed over those years i would say 1 in 20 people who collected vinyl in the UK owned one of ours.
When the white stripes produced 1500 copies of a party of special things to do in 2001 (sub pop), they sold for up to £100 a piece,today they cost in the regeon of £200 each , but little did the world know until now that there are actually 17,500 copies on the market, and they were printed in Newcastle by your truly.

The beginning of the end.
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By the back end of 2005 and 67 million quid later i called it a day and sold the machinary for scrap metal to fella who sculptured metal, all that’s left now of my equipment is a fifteen foot ****ing statue of something that looks like a ‘Nike Logo’ on a roundabout near Doncaster.

Today i’m the man who never existed and a very silent partener in one of the biggest nightclubs in Ibiza i have property in London , Leeds , and India and enough shares in apple to keep me in free Ipods for life.
I choose to live a humble life , i walk my kids to school , drive a Volkswagan and eat fish and chips without a knife and fork.
But after all i’ve done i can’t seem to keep away from music, i guess ripping off the record industry for so long made me addicted to it.
I share drinks with wanna be rock stars , and i must have been asked a million times who i am and what i do to know so much about music , for years i have talked the talk yet had to keep quite about how i walked it.
I had the biggest balls in the buisness , and i did it all under your noses , without permission, and i don’t lose any sleep over it.

I’m the man who sold the world, a true king of rock and roll, father of three, i walk with a smile and my **** stinks just like yours, i’m 34 years old and my kids will never kick **** on council estates like i did as a kid, i had **** all and built an empire.
And now it’s time to sign off , as you all run towards your record collections i will be running to catch a plane,
if it’s any consolation you can’t tell my copies at all from the real thing, the only way to do it would be to recall vinyl worldwide.
Jesus when i look at it like that it blows me away how huge this was, i guess you could call me an era in music, ….but **** it…i’m going where the waves are.

GhostInTheRuins

Interesting read alright. I'm in a mixed mind on if I'd commend the guy for having the balls to do that and get away it, or if he's just a total wanker.

If it's true at all that is.

BaZmO*

Complete and utter BS!

lordgoat

I hope it's true... Good story either way.

Amazotheamazing

BaZmO* wrote:

Complete and utter BS!

Probably, but there's some merit in his idea.

magpie

John Titor

aphex™

I doubt it's true. I mean there aren't thousands of copies of classic LPs on Ebay. Any time I look up a few specific rare ones theres only a handful if any.

BaZmO*

Amazotheamazing wrote:

Probably, but there's some merit in his idea.

There maybe a small amount of merit in his story but there's more holes in it than in a big block of Swiss cheese.

Amazotheamazing

Yeah, for the ultra rare stuff I don't think it would work, but for limited releases like the White Stripes etc you could make a bit of money.

Setun

Interesting read, but his estimation of his own personal wealth must be exaggerated. I doubt it's possible to make "67 million quid" out of bootlegging vinyl.

And if he claims he likes real music why did he move to Ibiza, where there is a distinct lack of???

lordgoat

Daddio wrote:

Interesting read, but his estimation of his own personal wealth must be exaggerated. I doubt it's possible to make "67 million quid" out of bootlegging vinyl.

And if he claims he likes real music why did he move to Ibiza, where there is a distinct lack of???

It's probably over exaggerated aright but one can see how it could easily be done and make quite a tidy amount of money from it. Especially if the cover art was up to scratch...

Is there any way to verifiy how authentic vinyl is ?

spaceradiator

Yeah, deffo got holes in (esp. the nineties stuff) but the foreign pressings and printing concept is sound.