away with The Fairies

John Reed traces the tangled tale of a psych-pop band whose ‘lost’ album could be worth £2,000 a copy

The record collecting world is a funny thing. It acts like a counter-weight to the received wisdom of pop history. For vinyl junkies, chart toppers are irrelevant. Classic songs are boring. Famous artists may – or may not – command respect, based more on the value of a Portuguese EP than their standing in rock’s firmament.

So this is a netherworld in which a hugely successful act like, say, The Tremeloes, are dismissed out-of-hand, and an unknown entity like Tinkerbell’s Fairydust (who, simply put, were The Tremeloes without the hits) become the stuff of myth and mythologising. That this is purely because the release of their sole, self-titled album was cancelled after manufacture, crystallises the topsy turvy psychology of vinyl fetishists: a battered copy of Tinkerbell’s Fairydust sold earlier this year on eBay for not much short of £1,000.

Because the Tinkerbell’s Fairydust album never even reached the shops, it’s understandable that the finished item would be somewhat elusive. After all, the only individuals with access to copies at the time would have been staff at the pressing plant or at Decca (since no reviews were ever sighted in the music press, it’s likely that the project never got as far as a media mail-out to journalists). Not even the …

by John Reed
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