THE QUEEN IS DEAD GOOD

Re Billy Albert’s piece on The Smiths rarities (RC363): I’m sure that you are aware but there is an unreleased version of The Queen Is Dead. It is an 8mins 43secs monitor mix which I assume the final album version was edited and mixed from. Johnny Marr gave me a copy of the track as a Christmas present a few years back so can I confirm its existence (it is stunning).

Also, I worked at Rough Trade Distribution (I was a director of RTD and Rough Trade Records when it went into voluntary liquidation in 1991) from 1987 onwards and do recall that a lot of the new release information listings in The Catalogue was pretty inaccurate.

The reason for this is that under the old computer system at Rough Trade, before the expensive new system that failed miserably, labels were allowed to allocate catalogue numbers and add them to the system on a weekly basis even if the records were not in the production stage. The Catalogue would then print off a monthly report off all the recent catalogue number additions and include them as forthcoming releases, which was not the most reliable source. I do know this to be the case because we did add a few ‘ringers’ into the new release sections a couple of times just to prove how easy this was to infiltrate. RT Records adding the listings to their monthly adverts is obviously another matter.

by Dave Cronen
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