Dear Santa,
I’ve been really good all year. Helpful, polite and diligent. I’ve kept my bedroom tidy and done all my chores enthusiastically. So I do hope you’ll see fit to visit me while I’m sleeping on Christmas Eve and drop a little something into my stocking.
Let me explain. April 2000, and Prefab Sprout were on tour. I wasn’t there: at this point in time I’d more or less forgotten the band and in any case was waiting for my younger son to be born, but there was this one superfan who decided to follow the entire tour, minus Dublin which was too costly, and Warwick due to a friend’s wedding. And most importantly he went to each gig armed with one of these new fangled minidisc recorders.
So uniquely, almost the entire tour was recorded. Now there were other people with recorders, including the BBC, and some of the results are better than this guy managed, but the point is there was something done everywhere. Dublin was beautifully recorded on both nights by a local, so that was covered too. And last year a cassette of Warwick came to light so we have that as well.
But on April the 4th in Liverpool, something went wrong. Due to some sort of equipment malfunction, only the encores were recorded.
To an OCD completist, this is horrific. There’s a yawning empty space in the metaphorical bookshelf so to speak. And all the worse because I know there is a recording out there somewhere. A recording of “Cowboy Dreams” turned up as a random MP3, but untraceable. Of course it’s not that I don’t know what songs were played or that I don’t have good recordings from the tour, it’s just that I don’t have THAT ONE. I’ve asked anyone I can find who might have one, but nada.
So Santa, please: as you pass through the lofts on your visits, have a rummage and see if you can’t turn up a dusty minidisc or cassette marked “Prefab Sprout, Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, April 2000, complete”. Thanks.
Extra sherry and mince pies in exchange of course.
Yours hopefully,
Sproutology.