Backtrack 2

Very smart clean vinyl with a good gloss flipback cover showing shelf wear rubbing on spine and approx 5 cm loss of top flipback.

Following on from both the success and the format of the first release in the Backtrack series, Volume 2 continues its scouring of the late-1960s Track Records vault, to emerge with a positively scintillating selection of monster hits, inexplicable flops, and occasional rarities. Scarcest of the lot, at least at the time, were the tracks that open and close the disc, the Who's renderings of the Rolling Stones' "Under My Thumb" and "The Last Time." Cut to protest the jailing of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in 1967, the single was released within days of the verdict, but all-but withdrawn when the appeals were heard and there suddenly seemed less to protest about. Both tracks have since become common enough on sundry CD compilations but, for a long time, this was the only place you could find them without dropping a lot of money on the original 45. The appearance, later in the set, of Fairport Convention's "If I Had a Ribbon Bow," also served to take some heat off a once-voracious collectors market; the band's debut single, in 1967, was never collected on any of the band's own LPs or compilations and, again, left a howling gap in many a collection. Now here it was for under one pound. As usual with the Backtrack albums, the Who and Hendrix dominate the proceedings, to be joined at the start of Side Two by the Track label's then-most-recent smash, Thunderclap Newman's "Something in the Air." Elsewhere, Marsha Hunt reprises one of the finest moments of Backtrack 1, with her own remarkable version of John's Children's "Desdemona," while the Children themselves weigh in with "Come and Play With Me in the Garden," which truly is one of the strangest and, possibly, sickest singles of the entire British psychedelic movement. The Crazy World of Arthur Brown weigh in with "Nightmare," the oddly-unsuccessful successor to the chart-topping "Fire," while true Track obscurists delighted in the inclusion of Cherry Smash's "Sing Songs of Love," one of the purest pop singles in the label's entire repertoire.