Ok, what if this was in possession of one person since 1975 and was given to them by a member of EMI Records, this is the case. This belongs to Phil Gould (original drummer of Level 42) and was given to him by his producer brother from EMI in 1975. He has posted this picture up on his facebook page and he seems to have been sitting on a gem. If anyone can throw any light on this or can estimate a value i'd be interested to know.
Chris.
I have no reason to doubt the story, or the authenticity of the item. Somebody got a disc with no name, and wrote whatever he remembered of the title.
There must be a limited market for these white label promos to begin with, and it's further reduced by the scribbling...
If the text can't be removed, he might get the most money out of it by selling it to a Level 42 fan with his own autograph! :P
Is it feasible that the track, only 9 days before it's full single release, still didn't have its final title? As suggested by Tero!, I suppose it could just be that whoever wrote the label forgot what it was called and so took a punt from memory.......
Does anyone know far in advance that Kenny Everett was playing the track on his radio show? I thought that was, at the latest, early to mid October (ie before the date on this white label), and at that point surely the correct title was already known. Advance copies were then subsequently shipped to US radio stations, again with the song correctly named.
Isn't it far more likely that the person writing the text on this item was an in-house employee who made a mistake (after all, "rhapsody" isn't a very common word, and evidently no one had heard of "Bohemian Rhapsody" yet...aside from a few Liszt-fans who couldn't tell singular and plural apart...)? I mean, he probably wasn't thinking "hey, this is a piece of history here!" but something closer to "I've got fifteen different test-pressings to deal with today, what's this one called again?". I don't think it's very likely the text was added later.