Music-related story of the year so far is the amazing “crossover” between Taylor Swift and Cabaret Voltaire:
A Taylor Swift fan in Staffordshire got a creepy surprise when she tried to play her brand new, orchid-coloured vinyl copy of Taylor Swift’s Speak Now.
Instead of hearing Swift’s re-recorded versions of Back To December and Sparks Fly, Rachel Hunter was confronted with a collection of dark and disturbing British electronica.
The opening song contained messages about “flakes of flesh” and “endless rows of sardines”, while another sampled cult the 1960s horror series The Outer Limits.
“There are 70 billion people on Earth, where are they hiding? Where are they hiding?” intoned a husky male voice over a sinister, droning synth.
“At first, I thought maybe the vinyl had a secret message from Taylor,” Hunter tells the BBC.
“But when I flipped to the b-side it started saying ‘There’s 70 billion people on earth, where are they hiding?’ I started to get a little scared.
“I was alone and it was late and my vinyl was playing creepy messages.”
It transpires that the tracks on sides A and B of this version (which now has its very own Discogs entry) are actually sides A and B of a compilation of 90s weird British electronica called Happy Land which came out a couple of months ago, which was pressed at the same French vinyl plant as Tay Tay’s “new” album, which I suppose at least partly explains how this happened, but even so… I know there’s been notable examples of this happening in the past, but something about this almost feels deliberate—if only because the disjunct between what the listener would expect and the actual “cursed” product is so great—and in any case clearly no one was doing quality control at the pressing plant. Wonder how many of these “crossover” copies actually got made? It’s got me interested in hearing Happy Land, anyway…
