Whisper it quietly, this bootleg of demo’s and unreleased tracks was put together by the band and sold on the merchandise stands during a British tour in order to make everyone a nice Xmas bonus! It’s made up of demo’s and unreleased recordings that were hanging around unused.

The master tape was compiled and taken to a cutting studio and pressing plant up near Manchester by TWS manager Les Johnson and me, he claiming to be my manager and I posing as the singer in the fictitious band that had made this record, “Nine Ways To Thursday” (IYKYK is I believe the correct way to describe that alias). The Mancunian studio engineer took one listen to it and looked at me and Les with a very knowing “yes mate, of course that’s what this band is called” on his face.

As bootlegs go, and this after all is a bootleg, the sound quality is as good as it gets. Side 1 makes up what would have been most of a Wonder Stuff live set in those early years before the songs that made up “The Eight Legged Groove Machine” were written. Side 2 is made up of songs that were played live at some point and were all very close to making that first album or a B-side. “How High (The Upper Hand)” was recorded a number of times (there’s another take of it on the compilation album “Love Bites & Bruises”) and was a candidate to be a single at one time but they never quite captured it how they wanted it. Then there is the version of “Golden Green” which is incredibly different to the final version and shows just how much a song can change from initial writing to final release.

There is also an unofficial bootleg of this “official” bootleg. If your copy includes a recording of a gig in Holland in 1988 (from the Euro Rock Festival in Groningen on 2nd November 1988, a terrible setup and gig and in future years we used the name of that town to describe a debacle, as in “oh no it’s all gone Groningen”) then it’s a bootleg of the bootleg, that gig was never on the bands original pressing. The guy responsible for that bootlegged bootleg, Paul a notorious Manchester bootlegger, walked into my shop a few years ago with a pile of them under his arm and sold ‘em to me ! There was also a limited run of the original release (sans gig) released on CD some years later.

No link on this one as none of the tracks are on YouTube (as far as I can tell)…but if you’re a Wonder Stuff fan there’s some great stuff on “The Boot Legged Groove Machine” and you should track it down.