Altern 8 – The Vertigo E.P.

This black vinyl issue is the one to own, due to a common pressing fault on the silver editions that sees the B-side pressed about 8% slow. Ironically the "limited" silver edition seems to be about 5x more commonplace, but aesthetics apart, this version is more desirable.

This is a distinctly shoddy CD issue from Germany's ZYX. For a start all the tracks are mastered off vinyl, so hum and crackle are the order of the day. But worse, the tempo fault found on many UK vinyl pressings is carried onto here.

I suppose that ZYX cannot be blamed for the fact that the pressing they used is one where "Real Time Status" and "The 1st of May" are pressed 8% too slow, but given that "Real Time Status" was available in pristine quality at the correct tempo on the UK Network CD, one can only imagine that decent masters existed at the time for the other tracks, making this is altogether a disappointing disc for collectors.

Does anyone else have a problem pressing of this record with the pitch/tempo incorrect? On my copy (it's silver vinyl) the 2 tracks on side B run at about 116bpm where they should be about 125bpm. this seems to be about equivalent of -8 on a standard Technics deck. I have the CD single and this is about 9bpm faster for "Real Time Status". My decks are tweaked so it's about +4 on my Technics to match the CD tempo. Also the BPMs given by James Hamilton in his Record Mirror reviews at the time were around the 124-125bpm mark.

Famously every single part of this record was a sample from somewhere else (the sampling kings subtitled their first EP "can you steal it?" as a subheader). The "come with me, tonight's the night, can't you see I wanna be with you" was heavily used around this time by other artists and the Archer/Peat combo were unashamed masters of taking elements of other people's tunes and making them their own.