Driffield Bummed Sessions
The famous sessions with Martin Hannett is difficult to find much information on but I do have a couple of tapes that I'm pretty sure came from those sessions. As you can see one of the tapes is labelled 'Wish You Were Here' which i interpret to mean it was recorded while 'away' recording the album but maybe I'm wrong. Also, the song Holiday was believed to have started from these sessions which explains its inclusion on one of these tapes alongside Mad Cyril.
The hand written notes you can see with the tapes are from the first time I played them to find out exactly what was on them.
Here is one of the unreleased instrumentals on the tape which is kind of confusing as this sounds more like the Pills sessions:
The tape labelled 'Paul D Pre-Pro Day 2' is a little confusing due to the inclusion of Tart Tart being on it when this song was finished and released on the Squirrel album already.
Also, were the songs Rave On and Hallelujah meant to go on Bummed but they decided to hold them back for the E.P. which came later? This tape would suggest so.
Blistred Rabbi & Strawberry Studios
After the sessions in Driffield the songs would have been taken to Strawberry Studios for the mixing and as you can see, some of the tapes on this page come from there.
The tapes are always some of my most cherished and most important items from my collection, most notably the FULL Bummed demo tape with the strange title Blistred Rabbi. I say full but there is no Mad Cyril on this tape, not sure why. Surprisingly only 4 songs have ever leaked from this amazing tape; Bring A Friend, Fat Lady Wrestler, Performance and Wrote For Luck, which can all be found on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXCKgzZ-Jc0
In the image on the right the scribbled track listing is again from when I first played the tape to find out its contents. When you hear these versions you can see just what Martin Hannett did with the record but the songs in this version were already great in my opinion so he had amazing material to work with and he should have kept Horse's bass ONE LOUDER.
Here's a bonus for you, a full song as well as snippets for all the other songs that have never been heard:
As you can see the above tape was recorded on 23rd and 24th July 1988 and then mixed on 27th and 28th July 1988. Neither of these versions ended up as the album versions though.
I'm not actually sure when the Wrote for Luck LSD Mix or Wrote For Dub were recorded/mixed as there are no details on the tape