First.

My first vinyl album.

My mum gave my 50p to spend in Woolworth's.

(I remember it had 50p in a star shaped sticker on the upper right corner)

This was the result.

I loved it.

Sadly gone now but fondly remembered.

It is on my grail list of vinyl to find.

The Ripoffs Play a Golden Age of The Beatles – The Ripoffs (Stereo Gold Award MER 415)

Get Back, Hey Jude, Rock Island Twist, Help, Yellow Submarine, I Want To Hold Your Hand, Let It Be, Long Gone Woman, Yesterday, Paperback Writer

Quite a late addition in the cash-in craze as, judging by the song titles (again, no credits aside from a man known only as L. Muller who composed the non-Beatle tracks) I’d say it’s late 1969, early 1970. It really makes you wonder why someone would even bother recording (some fairly decent) Beatle covers when:

1) Judging by the bland gold cover and the title (The Ripoffs Play A Golden Age of The Beatles? Sheesh…) it was pretty obvious that this wasn’t The Beatles.

2) By 1970 the fans were of an age where they could easily discern, and afford to buy, the real thing.

Still, as these things go, this is not a bad record at all. It is schizophrenic as hell, running the gamut from a disinterested version of “I Want To Hold Your Hand” to a fairly rousing take on “Get Back” (even if he does get the lyrics wrong: “JoJo left his home in Tombstone, Arizona, crossed the California grass”). There’s a definite post-Woodstock bluesy feel on the LP’s only original, “Long Gone Woman” (credited to the mysterious L. Muller), that sounds to me what David Clayton Thomas would sound like singing with Joe Cocker’s Grease Band (in case you ever wondered). Oddly, the band often sounds more like Beatle protégés, Badfinger, doing The Beatles than it does The Beatles themselves (the fellow singing “Get Back” and “Let It Be” sounds as if he could be Badfinger Tom Evans’ brother). Beware: this LP also contains one of the schmaltziest versions EVER of “Yesterday” (in fact I’m not totally convinced that its the same group) and a version of “Rock Island Line” that is as unusual as it is unwelcome here. File this somewhere between The Merseyboys and those sound-alike superstars of Pickwick Records: Tribes.