The second album that never shipped

Sixty copies got out — a number the label has never disputed and has also never explained.

Tracking down owners was easier than we expected. Finding somebody prepared to say what happened was not, and took a phone call from a landline that was not theirs.

What was pressed

The record is the second album by a band who had released one album in 2009 to enough attention that a second was expected. It has a catalogue number, PI-014, which sits in the label's sequence between two releases that exist, and which is the reason anybody knew there was a gap at all.

Nine hundred copies were pressed in March 2011. The sleeves were already printed — five hundred of them, gatefold, which was an expensive decision for a label that size and tells you what they thought they had.

The record was scheduled for June. In May the schedule was revised and PI-014 was absent from it. No announcement was made, then or since.

They came off the press, they went into a lock-up, and about five weeks later most of them went into a skip. I know because I drove the van.