Witchfynde Cloak And Dagger (Lemon Records)
The Best Of (Lemon Records)
Favourites? Well, I’ve got a soft spot for all of them – naturally – but I liked the Trespass CD because we managed to round up almost everything the band had ever laid down, with just one or two exceptions. Some reviewers gave it some flak because it contains three versions of ‘One Of These Days’. My response was that it doesn’t contain three versions of the song; it contains every version of the song!
I also thought Venom’s ‘The Seven Gates Of Hell’ worked very well. It flowed nicely, contained all the early single material (neatly fitting into 77 minutes), and had an appropriate title – their first tour was the ‘Seven Dates Of Hell’, the title itself was Venom B-side, and there were seven singles. Sanctuary messed up and put on the album cut of ‘In League With Satan’ instead of the original single version, but they were always messing things up like that. They also couldn’t locate the tapes for the 12” version of ‘Warhead’, and so we dropped this on from a CD-R of a friend’s copy of the single (cheers, Keith!).
Top of the tree for me though comes Shiva’s ‘Continuance’, because I was instrumental in getting the CD released, thus rescuing the tapes from a lifetime in Andy Skuse’s attic.