This bootleg could provide an alternative title and cover image for A Band With Built-In Hate, still might if I live long enough for a second edition. Discogs has it listed as a 1982 release, which I thought was fanciful as pretty much everything seemed to have been sourced from Thirty Years of Maximum R&B and subsequent CD reissues, but Jon Savage Tweeted that he’d bought his copy at the tail end of the 80’s (his is on the Brunswick label, mine is on Reaction). Consensus now appears to be early 90’s with a failed 1990 MCA box set as the source. Whatever, it doesn’t much matter, because this is not about rare cuts, instead it is all about surplus value: it’s the object itself that attracts me.

The image is, I’d guess, from around the time of ‘I Can’t Explain’, Spring 1965. Daltrey has moved back from the microphone, leaving a void at the centre that is now filled by the bootlegger’s rubber stamp. Here are four malcontents, utterly at odds with the conventions of pop promotion. Neither smiles or moody introspection, but a combined look that says not only ‘who gives a fuck?’ but more directly ‘who the fuck are you?’ How did that get translated into the pop conversations of the day?

In June 1965, Alan Smith writing about the band in the NME described the ‘four beatsters from Shepherd’s Bush’ as exuding a ‘sort of vicious strangeness’. But that conversation wasn’t taken up by others for another 11 years.