THE THE Double Oh Seven

he next instalment in our Official Bootleg series has landed.

Volume 007 was recorded at the end of the Naked Self tour in Koln, Germany, December 2000. Some of these recordings may have appeared on earlier, unauthorised bootlegs but these versions have been cleaned up and mastered at Studio Cinéola.

If you are new to the Official Bootleg Series, the design is based on the bootlegs Matt collected in his late teens / early twenties.

Our bootlegs are presented as vinyl-look CDs with simple white labels, encased in our vintage-style, heavy card sleeves with hand-stamped numbering, de-bossed foil logo and our holographic stamp of authenticity, with description track-listing inserts included.

The releases are retrieved from tapes in our large, dusty archive – each containing either demos, live or rare recordings, rough mixes, interviews or promotional performances. Each volume of our miniaturised digital version is mastered at Studio Cinéola. Due to the age and nature of these recordings certain imperfections and distortions may be audible at times.

We appreciate that our notorious Infected Masturbating Devil may be a little overwhelming for certain walls so, by popular demand, we have added to our Andy Dog Collection another giclée print of the Infected Cover Artwork. It really is a stunning print, with deep rich colour, and the Infected logo, Andy Dog logo and THE THE logo (hand-embossed) below the design.

Matt remembers: “Andrew was very late delivering this artwork so, for the first 100,000 copies of Infected we had to use as the cover a still from the ‘Out Of The Blue (into the fire)’ video by Tim Pope. However, I was delighted when Andrew finally did deliver the artwork as it perfectly captured the intense, nightmarish urban landscape of the mid 1980s. Mind you, compared to present times, that decade was like a fairytale really wasn’t it?”

Staying on the Infected theme and posted today on our YouTube channel: ‘The Mercy Beat’ is the rarest segment from Infected – The Movie. Filmed in Bolivia and Peru, it was directed by the late, great Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson. Its imperfect quality, compared to the original (which is held under lock and key in the Sony archives), nevertheless conveys the intensity and spontaneity of this infamous video, the story behind which is detailed in the official biography Long Shadows, High Hopes.

We get sent many videos and photos of our merchandise ‘in action’ from people all over the world. Here’s a particularly lovely one from Barny, who runs Wanderlusts, in the idyllic countryside of Cumbria – with some ‘Bugle Boy’ live at the Royal Albert Hall for accompaniment.

We love to see our merchandise on display so please keep sending them to us!

THE THE HQ x