This one is a little bittersweet: it’s a UK 12” single of Tears For Fears’ classic new wave track, “Change,” and as you can tell, it has seen better days. The vinyl is perfect, but that cover is really beaten up, right? The thing is, however, that the cover is really rare—it was released but then withdrawn from circulation and replaced with a different cover instead…but a few got out into the world anyway. One of those leaked copies managed to cross the Atlantic and somehow wind up in the archives of my college radio station, WRHU, where it was stickered, written on with both ballpoint (“AVOID” on the back next to “The Conflict”) and grease pencil (faint red line on front next to band name) and generally kicked around for years until it looked like this. Years later, large swaths of the station’s vinyl collection were thrown out into a dumpster to make room for CDs—and I saved this one from an untimely end. If you look online, they go for $300-400 on Discogs, but then again, those copies look a LOT better than this! Happy to own it, much less for free, and I certainly don’t plan to sell it, but it’s a shame that it’s so beat up. I think you might get $10 for it on a good day!
