| Main Pressing plants Pennyroyal Tea Test pressings Collection |
| Bleach TUPLP 6 white test pressing | |||||||
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An eBay seller had seven of these records, which he got from a person who worked at the Orlake plant near London, UK, six which had white labels, and one which had proper Tupelo labels. These six copies are the only we know of. It is on white vinyl, but several other colors are mixed in, too, probably due to dirty equipment. This marbled effect varies from copy to copy, the one pictured below having most added color, and less and less until one copy almost like the retail issue. The one with the Tupelo labels appears to have very little marbled effect. (Remember that the retail copies aren't completely white. They are muddy white, slightly marbled.) The seven copies came in plain, black die-cut sleeves, which were probably added by the eBay seller or the Orlake employee. On the first copy pictured below, the label on side B is white, but the label on side A is of a more yellow color, like it was exposed to the sun for a long time. My personal copy, which vinyl is almost completely white, also have the yellowish labels, but both sides look the same. All these records are in terrible condition (one were reportedly in better condition than the others). Some tracks jump all the way because of large dents, some play with a fair bit of crackles, pops, and clicks. This indicates that these records were thrown away, probably to be recycled, or discarded due to the impure color. One of the white label copies had a heat damaged label (image 5). Another copy with Tupelo labels had severe heat damage, and the vinyl itself was trashed, too. This was probably a regular rejected record originally thrown away. As mentioned, these records were pressed by Orlake in UK. Orlake pressed the white and olive green records, while MPO, in France, pressed the black records. MPO never pressed anything but black vinyl. Metal plates, probably mothers, were sent to Orlake from MPO, so the matrix codes are identical, except Orlake faintly scratched out MPO on the mothers. (The green pressing has MPO intact, it's possible that the set of stampers used to press the green copies were created from the mothers before scratching out MPO, and one set were made after, used to press the white copies.) Another explanation to this being a regular test pressing is that they had to press a few records to clean up the hopper which feeds the molten vinyl grains to the machines, if the hopper had been used to press records on different color vinyl. As I said, the degree of extra marble and color effect varies; the one with the strongest extra color must have been pressed first, until the seventh copy, the one with Tupelo labels, which were nearly completely white. The one with the proper labels could have been the first one intended for retail, but wasn't good enough.
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 1. First copy, side A  2. First copy, side B  3. First copy, matrix detail  4. First copy, matrix detail  5. Second copy, heat damaged label  6. Third copy, proper label Thanks to Enrico Vincenzi (images 1-4) and eBay seller tog77 (images 5, 6). | |||||||
| Main Pressing plants Pennyroyal Tea Test pressings Collection |
