Bee Gees Living Eyes CD Looks suspicious

I would ask $500. This is misprinted edition. Extremely rare

 

It is gone! Now it is just a piece of Gorgeous mahogany parquet flooring

 

Living Eyes never got a repress in Germany and if you see one with a clear center claiming to be from Germany then just turn around and walk away...
Bee Gees and Gibb counterfeits are fairly rife on the market right now, all of those ~$16.99 ones are fakes.

 

Yeah, there looks like three distinct versions of the counterfeit item,
-The one with the Polygram spelt wrong (PolayGram),
-The one with the Polygam spelt right but missing the hyphen between Bee Gees & Living Eyes.
-The one with everything ok but "Bee Gees Living Eyes" in the matrix and clear plastic centre. (I would say a lot of people were fooled with this one in Post #7)

Is the Rolling Stones item in post #7 with the clear centre fake too?

 

Uh oh.

A friend of mine just picked up four Bee Gees titles for me at Vintage Vinyl in New Jersey -- Trafalgar, Cucumber Castle, Life in a Tin Can, and Mr Natural -- new in shrinkwrap for $13 each. Now HE said they looked legit, but I haven't seen them yet. Should I assume these are in fact boots then?

Any quick/easy way to tell when I do get them later this week?

 

No. They are 100% legal. Fellow members of this forum contribute for this site about London pressings
http://home.arcor.de/folon2/stones_london_cds.html
Those with clear center are listed as 6th pressing. The only thing I do not understand where and when those discs were pressed.

I asked that question some time ago but got no answer.
http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/list-of-rolling-stones-london-cds.279535/page-3#post-8986277 (post #77)

 

And I believe, the 'clear center' discs were pressed not only for The Rolling Stones. Here is another pair Black Sabbath "Heaven & Hell". They are identical in terms of TOC, peaks and CRC. And pressed from the same glass master


The question is - where and when?
Sorry, wrong link in the above post
http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/list-of-rolling-stones-london-cds.279535/page-3#post-8963640

 

Given the price I'd assume the worst, these titles have not been reissued on CD since WMG took over the catalogue and if these indeed were legit they ought to demand some coin.
On the outside, assuming they're mimicking any of the old Polydor or the A&M US pressings that emerged around 1997 and in jewel cases, they can be difficult to spot as far as the artwork is concerned. Contrast and colour reproduction may have discrepancies. Opening these up and playing them, at least one set of the "Life in a Tin Can" and "Mr Natural" fakes added a gap in the two tracks on each album that are supposed to run together.

 

Thanks -- it did sound a little too good to be true. Hopefully I caught some legit copies, but it is starting to sound like that isn't the case. I've got a pretty good eye for these things, but so does my pal who picked them up for me, so if they got by him, I have a feeling they will look pretty good to me too.

 

Good to know! Thanks! Too bad Amazon is not aware of this (or doesn't care).

To be fair though, the Amazon listing also shows a bunch of the Japanese re-releases for sale under the same bar code.

 

This one?
http://www.discogs.com/Bee-Gees-Living-Eyes/release/4539380
or this?
http://www.discogs.com/Bee-Gees-Living-Eyes/release/1368628

 

Discogs says:

"This japanese re-issue was released in Europe as cat#813642-2 in summer 2005 with stickered EAN 0042281364228"

Who knows - might be release 1368628 - they aren't cheap from those Japanese sellers though.

 

If you decide to crack them open once you get them then please takes some photos/scans of the discs and post them here. They are often quite telling!
I'm glad I got into them as early as I did and bought most of the original CDs as soon as they hit the market and through legitimate channels, some later finds have been through either trusted sources or with photographic references to back up their origin.

Judging by posts on various Facebook groups there are most certainly new or rekindled fans getting hustled by fakes today as they stock up on their albums.

 

I'm sure most people buying them on eBay don't know they are fake and probably don't care (that is if they even know there are "fake" CDs).

Maybe they should be put back in print?

 

Will do. Thanks for all the info!

 

Pay close attention to the red-black ring around the outer edge, tell-tale sign of some of the Polydor counterfeits out there as it doesn't match real Polydor releases.

 

Many of the buyers are mainly female with little clue about these counterfeits and like you said probably don't care. They simply go looking around eBay and Amazon and see some sellers having them for sale at a decent price and think nothing of it. WMG seem to not want to bother with physical product as far as Bee Gees is concerned but if nothing else they could put some of these out in a couple of Original Albums sets or something akin to the ZZ Top set at an affordable pricepoint.

 

I would rather focus on strange matrix fonts and IFPI that leads nowhere...

 

Doesn't work all the time. If a pressing in question is from before 1993 then there wouldn't be one.

 

The Rolling Stones clear center discs were pressed by the same plants: PolyGram/PDO in Germany and France, but by then, DuPont sold its interest in PDO back to Philips, who reorganized back into PolyGram again, as PMDC (PolyGram Mfg and Distribution Corp) or PRS (in France). Same glass masters, different plastic mould. All the same company/plants, different name.

The Bee Gees is defintely a fake. I have seen CDs with that matrix and no IFPI code, despite it is supposed to have one. These discs are not from the Hannover, Germany plant from any of the different names/ownership eras.

Most of the fake CDs of unique OOP titles are coming from a plant in Taiwan, and plants in China and Russia.

 

Its hard to know if this guy, "pickusbambus" is selling fakes, because he never posts pictures of the actual CDs. But some of these Bee Gees CDs are as rare as chickens teeth.
http://www.ebay.de/sch/m.html?_odkw...46732.m570.l1313&_nkw=&_sacat=11233&_from=R40

 

I got my sealed (in clear cases rather than with black or dark gray spines... that was a tip right there!) copies of Trafalgar, Cucumber Castle, Life in a Tin Can, and Mr. Natural the other day.

The booklets look great, and they have barcodes and copyright info, but the discs themselves are NOT printed very clearly and they have that black and red ring around the outside that was pointed out above.

Haven't gotten around to playing them yet, but I'm about 99% sure they are fakes.

 

I sent a message to pickusbambus asking were they were genuine.
He replied "HalloKann carrolls das nicht übersetzen Gruß Pickusbambus" which translates as
"Hi Carrolls, I Cannot translate your greeting"

 

Sorry I could not see the fotos at work - blocked.
These are both from PolyGram/PDO/PMDC plants.

I posted this awile ago:
MADE IN XXX BY YYY
PolyGram: 1982-1985 W.Germany
PDO: 1986-1991: W. Germany/Germany, France, USA, UK
PMDC:1991-1999: same, France and UK sold off later
UNI or UML: 2000-2005: Germany, USA
EDC: 2006-today Germany, USA, UK reacquired; USA and UK plant closed in last two years

Top is a PolyGram era, unless it also has a PDO marking in the hub.

The bottom is likely a PMDC (90s), unless it has a UNI or EDC marking in the hub. Some early PMDC discs (1990-2 or so) will have no Made by PMDC in xxx in the hub.

 

I did the same thing...aaargh! At least I held onto the disc.