What song will always have a “scratch” whenever you hear it?

My Cool older sister had a copy of “In Crowd” by Bryan Ferry when I was about 11 years old (1975) As we all did, we played our records to death and this one had a scratch and jumped about 10 seconds in. Every time I have heard that song over the last 50 yrs it sounds wrong. That imperfection is totally embedded in my head and the correct version is wrong.

Does anyone else have a musical imperfection that cant be erased?

When I was at secondary school and downloading music/burning CDs was in its infancy, I paid my geeky friend Tom a fiver to make me a copy of the ‘Americana’ album by the Offspring.

I only found out probably well over a decade later that the tracks were totally in the wrong order. Of course, I inevitably think they flowed better on my pirate version 😀 .

The Clash – Rock the Kasbah
Sort of the opposite but – There is a digital alarm going off part way through. I always assumed it was just on my pirate recording but apparently is on the original too.

Ride On Pony from Free Live. Without the jump it’s just wrong.

As for extraneous noise on recordings:

I have a wonderful recording of Stravinsky’s The Firebird, but part way through it sounds someone is playing ping pong.

Years ago I was listening to The Who – The Kid’s Are Alright in my parent’s front room. At the end I heard a faint “I saw you” and looked out of the window to see who had been admiring my air guitar. No-one, it’s on the record.

I had a taped version off vinyl of Temptation that my mate taped – somehow there’s a faint “Mike!” (his name) over/under the intro that I really don’t think exists on any actual recorded version.  I’ve lost* that tape now and the song seems wrong whenever I hear it

* similarly, the track was on a mixtape and it always jars with me when I don’t hear the next song from the mix whenever I hear the end of any song that was on the tape.  The cassette & player were nicked from my car in Hyson Green in about 1989 but I could probably still rewrite the tracks in order if you told me the starter

🙁

The Clash – Rock the Kasbah
Sort of the opposite but – There is a digital alarm going off part way through. I always assumed it was just on my pirate recording but apparently is on the original too.

I think I know the bit you mean, it sounds like someone playing a scale on a stylophone?

Similarly there’s a weird clicking at 1:11 on Pulp’s “Common People” that I used to just think was an ipod glitch as it sounded like the click-wheel sound.

I dropped and scratched my CD copy of 4 Non Blondes’ Bigger, Better, Faster, More! at some point in the ’90s. Surprisingly this didn’t render any of it unplayable, instead there’s just a slight crackle in one channel during the second-to-last track, Drifting.

Red hill mining town, makes me laugh. I have a vinyl copy and cd, cd always sounds odd on the intro minus the scratch

The 12″ version of The The’s ‘this is the day’ has an audible click (at least mine does) on the lead in.

Not a scratch, but my copy of the Sister’s of Mercy 7″ single of Temple of Love, originally realised in 83, the intro was quite thin sounding. First listen I turned up the volume only to be blasted during the first chorus. A mates copy was ok. I guess it’s what you get when buying independently released music.

Too many to count. As a povvy student, most of my music was CDs borrowed from the library and recorded onto half a C90. As a result, I often sacrificed the last couple of minutes of the last song. As a random example, it always catches me out when New Order’s ‘True Faith’ is on the radio and it continues past the bit where my tape ran out.

A friend once did a tape for me with The Electric Boys ‘Funk-o-metal Carpet Ride’ on one side and (I think?) some Aerosmith album on the other. TEB starts with a plinky sitar instrumental that’s a couple of minutes long, then breaks into crunchy guitar. Years later, decades, I bought the remastered CD and… where the hell has the intro gone? It turned out, she’d recorded the outro from the other album onto the start of the second side of the tape. I always thought it was part of TEB album and to this day I hold that it should be part of that album because it worked perfectly.

(If anyone can think of a late 80s / early 90s rock album whose last track is a 2-minute sitar piece, I’m all ears. I’d love to identify it again. It probably wasn’t Aerosmith, thinking about it.)

My missis copy of Strangeways Here We Come has a defect on Stop Me If You Heard This One Before that causes the ‘and the pain was enough…’ line to repeat over and over. My brian gets suck on it too now.

There’s a vinyl rip of Liquidizer (Jesus Jones) on YouTube where the b-side has been recorded first so the tracks are in a different order – if I hear it “properly”, it’s confusing when the songs don’t follow the way I expect.

However Iain Baker (keyboard) has commented on it to say it actually works well with Info Freako as the first track!

Tina Turner’s Simply the Best has an odd ‘woo’ inserted at 3:23 that sounds like it was added over the top of her voice, maybe by an overexcited sound engineer or similar; the first time I noticed it I thought the radio DJ/presenter was having a singalong with the mic still on. It irks me every time I hear it on the radio.

heard a faint “I saw you”

I can’t hear that at all.

Paradise by the Dashboard Light by Meatloaf – ‘I’ll give you an answer in the mororning-mororning-mororning’ – it was hope-taped so it always had the same scratch when I played it (which was lots). It sounds odd when I hear it on the radio and I don’t hear the scratch edit.

The Bewlay Brothers when in the 80’s I got my first good turntable a Dual hearing Bowie drag on his fag and the creaky chair

Not a scratch, but.. Pan Pipes Christmas Songs cassette was used and abused year after year to the point that the tape had stretched in places so the pitch went all over the place. Ah, memories…

Faith No More’s Epic – I had it recorded onto a cassette mix tape and it was the last song squeezed on the end, so the last 30 secs or so were cut off. For years I didn’t even know how it ended, even now I still expect it to cut out at the exact piano note that tape ended!

“Memories” by Public Image. Seem to remember having a few copies, all of them seemed to jump. Sounds weird when  I hear it now.

FNM’s Epic. I got slung a copy with two seconds of the albums start, before it started again properly.

Bridge over troubled water was just a cornucopia of clicks and drags.

Not a record but hold music

in the early hours on the new millennium someone tried to steal my car. When I say ‘someone’ – what  Idiscovered in the morning was a scene that looked like a rhino has tried to steal it – door pealed open, dash ripped off, steering wheel collapsed .

couldn’t drive it or secure it so had to get it towed away….. on the most observed bank holiday in our lifetimes

I was on hold to Greenflag for close to 8 hours, hung over listening to ‘Come on and rescue me’. But not all of it, it would jump back to the start mid bar before it reached the end

I had to call greenflag again 18 years later and was sort of comforted that they still had the same hold music and it still looped in the same place

My missis copy of Strangeways Here We Come has a defect on Stop Me If You Heard This One Before that causes the ‘and the pain was enough…’ line to repeat over and over. My brian gets suck on it too now.

That sounds like a radial scratch, scratches that run from the centre outwards are generally not a problem. Have a close look at the playing surface and polish it with some Brasso or Silvo metal polish.

Fleetwood Mac ‘Rumours’, ‘Go Your Own Way’. My original vinyl copy used to skip a line of the song about a minute or two in, and it used to drive me nuts! It would do it from new, regardless of what turntable it was played, including my very expensive Logic DM101.

Close inspection with a powerful magnifying glass showed it was a mastering or pressing flaw, the grooves crossed over, like a set of points on a railway line!

47 years on, having bought it on CD, and having a Lossless download on my phone, I still expect it to skip the next line of the song!

We had a christmas album called Christmas Party Singalong that got dragged out every christmas, and it had a scratch on one side, so that’s completely burned into my brain with Winter Wonderland. My brother picked up another copy and it doesn’t have it and it’s just so <weird>.

Nothing else matters by Metallica. Ended up in a show of very dubious quality in Amsterdam and the performer managing to lip sync the whole tune during her performance but it included all the skips from the record player…was an eye watering performance but once you ignored what was going on and watcher her ‘singing’ in time with the tune, it almost became a pantomime!

my older sister was Bowie made.  still has every single record he made.

Port of Amsterdam was played on repeat for what seemed like the whole of 1973/74

i jumps a bit now.

I love this thread as so many can relate to the title but the responses are absolutely personal and unique.

My most memorable was Mama on the self titled Genesis album.  Today it feels like Spotify is wrong.

Although the real answer is Cosmic Jam on Neil’s Heavy Concept Album

Other than streaming it on Spotify the only copy of Amsterdam by Bowie is on my Ziggy Stardust cd as it one of a few extras

I had to look it up it was the b side to Sorrow

B sides were often great years ago, I still have Sunny Afternoon 45 and the b side was used in the Sopranos I’m not like everybody else

You can guess I’m a Bowie and Kinks fan

The intro to Simple Minds ‘I Travel’ …its the only one of their songs i still actually like and on my Empires and Dance LP the intro always jumped, sounds weird when I heard the digital version that the jump isn’t there!

When I was a teenager I took my Mum’s collection of Beatles LPs (from Please Please Me through to Sgt Pepper’s) and made a mix tape with my favourite tracks.

Between two tracks I accidentally flicked on to the radio exactly at the point Skunk Anansie Weak was at peak scream. It only lasted a second or so but actually sounded like it was intentional so I left it in, and the tape would never have sounded right without it.

The end of Endless Summer by The Jezabels. Sounds weird without the brake squeal.

i grew up listening to the peter gabriel plays live album on c90 cassette that my mum had recorded. there was a section between the end of intruder and beginning of i go swimming where you can hear her friend talking whilst a scratching sound is heard (i think the tape was jammed maybe when recording it). it just doesn’t sound the same to be without that”interlude”.

Quicksilver Messenger Service’s Happy Trails.

The opening of side 1 (aka the good side) had three clicks at the beginning. Sounds wrong without it.

B sides were often great years ago, I still have Sunny Afternoon 45 and the b side was used in the Sopranos I’m not like everybody else

So true. The chart people put a stop to including singles with extra tracks, EP’s, in the chart listings, because it was apparently ‘unfair to the artists to have to do extra songs’, which was completely wrong. Tori Amos was brilliant at doing this, she’d release two versions of each single with three extra tracks on each one; one set would be her songs, the other covers. She released six EP’s up to ‘Professional Widow’, after that any extra tracks were just remixes. Bugger remixes!
I bought all her releases as CD’s, and compiled the extra tracks onto CD-R, I ended up with a triple album of songs that never appeared anywhere else, until Tori put out an official compilation some years later.

I have a Dutch trance/techno remix of a Mauro Picotto choon that I copied from CD to FLAC along with a skippy bit from a scratch on the original CD surface that is somehow perfectly in time with the beat. 

If I hear the same tune without the skippy bit, it somehow feels wrong.

Warehouse – 2 Bad Mice

Not quite a scratch, but similar principle.

In about 1980-something I was listening, late night, to some localish radio station, broadcasting on medium-wave. They played Pink Floyd’s ‘Money’ which has the lyric about “do goody good bullshit’. Obviously listener sensitivities were a big concern back then, so they played their jingle “Two….Eight….One” to mask out the one word. Whenever I hear the track now, I still say the 3 numbers in my head, or often out loud.

Ah, that’s such a great and personal question! For me , it’s often a song tied to a specific memory or era of life. From the early 2000s. Songs like “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or “Wonderwall” tend to carry those imperfect quirks around my head.

“Security” by Men Without Hats (B-side to The Safety Dance 7-inch single).

Excellent song, skips about 1 minute in and now sounds wrong without it.

Reminds me very much of certain people at a certain time of my life (school disco memories…)

Back when i was DJ-ing I did a mix for a friend’s birthday. The only surviving copy of it was taken from the masters I had on a really old PC and the poor thing could not keep up with the bitrate so it buffers every few seconds throughout the 90 minutes. It still annoys me, but Kenny was fine with that and cuffed I’d recorded it for him.

I used to record all of my club sets on Minidisc, but cannot find them at all now.