Record Store Day and Black Friday for us is definitely a hit-and-miss affair.
Today we were of course on the hunt for the Paul McCartney RSD double A-side single ‘I Don’t Know’/’Come On To Me’.
On Black Friday last year it had paid off to get up bright and early to be somewhere near the front of the queue at the biggest and best independent record store in Sydney – Red Eye Records. This time around we got there so early the store wasn’t open yet and were actually the very first in line! Our massive fail from Record Store Day proper in 2017 wasn’t going to happen this time around, oh no…..
…or was it?
That sense of euphoria at being very likely to secure the new, limited-edition single was soon brought crashing down when we saw, much to our disappointment, this sign posted on the front door:
That was a blow. We’d checked their website earlier in the week and there’d been no indication of a delay. So we decided to stick around to see if the sign meant they hadn’t got all of their order, but possibly had received some.
When 9 o’clock rolled around and the doors finally opened the staff were very apologetic. They had in fact got zero of their entire Record Store Day order. No Paul McCartney, but nothing of anything else either. None. Zilch.
The only bright side to the story was that they were expecting the new Paul McCartney. It’d been confirmed from the supplier that the single was definitely included in their order and so, because we’d actually come into the store, they were prepared to take our name and put one aside. When will we get it? ‘I Don’t Know’. But we’ve got one!
UPDATE: Seems that there are two different pressings of this single, one for the US market and one for the UK. The US version is hand-numbered on the rear (from a total of 5600 copies) and comes with a non die-cut inner sleeve: 
While the UK/Europe version is not individually numbered on the rear, has no FBI anti-piracy logo on the rear, and comes with a die-cut inner sleeve that reveals the labels:
Just one more collecting wrinkle for those completists among us!
(Click on iamges for larger versions)
