Woke up this morning to a couple of intriguing emails.

First was big news from Apple. Seems they’ve listened to fan reaction and have decided to offer Anthology 4 as a separate purchase:

By popular demand, Anthology 4 is now available as a standalone triple LP and double CD — 36 tracks including 13 previously-unreleased demos, rare sessions from 1963–69, the band’s 2023 final single ‘Now and Then’, and new mixes by Jeff Lynne of ‘Free As a Bird’ and ‘Real Love’.

This means collectors won’t have to buy the box set just to get the much sought after 4th installment in the Anthology series. Good news!

Then came a mysterious email from the official John Lennon Store saying that the ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’ 7″ single on green vinyl was now available for pre-order:

A “What?”, closely followed by a “Why?” was heard. Hmmm. “Must investigate this some more. There has to be a reason this has randomly appeared out of nowhere.”

Then, scrolling further down the morning’s emails came this, with the headline: Introducing The Classic Holiday’s Singles Box Set!

Clicking through takes you to Universal’s udiscovermusic.com site and the announcement of a box set of 14 coloured vinyl Christmas singles from across the ages:

Of course it includes the John & Yoko/Plastic Ono Band green vinyl single, but also in there is the Paul McCartney holiday fave, ‘Wonderful Christmastime’ – on canary yellow vinyl:

The box set is kinda expensive but fortunately for those of you who collect coloured vinyl, as was just announced for Anthology 4, these too are available for purchase separately. Yay!

You can find ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’ here or here, and ‘Wonderful Christmastime’ here or here. Release date is October 31.

And, while we’re on the subject of coloured vinyl, last week Apple announced there’s to be a green vinyl release of Abbey Road:

This comes on heavyweight 180g green vinyl and is pressed using the version remixed from the original 8-track tapes by Giles Martin in 2019. In the UK this is exclusive to HMV stores, Target in the US, JB HiFi in Australia, Bravado in Germany, FNAC in France, Tower Records in Japan, The Circle in Denmark, etc. In other words, there will be one retailer per territory. It is released on October 10.