O.A.P's - Give Us The Right To Live

 

This 1970 release is one of the stranger records I acquired I do not recall ever hearing it played on the radio, like many things little has changed, one of my many jobs within the company I worked for was a spell in the Personnel group, I was in the Exit group dealing with people leaving the company, the work covered Age Retirement, Medical, Death In Service, Resignations and the largest part (at the time) Redundancy, on the redundancy side the most often asked question was "How can I get my whole Pension paid out as a lump sum" at the time it was not possible, you could only transfer it the another pension scheme, after I had left that group government rule changes allowed people to withdraw their pensions as lump sums.

The scans are from 45cat and are of my copy of the record, there is also a factory sample (not mine) it indicates that at least 100 copies were pressed, as part of the QA controls the 100th, 200th, 300th, etc. records was played, if the record was faulty the batch back to the last good record were rejected, the record that were played had a sticker put on them and were sold to the staff at a reduced rate, they are not as some people who try to sell them as promotional copies, generally the first 500 records were produced as promotional records and were supplied to Radio Stations, some D.J's and at one time record shops (so you could listen to the record before deciding to buy it). 

The rejected records were dumped, the children local to Hayes where EMI was based found out  where the records were dumped and started scavenging them, sales in the local record shops of EMI records declined, a number of children were interviewed about the records and all said they had 100's of records from the dump and all of them played perfectly.  

When I first started collecting records I could often get 10 for £1, on 45cat it has this record valued at £20 I think I paid £1 for my copy.

I am still trying to work out is this worse than the record by the Saucepan Lids or is the Saucepan Lids better than this record?

O.A.P's - Give Us The Right To Live (Part 1) (youtube.com)

O.A.P's - Give Us The Right To Live (Part 2) (youtube.com)