SHOW NUMBER, UK
"This SHOW NUMBER unofficial tour programme dates from spring 1965 and was sold outside the UK concert venues where the artists featured inside played until it was updated at the end of the year. It includes the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones among several other leading touring and recording artists of the day.
It would have been on sale outside venues hosting Bob Dylan's April-May 1965 shows (as documented in D.A. Pennebacker's film DONT LOOK BACK) accompanied by Joan Baez - on the page opposite - who also made several high-profile UK appearances in her own right.
In the 1960s, the era of package tours, it was common to find people selling booklets like this outside UK concert halls. Even though some of them (like this one) had 'this is not a programme' in small lettering on the front, that's exactly what the sellers hoped the inexperienced, unwary and over-eager fans queueing to get in would think they were. Only when those fans got inside and saw the official tour programme would they realise that what they had just bought wasn't it. Obviously, some other fans who knew what they were bought them in addition to the official programme.
There were three main producers:
JK Smith was responsible for the original SHOW NUMBER. He was based in London and started printing and selling this kind of programme in the trad jazz era. He maintains he was the first to do so, and that the others copied him... This is probably true, as those others have suspiciously similar designs, and one of them even started off using the same title...
'Mybry' of Pegwell House, London also began producing a programme called SHOW NUMBER, though they later changed the name to SHOW BOOK,
Jack Vale of Blackpool, also responsible for Valex postcards, produced SHOW SOUVENIR, which used reproductions of the postcards for its illustrations.
For all that they were cynical cash-ins, these booklets often had more content than the official items... though not all of it strictly relevant to the show taking place at the venue that night. JK, Mybry and Jack would choose as many of the most popular artists of the day - those who could be guaranteed to have hits, plus those scheduled to play the UK circuit over the next couple of months - as they could cram into 10-20 pages, and source free or cheap photos of from record companies, publicity departments or direct from photographer contacts. Every few months, they would update the list of artists included to reflect what was hapening on the concert circuit at the time. Sometimes the photos of the artists that kept their place would be updated, too. But not that often..."
Information: Richmond0748, eBay seller. [0826]
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1960s
1970s
1980s
NEVER ENDING TOUR