Well, this is annoying. My Wham! CD box set finally arrived in the post. I put on CD1, which is 6 different versions of ‘Wham Rap’. But it isn’t. Thanks to a mastering error, track 5 is not the relatively rare Special U.S. Remix, but instead is the extended mix of ‘Young Guns’. Major stuff-up right there.
Commenters at Super Deluxe Edition have highlighted the issue, so it isn’t just a problem with my disc. And it’s not even the case that we’re getting one of the many missing mixes from the compilation by accident. That same extended mix of ‘Young Guns’ is on CD2 as well, which is the logical place for it.
It’s certainly not unknown for box sets to have tracklisting stuff-ups, especially when there are multiple mixes included which may have only subtle audio differences. But this isn’t a case of including the wrong mix – it is literally the wrong song. Someone just wasn’t paying attention.
The Young Guns extended mix is described on the box set as the US Special 12″ Mix, though some of the different vinyl releases didn’t use that name. I’d guess that someone just pulled the wrong “US mix” for the master, and none of the dozens of folks listed as involved with the project ever listened to it properly.
It’s a particularly annoying omission because the Special US Re-mix is not available anywhere else on CD to my knowledge.
So far, I haven’t been able to find any official acknowledgement of the problem on the Wham! Twitter or official site. Hopefully somebody at Sony will pull their finger out eventually and organise replacement discs. I don’t want to have just settle for a YouTube version!
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