Game For All Who Know: The H & F Recordings Box / Various

Between 1968 and 1974, amateur songwriters, musicians and home taping enthusiasts Peter Howell and John Ferdinando - aka H & F Recordings - retreated to their makeshift home studio in East Sussex to mastermind a series of privately-issued albums that were attributed to semi-fictitious groups such as Ithaca and Agincourt. Only pressed in double-digit quantities, those albums are now amongst the most valuable vinyl artefacts of the era, with copies selling for upwards of £2,000 on the extremely rare occasions that they surface. A Game For All Who Know: The H & F Recordings Box gathers together all four albums and adds an unreleased-at-the-time fifth, the Friends LP Fragile, which was abandoned at acetate stage after Howell accepted an invitation in 1974 to join the BBC Radiophonic Workshop on a full-time basis. The first four albums are presented in miniature card sleeve replicas of the original vinyl artwork, while the Friends album recreates the duo's original plans for the artwork had the LP reached pressing stage. Taken from the original master tapes, and with a lavish booklet that features a new 7000-word essay on their activities, fresh interview quotes and previously unpublished photos, A Game For All Who Know constitutes the final, definitive word on a fascinating and hugely collectable body of work.