Did piero scaruffi review the lost albums?
CONTEXT: https://www.scaruffi.com/vol6/boardsof.html (first and second paragraphs)
Ok so if you don’t know who piero scaruffi is, he’s a well known music critic (quite possibly the first on the internet actually) and I was messing around on his website, searching artist I liked and by searching BOC I noticed that he had reviews written for catalog 3, closes 1, play by number and acid memories, which is quite strange considering they’re all considered as lost media.
So what the hell is up with that???? I doubt he’s lying because for having browsed his website obsessively for over a year now he’s always stroke me as an honest and unbiased guy. Also the amount of conversation I’ve seen about this is practically is so small, it’s kind of weird.
So what do you guys think of this, have any of you actually tried contacting him or have any insights on what’s going on here?
I also emailed him yesterday about it but he Hasn’t responded yet
Posted Feb 5, 2022, 5:06 PM UTC
This has been a subject of discussion on the Twoism forums and quite a few people accuse him of lying or talking out his ass.
Another possibility is that he found fakes and did not realize they were fakes and is giving an opinion based on those fakes. It happens / used to happen a lot that a "rare" BoC bootleg album would surface only to turn out to be mislabeled songs by another artist.
My own theory is that Scaruffi is not so much lying as extrapolating stuff from things he has read somewhere, and never bothering to correct something once it's up.
I don't think he gives a crap about BoC to be honest, all he cares about is his idiosyncratic, bonkers view on the history of rock which he tells at length on his website in a very pompous, very non-rigorous and non-academic style.
He actually answered my email
Hi, I get this question almost every month... I should post the answer on my page about BoC... The answer is: i gave all my cassettes away for free a long time ago. So, whatever i had is gone, and i don't remember who got what. Many tapes of British music came from my friend Anne, who certainly does not remember what she did 25 years ago (she went on to become a Cambridge Univ scientist). Judging from my notes, those cassettes were garbage (4/10). I don't remember if i went to their website in the 2000s. I don't even know if they had a website back then. Not many bands did. Sorry.
Don’t really know what to make of it tbh. Kinda wanna ask who Anne is and if I can contact her but the way he describes her makes it seem kind of fishy
For what it's worth, BoC did have a website in the 1990s as part of the EHX website at first and then at the url boardsofcanada.com which has been active ever since the year 2000.
The question remains open as to whether he's completely full of shit or whether he just listened to fakes... I really don't believe the tapes from "Anne" could have been the real deal because if they had been real, they probably would have resurfaced in some form later like the other early BoC stuff that is currently available.
But anyway, it really does sound like I'm right so far as his interest in BoC goes. He just doesn't care.
Sounds like he reviewed some fakes and is aware of it. What a turd.
Yeah I guess so. The Anne part really killed any credibility left for me. I just wanna hear those damn albums before I die man
I just looked up "Piero Scaruffi Anne" on google and this link showed up: https://www.scaruffi.com/travel/
The title is "The Wall of Fame: Friends of piero" haha. It has anne's name as an inductee but the links to the inductees are broken. Given that, he is probably referring to that Anne. I would say it is impossible to know whether she really did give him those tapes or not.
Edit: the pictures are probably somewhere on the Internet Archive.