There are records and then there are records. 

Most of what passes through our hands is great vinyl. Well pressed, well graded, music worth owning. But every now and then something arrives that makes us stop.

This month's insert is one of those.

Queen. Sheer Heart Attack. Not the UK pressing you can find on any record fair table. Not a reissue or a remaster. This is the original Japanese pressing on Warner Pioneer, catalogue number P-10137E, complete with the original red OBI strip intact with all the inserts and is a immaculate as we've ever seen. 

The OBI strip is everything. That narrow band of paper wrapped around the left spine of a Japanese import is not just decoration. It is provenance. It is the original point of sale, still attached after fifty years, carrying the original retail price of ¥2,500 and the full Japanese tracklisting. When an OBI goes, it goes forever. This one hasn't gone anywhere.

The record itself grades EX on both sides. The sleeve grades EX. This is not a record that has been played to death and sold on. Someone kept this carefully for a long time.

Sheer Heart Attack was the album that made Queen impossible to ignore. Released in 1974, it arrived between their promising debut run and the world-conquering A Night at the Opera, and it contains some of the most confident, varied and genuinely strange rock music of that decade. Killer Queen. Now I'm Here. Stone Cold Crazy. Brighton Rock. Thirteen tracks that cover more ground than most bands manage in a career.

The Japanese market in the 1970s pressed records with a care and consistency that was simply different from the rest of the world. The vinyl was heavier, the quality control was tighter, and the presentation — the OBI, the inner sleeves, the liner notes translated into Japanese with the band photographed in full — treated the record as an object worth respecting.

This copy has been with us for a little while. We have been waiting for the right moment to let it go.

That moment is this month.

As always, this will be inserted in to one of either a Studio, Arena or Collectors Cut Pack.