The Can - Bootleg LP Box Set

This is probably one of the most unique bootlegs and one of my personal favourites for the simple fact that it's very well done. This one started surfacing around 1990, and it comes in durable plastic film canister measuring 12.5" in length with a 1" width. The front cover has a brassy/gold coloured sticker featuring a drawing of Kate, and the back of the canister has a simple sticker with the "limited edition" number on it. Mine finally fell off after all these years, but it really doesn't matter as there's another one on the inside of the canister. This box set is limited to 500 copies and mine is number #055.

The canister comes with several different things. The first thing is this t-shirt with Kate's image on it - it's the same image found on the canister cover. The interesting thing is that they split the t-shirts up into five different colours, so there are 100 red shirts, 100 blue shirts, 100 yellow shirts, 100 white shirts and 100 grey shirts. If I recall correctly, there really wasn't any way of knowing which colour shirt you got until you opened the thing up.

It also comes with a four page press review and sticker. The sticker is attached to the first page, which is single-sided and basically just lists the tracks on the LP included in this set. The other three pages are multi-coloured and double-sided. They consist of photocopies of magazine articles, lyrics to the songs on the LP, some of Kate's poetry from school and other random things. If some of my scans look smeared or smudged to the point where you can't actually read some of the text on the photocopies, it can't be helped. The problem lies with the photocopies themselves.

Lastly, there's an LP included. It's basically a collection of rare tracks featuring Kate. At the time most of these were considered rare tracks because they either weren’t easily accessible, or you literally had to buy every album from every artist in order to get them all. These days an LP like this is totally redundant because you can easily find all of these songs on sites like You Tube.

The labels on the LP have been copied from the Breathing single, and it may interest you to know that the record does have surprisingly excellent sound quality. It's probably one of the few bootlegs out there that does.

The Can is one bootleg set that rarely ever shows up these days.