Klaatu - Klaatu/ Hope [CD]

1976 and 1977 albums from Canadian band Klaatu, originally released on Capitol Records. Their big hit was 'Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft' which was an even bigger hit single for the Carpenters, whose version reached the UK Top 10 and the US Top 40. The story goes (according to the official Klaatu website) that The Beatles recorded an album in 1966 which was to be the follow up to 'Revolver', but the master tapes had been lost. This was also the time when Paul McCartney had supposedly died in a car crash, so the remaining trio recruited McCartney lookalike Billy Shears, and with him recorded the 'Sergeant Pepper' album. In 1975 – it says here – the tapes were rediscovered and Lennon, Harrison, Starr and Shears decided to release the album as a tribute to their dead bass player. And if you believe that… The thing was that the Klaatu project was anonymous, with no names on the sleeve or the record, so there were many theories about who it was. The fact that it was a record company hype, designed to produce maximum publicity for an unknown act, only became clear later. Another thing which apparently made many American Beatles fanatics wonder if there could be any truth in the rumour was that the first Klaatu album was released by Capitol, the label on which Beatles records were released in America. Added to that, the songs were published by a company called Klaatoons (could be a Beatle joke) and this company was attached to CAPC, the Canadian copyright association. There had been a rumour circulating that John Lennon was going to move to Toronto to escape from the attentions of the US government, so the idea wasn't completely off the wall.