Distribution and EP Release
A short time later, Harris and Murray presented a copy of the tape to a DJ named Neal Kay, then running a heavy metal club in Kingsbury, North West London called the Bandwagon Soundhouse. Impressed with the demo, Kay began playing the tape heavily and eventually "Prowler" reached No. 1 in the Soundhouse charts, which were published in Sounds magazine. In addition to gaining the band exposure in Sounds, the demo tape also reached Rod Smallwood, who would soon become the group's manager and help them acquire their record deal with EMI in December 1979.
In late 1979, while waiting to sign their deal with EMI, the band decided to release the demo on their own label, Rock Hard Records, on 9 November 1979. Entitled The Soundhouse Tapes after Kay's club, Steve Harris explains that they decided to release the EP "because everywhere we'd go we'd do really well at the gigs, and then afterwards there'd be, like, all these fans asking where they could buy one of our records and when we told 'em there wasn't any yet they couldn't believe it. They'd seen the charts in Sounds and a lot of 'em just assumed we must already have a record deal of some kind, but we didn't. Not then. So then, they'd be, like, 'Well, where can we get a copy of the tape?' And I think that's when we really got the idea of putting the Spaceward demo out as an actual record." Although the original demo had included four songs, "Strange World" was excluded from the record as the band were unsatisfied with the quality of the track's production.
Deciding to release the EP as a memento for fans, the group only printed 5,000 copies, 3,000 of which were sold by mail order in the first week. The EP was so successful that Rod Smallwood reports that several fans asked for copies of The Soundhouse Tapes at their local record stores, to the point where HMV and Virgin tried to order 20,000 copies each. Smallwood states, "we could have really cashed in at that point. It was our record, not EMI's, and we could have made enough to clear our debts, if we'd wanted to, maybe got it in the charts, even. But there was just no way. It really was something special for the true die-hard Maiden fans, and we'd already made that quite clear. If we'd changed our minds, just to get our hands on a bit of cash, it would have been selling out the kids who'd gone to all the trouble to send in for one of the original 5,000 copies. We thought, 'No, we'll wait until we can do it properly with EMI.'" Today, the EP is considered a valuable collector's item, with Record Collector reporting in 2011 that copies of the original have been purchased at up to £800.
Read more about this topic: The Soundhouse Tapes
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