The big record deal

An English retelling from Kjell Moberg's manuscript.

A German company offered Punishment Park a route into wider distribution, and we signed on 13 January 1992. We recorded The Return Of The Shovel Police at Delta Studio, but the promised release and master tapes stalled. By keeping the correspondence in writing and securing a DAT copy, I protected the album as the deal collapsed.

In late 1991, a German music company offered Punishment Park a route into wider distribution. Claes and I flew to Hamburg, studied the proposal and accepted the risk of contributing to production in exchange for European reach. The contract was signed on 13 January 1992. We recorded The Return Of The Shovel Police in one week at Delta Studio in June, with the release planned for the following year.

The promised master DAT and 24-track tapes did not arrive, and the release date kept moving. I pressed for a copy in writing and eventually secured the DAT in January 1993. When the album still did not appear, we used the copy for promotional cassettes and kept working from the documentation we had preserved. The deal later fell apart; The Return Of The Shovel Police did not receive its own physical release until 2000 on our label, while parts of the recording travelled through tapes and compilations. This is my recollection of a recording project whose distribution never matched what we had been promised.