Elvis... From Beyond the Grave

Issued just two years after he died, The Elvis Presley Séance  has to be one of the most bizarre Elvis-related albums of all time – and the most tasteless.

The album, released to coincide with the second anniversary of Presley’s death, features an ‘unedited’ recording of a seance with Elvis Presley that was conducted on 24 July 1979 at a Spiritualist Church in North London, according to the rather vague sleevenotes: the event actually took place in a hall in Watford. The seance was led by Carmen Rogers (a renowned medium, apparently, again according to the sleeve notes), narrated by Stuart Colman, and was attended by Theresa Currie (representative of the official Elvis Presley fan club), two reporters and a photographer from the Sunday People and a handful of others, including Rogers’ and Coleman’s respective spouses. Perhaps unsurprisingly this was not the first Elvis séance album issued: a similar record appeared the previous year in the States: A Séance With Elvis: The King Lives On and Talks to the World From Beyond the Grave

Shadow records pressed 5,000 copies of The Elvis Presley Séance, a large number of which ended up in bargain bins: you can still pick up copies today for under a tenner. 

The Watford séance was featured in an article in The Sunday People the following weekend, an article that Shadow Records used to promote the sales of the album. It didn’t help. It's just so random. Why would the ghost of Elvis suddenly turn up in London, a city he never visited? Unsurprisingly Elvis fails to speak on the album, however Carmen Rogers assures those present that he spoke very clearly to her.

In 2004 the Sydney Morning Herald featured its own list of the 20 “strangest albums ever made” and included the Elvis Presley Seance at number 13. The same list had Marcel Marceau Speaks at number six and Ali and His Gang vs Mr Tooth Decay at number three. that reviewer commented that “Elvis seances are often held on his birthday (January 8) or the anniversary of his death (August 16), and it can only be hoped that they are not all as boring as this one.” How right he was.

Carmen Rogers had previously made the papers when, In March 1976, Reveille magazine published her account of the most notorious murderer in British history. Carmen called him Charlie the Ripper and described him as “a nondescript sort of man, with a thin face and pasty complexion, deceptively strong in the arms and hands, aged about thirty-four, or thirty-five, and who worked in the fish trade. He was unable to form normal sexual relations with women, hence took out his frustration by killing and mutilating them instead.” The previous year she had been called on to help with regular sightings of a ghostly apparition on a runway at Heathrow Airport. She announced that the ‘ghost’ was of a man called Thomas Alperton who had died in a crash in 1948. Alperton, she claimed, did not know he was dead, but after she made contact with him he did not appear again.

Anyway, here’s the whole damn thing for you. I've not added streaming links as no one in their right mind is going to want to listen to this pap for pleasure, however, if you are as perverse and twisted as I am I guess you may well want to download a copy.

 

Enjoy!

Download Side One HERE

Download Side Two HERE