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Catch as Catch Can cought

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January 1, 2000 - The past year was rather astonishing for Kim Wilde fans looking for the hard-to-find first ever Kim Wilde Compact Disc, "Catch as catch can". No less than three times it appeared on Ebay, the worldwide auctioning site. And every time, enormous amounts were paid for these items. The most recent acquisition was made in December by Tom Burton. He tells his story to KimWilde.com...

The first two copies of the Japanese CD "Catch as catch can" as released in 1983, were offered in September. Both were bid on frantically, with one ending up costing $300 and the second one $265. That seemed to be the end of it, since no further copies appeared on the Ebay site for a long time.
Until December 4th, that is. With the appearance of another copy of "Catch as catch can" a true war began. The second auction had already caused 11 bids, this one counted 37 bids by two persons. The final amount the winner of the auction had to pay was a staggering $405.

People may wonder: 'what causes someone to pay more than 20 times the amount of a regular CD?'. There's only one person who knows, and that's the winner of the auction, Tom Burton.

"I think that the price reached such a high level because one other bidder and I were battling to win it", he explains. "I would normally wait until later in the auction to bid so as not to drive the price upwards, but on ebay, a seller has the option to close an auction early and sell the item privately. The buyer has to be the current high bidder at the time of the auction close. Since this disc is so rare, I did not want to take a chance of someone negotiating with the seller to do this so I made sure that I was the high bidder throughout the auction. I think that this drove up the price to possibly an unrealistic level. I will be curious to see when another copy is offered, what kind of bids it receives. I had searched for a copy since I found out about this disc in 1984. A friend actually purchased a new copy in 1986 so I always knew for certain that it existed. To me, although the disc was released in the Originals box set, this disc is the very first Kim cd ever issued in the world. I think that contributes to the continued interest in it as well as the fact that since it was manufactured in 1983, CD production quantities were extremely limited and this album was also a commercial failure for Kim. All these things contributed to its limited availability and to it maintaining its desireability as a collectable."

"I felt kind of bad about winning it", Tom adds, "because I think that the other person wanted it as badly as I did. Hopefully another will be made available so other Kim fans will have a chance to buy a copy."