JUSTIN HAWKINS BUYS HIS OWN RECORD

We're not even going to start to speculate how Justin Hawkins found out that the Australian Ebay site was flogging a pre-release copy of One Way Ticket To Hell... and Back, but as soon as he heard, he swung into action, and forced the price up to a point where he paid £350 for his own album:

"I've bought our own album back off this character who's selling it on eBay," the singer told the BBC News website. It cost me £350 and it's going to be a tenner when it's in the shops - with artwork.

It's encoded so we'll have a name and a number - so we'll know which disc it is, who distributed it and who they distributed it to. And that person is going to go down.

He is either going to get some sort of legal intervention or he certainly won't receive an album from our record company ever again."

We love the idea that "that person is going to go down" like he's a nark or summat and this is Cell Block H. We're unaware of the supposed encoding of pre-release discs ever being used to track someone before, so this should be an interesting test case.

Drummer Ed Graham added that the culprit "should really be sacked" if it is someone in the music business.

Lacking, perhaps, some sense of proportion here - but then he is a drummer, we guess.

The BPI is jumping on the story to refresh its banging on about Ebay being full of evils:

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI), which represents UK record labels, said the scale of counterfeit and unauthorised selling on eBay had got "out of hand".

"Time and again, we have seen eBay being abused by individuals seeking to make a quick profit on the back of our members' copyrights," a BPI spokesman said.

Of course, the real beef the music industry has with Ebay is the perfectly legitimate selling of second-hand records on the site. It suits the BPI to suggest that discs for sale on there might be in some way dodgy.

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