NME gets lost in the basement

You'll have come across the strange story on the NME website last week which suggested that Jamie Oliver had found New Order and Joy Division mastertapes in the basement of his new restaurant, along with guns and gold. Complete with the certain statement that:

Oliver has since given everything found in the basement to the treasury.

The NME gave Holy Moly as the source for this.

Now, you probably thought 'if that was in any way true, why would Oliver have given the masters of a New Order album to the Treasury?', shrugged and moved on.

It turns out that the whole story was based on a misreading of a story on Manchester Confidential:

We had reported how £1.1m of assorted valuables (and a gun) had been left behind in the safety deposit boxes. But we never said anything about Joy Division master tapes being left there.

We’d put: ‘For each box there were two keys both of which had to be used to unlock the box. The person who rented the box had one key and the bank manager kept the other. All sorts were stored down there from diamonds and gold to the master tapes of Joy Division and New Order. When the bank was decommissioned prior to the restaurant refit a problem became apparent. Some of the boxes hadn't been emptied.’

The half-arsed story also appeared in Metro, but that's a sister paper of the Mail so you wouldn't expect them to bother with facts getting in the way, but, seriously, NME: what would make you think 'hello, here are some master tapes? They'd be crown property, then'?

[Thanks to the wonderful Morag]