Full Q: On the back of the 17 single Stephen says he recorded 23 new
songs 12 were included on I Love My Friends, and 8 were to accompany the 3CD set of 17... However there are only 7 extra songs on that set... Does anyone know what the 8th one was going to be?

A: There were nine extra songs on 17 (3CD set), yes a version of Hanging
Around had been released but this one is different and was re-recorded
without Alex James specifically to be released by Stephen as a solo artist.
So that added to the 12 (real songs) on ILMF makes 21. The only song that we can confirm was scheduled for I Love My Friends but didn't make it was "Hard For Her" which finally appeared on the b-side of "A Dream That We All Share" there may have been another one but Stephen has never mentioned what that track was. Stephen has a habit of sidelining extremely good songs either temporarily or permanently. Some make comebacks years later in a reworked form ("The Silence" was written for Paradise Circus 14 years previous to it's inclusion on Keep Going, for example). A couple of songs that we know about which were recorded around that time were Suburban Symphony and An Open Book. Chris was sent a different version of An Open Book in about 2001 and Suburban Symphony in 2002. They had been unearthed on SONY promo CDs which have not since come to light and only a few dozen were ever made up. When Stephen realised they had been found he decided to put them to official use, Suburban Symphony on a charity compilation and An Open Book accidentally appeared on Keep Going.

A: The Fontana disc that you are referring to is a CDVideo or CDV (not to be
confused with a VCD which is totally different and incompatible). There are
several types of machines that will play this CDV. You can buy a dedicated
LaserDisc player. LaserDisc was a popular format worldwide from the very
late 1970s to the late 1990s. There are many different models available and
you can see most of them here http://www.laserdiscarchive.co.uk/ . Only a
couple of machines are capable of playing DVDs at the same time as CDV and LaserDisc and they are the Pioneer DVL-909 and DVL-919. These are very sought after and change hands for about £250 to £400 regularly on eBay purely due to their multiformat compatibility.

A: There was never a LILCD1. This issue arises due to the Swordfish release of RTY. This was Lilac 1 in 7inch form. It was not released on CD, if it had
been, it would have been LILCD1. It was not even proposed as a CD release.

So when Fontana started to release Lilac Time singles it took up the list
following on from Lilac 1 with Lilac 2 etc. But it had to start the CDs from
LILCD2 for this to make any sense.