According to Aftonbladet, a SCORPIONS album advertisement classified as child pornography ran for 24 hours on Tradera, popular online marketplace and classifieds site from Sweden, before being removed.
Back in 2015, a Swedish court ruled that an image of a naked girl on the SCORPIONS‘ 1976 album “Virgin Killer” found at the home of a 53-year-old pedophile’s home could be considered pornographic material.
On Friday, an ad appeared for a copy of the album on Tradera. In the announcement, the seller pointed out that it was an uncensored copy of the original album cover.
Ten offers were made to purchase the LP, including one for 352 Swedish kronor (approximately $40), before the ad was pulled. Now the advertiser is at risk of being reported to the police.
“We will take a closer look at the specific case,” Tradera‘s head of security, Niclas Hjelm, told Aftonbladet. “This is an album that shows up [on Tradera] from time to time and that we shut down as soon as ads for it are noticed.”
Asked if Tradera will contact the police over the incident, Hjelm said: “If it is a question of suspected violations of the law and not just violations of our policy, we make our reports to the police.”
SCORPIONS guitarist Rudolf Schenker told Blasting Zone in a 2007 interview that the original “Virgin Killer” cover was the record company’s idea. “The record company guys were like, ‘Even if we have to go to jail, there’s no question that we’ll release that,'” he said. Explaining the original idea behind the album title, Rudolf said: “On the song ‘Virgin Killer’, time is the virgin killer. But then, when we had to do the interviews about it, we said ‘Look, listen to the lyrics and then you’ll know what we’re talking about. We’re using this only to get attention. That’s what we do.’ Even the girl, when we met her fifteen years later, had no problem with the cover.’
He added: “Growing up in Europe, sexuality — of course not with children — was very normal. The lyrics really say it all. Time is the virgin killer. A kid comes into the world very naïve, they lose that naiveness and then go into this life losing all of this getting into trouble. That was the basic idea about all of it.”
A year earlier, former SCORPIONS guitarist Uli Jon Roth also blamed the band’s record label for the original “Virgin Killer” cover, telling Classic Rock Revisited: “Looking at that picture today makes me cringe. It was done in the worst possible taste. Back then I was too immature to see that. Shame on me — I should have done everything in my power to stop it.”
