My boyfriend and I went to Zavvi, where I snapped this picture of the dance section:
It's like an eerie vision of the future, where everything has been packaged into separate compartments (Ibiza chillout, summer dance, funky house etc), but everyone is impossibly attractive because they're made out of plastic. And the content is all the same. Zavvi is not my kind of shop, but the boyfriend did find re-pressings of The Cars' Greatest Hits and The Art of Noise, for £2 each. Although we're usually eco-conscious to the point of being eco-bores, he asked for a plastic bag (well, we need something to put the rubbish in). It was hilariously large, and pictured here with the Norton Complete Shakespeare for scale:
And that Norton Shakespeare is BIG. We also browsed Probe Records, but left empty handed. In Hairy Records I picked out Roxy Music's Music For Your Pleasure, and the boyfriend selected a Stock, Aitken and Waterman compilation called The Hit Factory (of course). When I was sticking it onto the turntable at home, two press releases fell out:
The text is the same, but one is double spaced. Are they the former property of a SAW completist who bought them? Or was it a promo copy? They're dated 14 October 1987, but the record was released 12 October 1987. Nice to know that Stylus Music had the marketing campaign was well planned. As press releases go, it's a good one as it's full of facts. And there's no purple prose, unless you count the badly punned title of "Stylus score spectacular coup with SAW collection". The 12" had a dealer price of £4.17, and RRP of £5.99, while the CD dealer price was £8.34, RRP £11.99. The TV advertising campaign had a £500,000 budget, and there's even a Telex number at the bottom. The past really is a foreign country. I don't really to keep them, but don't want to chuck them in the recycling (yawn, eco-bore). If you want me to post you these pieces of SAW history (you know you do), email me at takeittothechorus@gmail.com.
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