As trailed here previously, The Singles Album was the first recorded music I ever bought, in 1976 or early '77 (Remember You're a Womble doesn't count because my mother chose that, and it didn't come out of pocket money). Here it is: that very same cassette. I only half liked it at the time, and at one point I effectively pawned it to my parents when I was short of pocket money: I don't think I ever repaid the loan, but I repossessed the cassette anyway, when they weren't looking or had forgotten.
It still plays perfectly well, and I get more out of it than I did 32 years ago — as with so many other things.
Look at how cheap and lazy United Artists were with their cover design. The original 1975 LP cover can be seen here. For the cassette version they couldn't even be bothered to take a detail from that design and rearrange the titles for more rectangular cassette shape: they just shrunk the square design right down and topped and tailed it with some vanilla typesetting. But it gets worse. For the CD version, EMI seem to have done some crude photocopying, deleting the word "album" and changing the tracklisting, but also add a horrible tint that removes most of the detail from the original photo and changes Dame Shirley's skin tone considerably. Still, the CD inlay card does provide full details of all the songwriters and publishing rights.
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