by JimN » 02 Jun 2021, 19:31
My copy of the cassette "An Hour Of The Shadows" was bought sometime in the mid-1980s, though it seems to have temporarily escaped entry into my collection database (then kept in paper and ink).
The commentary Paul and I wrote for the FB Group mentioned above is replicated below. Be aware that there is no claim on the EMI /MfP artwork that "Jigsaw" is a BBC recording. Quite the opposite: the recording is stated to have been published in 1967.
Anyway:
Album 036
An Hour Of The Shadows [MC compilation]
(EMI / MfP HR 4181123 4; May 1986)
["MC" = "musicassette", the official industry term for pre-recorded cassette.]
During 1985, there were no new Shadows UK releases, whether of new material or compilations. In May 1986, this cassette-only compilation of EMI material became available, as well as a new album on the Polydor label (see album 037, below).
SIDE ONE (and track origins):
1. Foot Tapper (single version) (Ø) - 1963 A-side (c/w The Breeze And I)
2. Friday On My Mind - “Jigsaw” LP (1967)
3. Winchester Cathedral - “Jigsaw” LP (1967)
4. Maria Elena - “Jigsaw” LP (1967)
5. Semi-Detached Suburban Mr James - “Jigsaw” LP (1967)
6. Jigsaw - “Jigsaw” LP (1967)
7. Stardust - “Jigsaw” LP (1967)
8. Trains And Boats And Planes - “Jigsaw” LP (1967)
9. Ranka-Chank (Ø) - “Rhythm And Greens” EP (1964)
10. What A Lovely Tune (Ø) - 1962 B-side (c/w Guitar Tango)
11. Little 'B' - “Out Of The Shadows” LP (1962)
SIDE TWO (and track origins):
1. Shindig - 1963 A-side (c/w It’s Been A Blue Day)
2. Shazam! (1963 studio version) - 1963 B-side (c/w Geronimo)
3. Rhythm And Greens) - 1964 Single A-side (c/w The Miracle)
4. Genie With The Light Brown Lamp - 1964 A-side (c/w Little Princess)
5. Walkin' - “Wonderful Life” soundtrack LP (1964)
6. All My Sorrows (v) - “The Shadows” LP (1961)
7. I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Arthur (Ø) - 1965 B-side (c/w The War Lord)
8. The Frightened City - 1961 A-side (c/w Back Home)
9. Mustang - “The Shadows” [Mustang] EP (1961)
10. Alice In Sunderland - 1965 B-side (c/w Stingray)
11. Slaughter On 10th Avenue - 1969 A-side (c/w Midnight Cowboy, HBM)
[Ø = mock-stereo]
This was part of an EMI / Music for Pleasure series of cassette compilations, credited to various artists and groups of artists under the generic title of “An Hour of...”. They included:
“An Hour Of Disney Hits” (various),
“An Hour of Superthemes” (Geoff Love),
“An Hour Of Ravel, Fauré and Debussy” (various)
“An Hour Of Strauss” (London Philharmonic Orchestra),
“An Hour Of The Hits Of 1961” (various)
"An Hour Of The Hits Of 1962" (various) and
“An Hour Of Bert Weedon” (guess who), as well as “An Hour Of The Shadows”.
And that’s just the ones I have in my collection. This was the second half of the 1980s, and two things were happening in the record collecting world.
The first was the big issue about whether to change to Compact Disc. Announced in 1983, CD promised “perfect sound forever” plus a certain amount of physical convenience and extra capacity, but the discs were expensive - £10 and up against the LP price of about £5 - and the players were very expensive, originally starting at around £500 (around 1.5% of the price of an average UK house). That was the pull factor. The push factor was the plummeting quality of common or garden vinyl pressings, which were visibly and audibly inferior to the product available in previous decades, lighter in weight, more flexible (is that a good thing?) and noisy, with plenty of click, pops and distortion.
I wasn’t sure I could afford to swap to CD (I didn’t have a spare £500 for a start, and a tenner a time for discs didn’t sound too attractive either). But buying on cassette – which at least avoided vinyl’s clicks and scratches - seemed a reasonable compromise. Obviously, like most audio users, I had a cassette deck. The record industry had another reason to push tape. Throughout the seventies and eighties, they were running a persuasion campaign against domestic recording, under the slogan “Home taping is killing music”. I’m not sure that this was fully justified, because not every album dubbed to cassette would have resulted in a sale of the LP if the copying process hadn’t been available, but there was obviously something in it. One of the ideas that occurred to EMI was that if they promoted the sale of pre-recorded cassettes, this itself would militate against home-taping because most users were set up to copy from vinyl or radio to tape, whereas tape to tape wasn’t so easy if you wanted to maintain quality. True, there were twin cassette ghetto-blasters, but they tended to come without tape-type switching, without bias switching and without noise reduction facilities (Dolby or Dbx) as well as with cheaper and less reliable tape transport mechanisms. As a tactic, it worked. By 1990, cassettes were significantly outselling vinyl (and both were still outselling CD).
So I felt justified in buying more cassettes, though I couldn’t bring myself to do this for Shadows releases, where I continued to buy vinyl. Except for this one, that is, because it had no vinyl version. Compiled from tracks between the spring of 1961 (The Frightened City) and late 1969 (Slaughter On 10th Avenue), this was an unwontedly eclectic mix of LP tracks, EP tracks (just two, or three, depending on how you count them) and six (or seven) 45rpm sides. Early on, one’s eye is drawn to a consecutive seven tracks from the 1967 album “Jigsaw”. That is the only LP treated to such coverage though and the rest of the collection is drawn from more disparate sources.
One of the more intriguing features is the (un-noted) presence of four tracks in mock-stereo. The first of these was Foot Tapper (the 45rpm single), in its processed version – attributed to Bruce Welch - first heard on the LP “20 Golden Greats” in 1977. This had been created, almost certainly, because of the unfortunate pulsing effect on the rhythm guitar audible in the true stereo mix. The next reprocessed track was Ranka-Chank from “Rhythm And Greens”, which had been presented in this form on the Shadows’ first MfP LP, “Walkin’ With…”, in 1970. The reason for that is a mystery, since the track does exist in true stereo and had been issued on its source EP in 1964. What A Lovely Tune had never, at that stage, been presented in true stereo (it seems that the master tape had been misplaced) and it too had been a mock-stereo track on “Walkin’ With…”. I Wish I Could Shimmy… had been subjected to the same process on the same disc. That last track would have to wait until the 1990 release of “The Early Years” for a UK stereo debut, whilst What A Lovely Tune was eventually found and re-issued in stereo on the 1997 CD “The Shadows At Abbey Road”. Although “Walkin’ With…” was a compilation, it seems that it had been influential here. Seven of its twelve tracks were repeated and each of them in the same stereo format.
The tale doesn’t quite end there. As Paul Wray has noted, and in keeping with what happened to some of the other “An Hour Of…” cassette compilations mentioned above, Music for Pleasure intended to re-issue this collection on CD in 1988 (on their Compacts For Pleasure sub-label), but it didn’t happen.
Annotations by Paul Wray:
The cassette was issued with either a transparent or an opaque white shell.
“An Hour Of The Shadows” was listed in the EMI release sheets for June 1988 as a CD release on the “Compacts For Pleasure” label with the catalogue number CC210. It never appeared.
Last edited by
JimN on 03 Jun 2021, 10:49, edited 2 times in total.
