Bovey Traces

  When I was cataloguing my CD collection during the COVID lockdown, I came across several that my parents had bought. One that I found in the “various artists” section, Sixties Mix Two , reminded me of a late ‘80s musical trend that is little celebrated now – digital megamixes of rock-and-roll-era tracks, which peaked (or reached a nadir) with a short-lived phenomenon involving a cartoon rabbit... The 1988 compilation  Sixties Mix Two boasts on the sleeve 60 “original recordings”, implying that this wasn’t something to be taken for granted. This was probably due to the glut of cheap '50s/'60s compilations at the time featuring re-recordings of the original tracks by the original artists, but it also points to the predecessors of these types of megamixes. The early '80s saw several disco-style medleys hit the charts. The most famous of these were the Stars On 45 releases by Star Sound (which launched a wave of pastiches by contemporary acts such as Squeeze, Captain Sensi...

The first album that I ever bought (or, more accurately, that my dad bought) was actually two albums, and they were both by Stevie Wonder – Talking Book and Hotter Than July . The latter was on cassette while the former was on the relatively new compact disc (CD) format. My dad and I bought them at Woolworths in Coventry city centre in 1988, and we’d actually only planned to buy one album (or, more accurately, one song – ‘Happy Birthday’, the last track on Hotter Than July ). Not knowing at the time that it was a plea by Wonder to commemorate  the life of Martin Luther King Jr with an official US holiday, I wanted the song to play it on my ninth birthday, ideally on CD, as my dad had recently bought a new CD player extension to his Pioneer hi-fi. However, this branch of Woolies only had the song on cassette, and somewhat bizarrely, the lady on the music counter also brought out Talking Book because it was on CD (as if to offer my dad and me a compromise between the song we wanted a...