#shapedpicturedisc

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Here is something you don’t see everyday: A UK shaped picture disc and a rare uncut copy of the same record! This is The Art of Noise’s “Paranoimia,” a collaboration with 1980s fictional character Max Headroom. I found the uncut version years ago for virtually nothing (the store didn’t realize what it was) and then didn’t come across a finished, cut version until recently. Surely few uncut copies ever made it out of the factory, so it’s a treat to finally own both “Before” and “After” versions. 


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I found this Prince “Paisley Park” shaped UK picture disc a few weeks ago and it’s beautiful in person. It sure LOOKS the part, too, as that illustration looks like it fell out of a British children’s picture book from the eighties, no question. 


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My vinyl record of the Star Wars: The Mandalorian theme showed up today, pre-ordered back in March. Ready to give Baby Yoda a spin!

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I’ve never been a Dead or Alive fan - just not my vibe - but that didn’t stop me from picking up a great-looking U.K. shaped picture disc. Uniquely, it came with a cardboard plinth so that you could display it on a shelf (!); it has never been assembled, but you can see it in the subsequent photos - it turns buying a record into an origami craft! 😂


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I spotted this UK shaped picture disc in a shop and how could I resist? I mean, a record shaped like Styx’s Mr. Roboto himself? Ironically, it’s not for the song “Mr. Roboto” itself, but the drippy follow-up single, “Don’t Let It End.” Perhaps a bigger mistake than not having the character’s own song on this was the choice of B-side: the classic rock staple, “Rockin’ The Paradise,” from earlier in Styx’s career. Not only is it a better song, serving to highlight how mundane the A-side is, but listening to it for the first time in decades, I discovered something I never realized before: It owes a MASSIVE debt to Queen. The phrase “heavily influenced” definitely comes to mind here. On the other hand, if you’re going to draw from other sources for inspiration, borrow from the best—and that’s what they did.


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This UK shaped picture disc of Robert Palmer’s mid-80s staple, “Addicted to Love,” illustrates something that pretty much everyone on both sides has been doing today while watching the impeachment hearings: The Facepalm. 


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I have always been a sucker for gimmicky records, so when I saw these shaped UK picture discs from the mid80s for Bananarama, I grabbed them without a second thought. I’m sure the song, which I’ve never heard of (“Do Not Disturb”), must suck, because that’s what Bananarama songs do (Notable exceptions: Their cover of the Doobie Brothers’ “Long Train Running” (I kid you not) and “Cruel Summer,” with that fat analog synth bass line and the swankiest xylophone of the 1980s). You have to feel bad for the marketing guy at their label—their main appeal was that they were as if the girls next door became famous for no reason, which means they were cute but not knockouts, and their singing was “first song of karaoke night at 7PM” level at best—so how do you market that? With gimmicky records—and it worked, even 30+ years later on the other side of the Atlantic in a used record store. PS: What unfortunate—and surely not coincidental—placement of the spindle holes.

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I finally found the last of the Police badge record set. In the U.S., record companies rarely produced shaped picture discs (unlike the U.K., where they were made all the time), so that made this trio of circa 1980 badge-shaped discs by The Police very unusual and likewise impossible to find. Huzzah!