Early Octopussy CD

One of my favorite parts of doing these CD sales is seeing discs that I had read about for decades but never actually held in my hands.

One of those is the very first CD of Octopussy, which was pressed by A&M Records only in Germany (then West Germany, that’s how old this is) circa 1985, and soon withdrawn.

Take a look at the cover credits and you’ll see what was obviously some kind of paste-up error (in the old days of physical photo prep):

The LP has the full credits: “Music Composed and Conducted by” and so forth:

Curiously, comparing them, I never noticed that the “All Time High” and “Rita Coolidge” were blue on the CD, but red on the LP. So it must have been newly done for the CD, but left incomplete by accident.

Here are pix of the rest of the package:

Please ignore my filthy keyboard captured in the photo...

I love those old days when they were putting the track titles on the disc face, the way they used to with LPs—never mind it was completely impossible to read anything when the disc was spinning.

Ah, yes, those old page-long, multilingual discriptions of AAD, ADD and DDD, when “digital” was some kind of Holy Grail.

But it does remind me what a godsend CDs were. No more scratches, vinyl wearing out, pops and skips—every play was immaculate and identical, incredible! I hope people appreciate what we completely take for granted now.

We have one copy of this, we’re asking $35, and it’ll probably sell in a few minutes once people read this blog post. Of course with the La-La Land edition, it’s not like the music isn’t otherwise available (though it seems to be temporarily out of stock over there) but this reminds a super cool Bond collectible.

There are some other nifty, vintage discs like this that I will pull out and write up—if they don’t sell first!