Before Amazon — before the internet even existed — there was the catalogue.
For anyone who never had the pleasure, this was a vast slab of glossy paper, thumped through your letterbox like an oversized Bible of consumer desire. It sold everything: ladies’ underwear (always the most dog-eared pages), lawnmowers, jewellery, children’s toys, and garden sheds that never looked as good in real life.
Every item came with instalment terms: £1.20 a week for 38 weeks or similar. No APRs listed, of course — but the interest rates were quietly usurious. Local catalogue agents would collect payments door-to-door, a sort of proto-Amazon fulfilment system with gossip included.
Most of my Christmas and birthday presents came from the catalogue, drip-fed through the household finances month by month.
The music section
As a budding music obsessive, the catalogue had one fatal flaw: the range was terrible. It was the same handful of evergreen big sellers, year after year. You could practically recite them:
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ABBA – Greatest Hits
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Meat Loaf – Bat Out of Hell
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Jeff Wayne – War of the Worlds
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The Beatles – 1962–66
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The Beatles – 1967–70
Parents chose for you. Mine picked The Beatles 1967–70 — a stroke of luck, really, because it’s packed with their most experimental, psychedelic, and downright weird music.
I’m convinced the album you received from the catalogue shaped your musical DNA forever.
If you were given Bat Out of Hell, you grew up to worship hairy men in lycra and own too many Iron Maiden T-shirts.
If you got War of the Worlds, you drifted into prog.
ABBA kids became pop-and-disco lifers.
And if you got The Beatles 1967–70?
You ended up like me — into druggy psychedelia, odd time signatures, and pretentious music from the 60s.
The Christmas listen
Mine came as a double cassette. I played it on a cheap portable player in my bedroom because my parents refused to let me near the smoked-glass, wood-veneer record player in the dining room.
Christmas Day was the one exception. I brought the cassette player downstairs and listened while opening presents. From the end of Side One — Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, A Day in the Life — into Side Two with I Am the Walrus, it was just an unbroken stream of kaleidoscopic oddness.
But the song that truly anchored itself in me was Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”
At the time I was studying music theory as well as learning brass, and the structure floored me. A verse in a minor key that blooms into a chorus in the related major — a bizarre choice for a pop song, yet perfectly executed.
It was the first time I realised music could be both mathematically strange and emotionally overwhelming — and that the catalogue, for all its limitations, had just handed me the key to a lifelong obsession.
PS
I'm not much of a one for guitar histrionics but the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame version, really is something else. Prince decides not to turn up for the first half of the song, but the highlight are the naughty grins he shares with Dhani Harrison.