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45 years ago today, May 5th, 1977, the Shadows were in sunny Blackpool, at the Opera House, on their 20 Golden Dates tour.

The tour had started on May 2nd, In Bristol, and would continue until the 24th, when they would be in Stoke-on-Trent. I'll admit that, as a 13 year old, I was too young to see them at their two-night residency at Bunny's Place nightclub in Cleethorpes (saw the ad in the local paper and wanted to go!), but have since got a couple of recordings from that tour (but not the Cleethorpes gigs) and these will have to do!

Also managed to get a couple of copies of 20GG on 8-track cartridge - well, one is never enough - and have to wonder how many people in May '77 were listening to these in their car on the way to the gig!

I never adopted 8-track and have never owned a cartridge.

It was the first to the car-market (as between 8-track and cassette) but that was at a time when cars didn't come with in-car entertainment as standard and I would not have felt financially able to fit such equipment to any of the bangers I drove. Later, new cars within my price range started being equipped with radio-cassettes from new and they were so commonplace that thieves couldn't be bothered nicking them.

[UK Social and Economic History 102 ]

Back in the late 70s - actually, from 1977 onward - I was at boarding school in a small village in the midlands. For some reason, one day, one of the teachers had to give me a lift into the nearest town. This was either '77 or '78. The teacher in question had recently bought a new car - actually second-hand as he wasn't exactly flush - an old Volvo saloon, a sort of purple or mauve colour as was quite common at the time. Anyway, to cut a long and boring story short... the car had an 8-track machine in it and in that machine was a cartridge version of The Shadows 20 Golden Greats! Now, I don't know if he had bought it or if it was in the machine when he bought the car. That detail now eludes me. But it just goes to show that this album, in every format, was everywhere back then! Until 1979, none of our (the family's) cars had any kind of recorded music player... thus we would always take portable cassette players with us on long journeys! And headphones! And plenty of batteries! And all our LPs copied onto C90 cassettes! Those were the days...

20GG always sounds a bit strange to me like the rhythm guitar is too high in the mix

howarddobson wrote:20GG always sounds a bit strange to me like the rhythm guitar is too high in the mix

The vinyl version is very compressed. This was necessary to get the twenty tracks on to two sides of one LP.

The album lasts forty-nine minutes and a few seconds (not counting each side's nine inter-track rills and the playout groove) and the maximum optimum playing time for one side of a 12" LP is only about seventeen minutes (less is better, with a max of twelve minutes recommended for best quality).

For 20GGs and other albums in the same series, significant audio compromises would have had to be made in order to fit something like twenty-four to twenty-five minutes on each side (even more for albums labelled "An Hour Of...") - and reduction in dynamic range is one of them. The compression tends to make individual sounds closer together in volume (among other things).

The Spanish version of 20GG is a double album, thus spreading the tracks over four sides of five tracks each. In theory this sorts out the compression problem. In reality, the copy I have is a bit rough - due to age and wear & tear - and so it's hard to tell if they sound any better.

It won't be legible at this size, but here's the May 1977 20 Golden Dates tour itinerary poster...

45 years ago today, the Shads were between their two dates at Bunny's Place nightclub in Cleethorpes. I wanted to go... but mum and dad wouldn't let me. To be fair, at only 13, I doubt I would have got in. Oh well.

Here's a pic - recently acquired off ebay - which shows them about to set off on the 20 Golden Dates tour. Happy days, as they say!

That's a great picture, I had not seen it before! Hank wears a 20 Golden Greats/Dates shirt by the look of it.

20 Golden Greats Programme signed by Hank, Bruce, Brian, Alan Jones & Francis Monkman.