The Beatles 1967-1970 (AMIGA 855742)

Amiga 8 55 742 (stereo, 1980) is an East German single-LP distillation of The Beatles 1967–1970 — the so-called Blue Album — which in its original Apple Records form was a double LP released in April 1973. Amiga selected 14 of the 28 original tracks and pressed them onto a single disc, which then found its way into Polish record shops as well as East German ones: a small but meaningful fact in the context of Iron Curtain cultural circulation.

The Blue Album: Why It Existed

The Beatles 1967–1970 and its companion piece 1962–1966 (the Red Album) were not born out of nostalgia. Both compilations were rushed into production in early 1973 as a direct response to an illegal bootleg called Alpha Omega — a 120-song unauthorised collection distributed by mail order by a New Jersey company called Audio Tape Inc. Apple and EMI shut down the operation and moved quickly to provide fans with a legitimate alternative. The Blue Album went on sale in the UK on 19 April 1973, designed by Tom Wilkes and shot by the same photographer, in the same EMI House stairwell in Manchester Square, as the Please Please Me cover from 1963 — the six-year visual gap between the two shots was entirely intentional. It topped the Billboard chart in the US and sold over eight million copies in its first decade.

The Amiga pressing arrived seven years later, in 1980, during the relative cultural opening that followed Erich Honecker’s succession to the GDR leadership in 1971. Where Walter Ulbricht had effectively banned Western beat music after 1965, Honecker’s administration gradually relaxed these restrictions, allowing Amiga to license a wider range of Western recordings through the late 1970s and into the 1980s.

Two Covers

The East German pressing appeared in two distinct sleeve variants. The first reproduces the original Blue Album artwork — the EMI House stairwell photograph. A note for Polish collectors who may have encountered this record: it is sometimes called the „okładka Abbey Road” in Poland, which is a misnomer. The Abbey Road album has an entirely different cover — the zebra crossing photograph taken by Iain Macmillan in August 1969. The Blue Album’s stairwell shot is a different image entirely.

The second variant is an original East German design known as the Strahlen-Cover (from the German Strahlen, meaning rays or beams) — nicknamed „słoneczko” (little sun) in Poland. It was designed by Monika Prust, a graphic artist who produced over 300 album covers for the Amiga and Eterna labels. Both covers were printed by VEB VMW „Ernst Thälmann”, Werk Gotha-Druck — the state printing facility responsible for the bulk of East German LP artwork, working entirely by analogue methods: ORWO photonegative film, in-house retouchers, scalpels and halftone screens, with a palette of four colours that had to cover virtually the entire catalogue.

The Tracklist

Amiga’s selection of 14 from the original 28:

Side A: Strawberry Fields Forever / Penny Lane / Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band / With a Little Help from My Friends / Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds / Something / All You Need Is Love / Here Comes the Sun

Side B: I Am the Walrus / Hello Goodbye / The Fool on the Hill / Hey Jude / Lady Madonna / Let It Be

Notable omissions from the original double LP include „A Day in the Life”, „Come Together”, „The Ballad of John and Yoko”, „Get Back” and „The Long and Winding Road” — the single-LP format demanded cuts, and the choices Amiga made skew toward the more melodically accessible end of the catalogue.

Matrix codes: 8 55 742-1A D80 W N (Side 1) / 8 55 742-2A D80 W N (Side 2). The D80 code in the matrix identifies the pressing year as 1980.