K-TEL: THE SECRET HISTORY!

Something that was lost in the CD revolution 20 years ago was the beauty of the record label. Capitol, Decca, Warner Brothers, Polydor: true design classics. Think of the Beatles and you think of black paper labels with a Parlophone pound-sign logo and the big "Capitol swirl" to show that you hadn't just bought a shrunken 78. Blondie's "Heart of Glass" could only ever be on the powder-blue Chrysalis label with a butterfly flapping in the corner.
Between the ages of seven and 14, though, the only label that counted for me was a murky brown colour with two white curvy lines, something that no one could mistake for the work of Barnett Newman or Peter Saville. It was the K-Tel label, home of the hits - usually 20 of them but sometimes as many as 24. For a boy on a dollar a week pocket money, K-Tel was the only label that could give me any hope of keeping up with the kids at school whose dads bought them a hit single or two every Saturday (usually on flashy labels such as Bell or RAK).
Every three months or so, a new K-Tel compilation would appear with a snappy generic title - Music Power, Disco Rocket, Star Party - and for around three bucks my collection would be bolstered with anything from Cockney Rebel and Pilot to War's "Low Rider" (cool) or Pussycat's "Mississippi" (not so). Philly soul, novelty, hard-rock, glam, whatever David Dundas was meant to be - it was all pop music to K-Tel. They were the kings.
Aged 12, more than anything in the world I wanted to work for K-Tel.The man whose job I coveted was Don Reedman, an Aussie who was in at the beginning and made a bomb with the Classic Rock and Hooked On Classics series.

K-Tel's boom years came to an abrupt halt in 1983. Squeezed out, K-Tel had ceased making records by the late Eighties, and reverted to its original purpose - selling kitchen gadgets.
The label's place in bri-nylon pop culture history is secure - the number of hits (five million at the last count) on a fabulous website called ktelclassics.com is testament to this. When you get down to it, K-Tel stood for pop in its purest form: Ultravox may still whine about the injustice of "Vienna" being kept off the top by "Shaddap You Face", but when you are sandwiched between Racey and the Gibson Brothers on a K-Tel comp there's no place for pretension or revisionism. It may not have been Motown, but K-Tel produced dozens of perfectly formed time machines. Your local thrift shop is waiting to transport you.