The Kick Inside - Canadian Cassette

Canadian cassette for The Kick Inside. I think I bought this around ‘85 or ‘86. Cassette cases typically had a clear plastic front and spine, with a solid black backing, but in some cases were completely clear as well. The cassettes were usually black with silver lettering on both sides listing the tracks. If I recall correctly, I think U.S. cassettes were typically white or beige colour with black printing on them.

The front insert has the album artwork, which is also the same artwork found on the Canadian LP release. The spine area of cassettes usually had the artist name, album title and catalogue number for the cassette. The back portion usually listed the tracks and the distribution information - it had very limited space as you can see. Another downside to cassettes inserts was the reversed side. Typically, they tended to be blank in a lot of cases, so if the LP version had the printed lyrics, chances were you wouldn’t always see them being reprinted for the cassette version. Sometimes the inside of the inserts just reprinted the album tracks again, which I found to be quite useless as they were already listed on the outside. In the rare cases where the lyrics were printed, they were usually printed in the form of a mile long unfolding booklet, which was nearly impossible to fold up the right way again.

The biggest downside to cassettes in general was that after playing them a million times they tended to become warped. Sometimes your cassette player or walkman would chew the tape up, which was always annoying because it literally destroyed your tape and you had to throw it away. Sadly, my copy of Lionheart is now living somewhere in some landfill.