Experiment IV - Japanese 7" Single

By the time Hounds of Love/The Whole Story came out, I was really losing interest in collecting Japanese singles and vinyl LPs because the releases were mimicking the UK releases too much by then and I didn't find that very appealing. If you compare one of the really early Japanese releases to this one, you can see right away how much they changed.

The thing I loved about the early Japanese releases was that they often used very unique artwork, with large eye-catching Japanese writing. By the time the singles for Never For Ever were released, this was pretty much disappearing or gone completely. The Japanese picture insert for Experiment IV is just another example of this. No unique artwork and even the writing on the cover had been reduced to a minimum. In fact, it almost disappears into the background.

Japanese releases were never cheap to collect, even when I used to collect these things back in the day. If you're going to collect Japanese singles, you're far better off collecting the earliest ones like Symphony in Blue, Moving and Them Heavy People. They're far more interesting than the later releases.