All My Loving / This Boy

45.72144.7.1 once again features the orange label design, but the gold perimeter print was changed to BLACK for better legibility. The text font and layout are also different from all previous releases. This specific variation is sought after by collectors as it was the first worldwide release of This Boy in true STEREO.

Availability

This variation was available in 1975, and technically available until 1976 when the 3^rd generation of orange labels was introduced. It seems to be slightly more common than 1^st generation label copies, but still, copies do not surface on a regular basis. The 1975 date is also supported by the ® logo introduced in early 1975, and found here at the end of the large yellow "CAPITOL".

General Information

Very few titles from the Beatles' back catalogue were reissued on this label generation (although slightly more than the previous generation of orange labels, with 11 confirmed titles). Again, older titles were not in high demand anymore, and records were pressed on a need-to basis. For a complete list of titles released on the 2^nd generation orange label, see the Search tool page of this website.

The first worldwide release of This Boy in true stereo

45.72144.7.1 marks the 1^st worldwide release of This Boy in true stereo. Until then, the song had only been issued in mono or rechanneled stereo since its first release in late 1963 (the American stereo pressings of Meet The Beatles!, for example, carried it in Duophonic, Capitol's reprocessed fake stereo). The timing of this single release also coincides with the first stereo release of Beatlemania! With The Beatles in 1975, so Capitol of Canada must have received stereo master tapes from the UK around that time, unless a narrow stereo mix was prepared here in Canada before a proper one arrived from England in later years. More information is needed on how Canada came to have a true stereo mix before any other country in the world.

Interstingly, for many years, the credit for the first stereo release of This Boy was attributed to a Dutch promo cassette for the Heineken brewery. In July 1986, eleven years after the release of 45.72144.7.1, EMI in the UK teamed up with the Dutch brewer Heineken for a mail-in promotion: four ring-pulls from specially marked cans plus £2.99 bought a 12-song cassette titled Only The Beatles... (Parlophone SMMC 151).

The campaign, reportedly advertised on some 35 million cans, featured two specific selling points spelled out on the inlay card: This Boy was described as "a previously unreleased stereo version of the 'B' side of 'I Want To Hold Your Hand' - a real collectors item" (This Boy was not paired with All My Loving in Europe, and as we know today, this was not its first stereo release). Yes It Is was also advertised as a first stereo release, and in this case, it was true. Apparently, as many as 250,000 tapes were originally made for the occasion. Apple Corps, which had never authorized the use of the group's name to sell beer, went to court, and EMI halted the promotion on 18 July, 1986, seventeen days after it started. The remaining stock was withdrawn, which turned the tape into an instant collectable.

The Yes It Is stereo claim was true, although since the tape was withdrawn, the first OFFICIAL stereo release of Yes It Is only came in 1988, on the then-new Past Masters set. As mentioned earlier, the stereo claim for This Boy was wrong, but Canadian pressings were poorly documented in the 1980s, and a stereo This Boy on an obscure 1975 Capitol reissue single from Canada was simply unknown to the British and American collectors who wrote about the tape.

This Canadian "trophy" had not been documented anywhere besides a note in Nicholas Schaffner’s 1978 book The Beatles Forever. It is not surprising that the cassette's "first" was taken at face value and repeated in discographies for decades (some later listeners have even questioned whether the tape's version of This Boy is true stereo at all, or a reprocessed transfer). Regardless, it is clear now: the first true stereo version of This Boy sold to the public was Canadian: 45.72144.7.1.

The tape has been counterfeited many times over the years; the photographs here show an original in detail. The cassette came in a standard clear Norelco box with a green J-card designed by Wharfside Studios: a painted portrait of the four on the front, the track notes on the back, and the full Parlophone album catalogue of the day across the inside panels. The shells are white with black print, the Parlophone logo, "SEE INLAY CARD FOR DETAILS", the SMMC 151 catalogue number and a 1986 Stiletto Limited copyright line; the tape itself carries no Heineken branding. The Heineken name appears only on the inlay (next to the Stiletto logo) and on the separate green gift-tag that came with each tape, a small folded card inviting the recipient to send four more ring-pulls and £2.99 (£2.49 plus 50p postage) to the Fab Four Offer at a London FREEPOST address to have a copy mailed to a friend. The gift-tag gives 30 June, 1987 as the closing date of an offer that in fact lasted seventeen days.

Pressing Information

45.72144.7.1 (with BLACK perimeter print) was a STEREO release and these were therefore pressed from different plates than 45.72144.6.1; they feature new larger matrix numbers on both sides:

Side A: 72144 YEX-905B6-2 TXD
Side B: 72144 FYCE 17560 -2 TXD

Packaging

These orange label pressings would have been sold in a brown / orange target Capitol sleeve.