I would have spent all my pocket money on this, had it existed in the right place at the right time (Australia, 1992-3). Instead I saved up for the sub-optimal cassette 100% Hits Volume 8. While it wasn’t as stacked as my hypothetical Personics selection, it did have Cats (sic) in the Cradle, Mrs Robinson, Mr Wendel, In The Still Of The Nite (sic), The Hitman, and my favourite, Looking Through Patient Eyes. The fact that half of those were covers suggested to me that old songs needed updating, preferably by adding distorted guitars.

I brought the cassette to the counter of a small music store at Southgate Sylvania and poured my jar of small change loudly onto the glass. The young woman counted it all up, hopefully thinking I was adorable, and found I was about $1.50 short. The look on my face and the pathetic display must have been enough: she said “that’s ok” and gave it to me anyway, scooping up more than a handful of coins.

I came to enjoy most of the tracks, as was the custom at the time, but Caligula and the Cruel Sea were a little too scary (maybe Satanic?) and Deep by East 17 was a lot too sexual. I thought I might have hated the Wendy Matthews song but it was on a cassette I paid for so I was happy to give it 20 more listens to be sure. I don’t remember if this was my introduction to Detachable Penis or if it had been a drawcard, but it was an important one to learn the lyrics to for the school bus.

I once put Oh Carolina on a mixtape I put together purely to try and explain to my dad what reggae was. I had asked him if Can’t Help Falling In Love (UB40) had been a reggae song originally and he didn’t know what that meant. The tape didn’t clear things up but we decided the original probably wasn’t reggae. It certainly wasn’t similar to Oh Carolina.

What you no doubt noticed from the CD cover above was that the SONGWORDS were included for FREE. The bigwigs at the record company were so confidently swimming in their champagne during this era that they could afford to make this extraordinary gesture.

The big coup here, aside from the complete lyric sheet for Detachable Penis, was the revelation of the hitherto undecipherable chorus of Snow’s Informer.

It didn’t make a lot of sense—I assumed “you know say Daddy me Snow me, I go blame” was how they talked on the mean streets of Canada—but that wasn’t the point. I could now confidently spit these bars on the deeply competitive school bus, all because some industry fat cat signed off on including them for FREE.

So what would my Personics tape have looked like, and how much of an improvement would it have been on 100% Hits Volume 8? Find the playlist below and judge my 12-13 year old heart.