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Welcome to this SDE guide to the various formats on which Universal/Polydor have this week released The Rolling Stones‘ 1971 album Sticky Fingers. This feature isn’t about an examination of the bonus audio or an appraisal of the mastering, rather a look at the packaging and what you get beyond the audio/video. You can click on any photo for an enlarged hi-res look. Hope you enjoy!
The Super Deluxe Edition

The Super Deluxe Edition box set version of Sticky Fingers is about 12 inches wide, ten inches high and an inch or so thick. The oversized monstrosity 2012′s GRRR! super deluxe has thankfully been left behind. This new box set has a nice textured, linen/hessian feel to it. Given the dimensions, famous Warhol cover has its legs chopped off a bit, but other than that all it good. No zip on the outside, but we will find one within as you’ll see…

Open the lid, and on the top is a black envelope which contains five good quality art cards featuring group photographs (favouring Jagger/Richards). You will also find a ‘stand-up’ cut-out figure – one of the band. It appears to be random, whichever band member you get and as you will see below we found Mick Taylor in our envelope. If you want them all, you’ll have to buy five boxes and hope to get lucky! It occurred to me that the photo that the Mick Taylor image is taken from doesn’t actually show his entire body, so how could they have got a clean cut-out? Close inspection reveals a helping hand from photoshop (his left arm/elbow has been cloned).

One larger art print (The Rolling Stones with Ahmet Ertegun) and a folded poster sit underneath the envelope and beneath that is the star of the show which is the weighty 120-page hardcover book. Satisfyingly this *does* have a working zip on the front. Unlike the original the zipper has a ‘tongue’ logo as part of its design, but as per the 1971 release a peek underneath reveals the ‘pants’ image. A thick double-walled rectangle of cardboard protects the contents that sit above the book in the box set from being scratched by the zipper.

The book is fantastic, a significant improvement in terms of content on the Some Girls super deluxe book which was also a bit too big to handle comfortably. Top marks go to Studio Fury who have been responsible for the overall design and art direction. It looks superb with its visually appealing, distressed chunky typeface chapter openers and clever gold-ink ‘sticky finger’ prints throughout which prove an effective and stylish device. Period black and white photographs shine and Nick Kent’s words along with the various images (tape boxes, Warhol photoshoot, tour posters) really do tell the ‘story’ of the album. For once, there is proper content to digest and this is much more akin to the standard-setting McCartney tomes which are central to his deluxe sets.

The actual discs reside at the back of the book, but again, the execution seems that little bit better than previous ‘Stones sets. Something about the design, the uncoated stock and the way the discs seem to sit nice and flush within the pages. CD 3 ‘Get Your Lungs Out: Live at the University Of Leeds, 1971′ is exclusive to this box.

Super Deluxe Edition photo gallery

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The Deluxe Box Set Edition

New for this release is a mid-range deluxe priced at around the £30 mark. In terms of audio/video content this only offers the DVD (from the super deluxe set) over and above the two-discs that you get in the standard deluxe edition. Not particularly exciting, given that the DVD only contains two video tracks and is effectively a thinly disguised promotional device to get you to buy the separate ‘From The Vault’ Marquee Club release which contains the performance in full. For less than £12 you can pre-order the LP+DVD Marquee Club release which softens the blow of not including it here in full, but you do think they should have either included the whole thing or not bothered with it at all.

If you’re having trouble visualising this edition, the box is exactly the same size as the Tears For Fears super deluxe sets and the contents inside are laid out in a similar way. You get the same five art cards in a black envelope, just as per the super deluxe – the only difference being that they are slightly smaller. The 70-page book is like a ‘mini-me’ version of the volume from the big box although crucially it doesn’t include the sleeve notes so it doesn’t have the same sense of narrative. There is still a lot of great photos and the design is a brilliant as before but obviously the impact is reduced somewhat by the smaller scale.

One advantage this smaller deluxe box does have over the other formats is that the three discs come in their own separate vinyl replica wallets. This is a small, but significant detail because groovy though super deluxe edition is, the only place for the discs is in the big, heavy book. Having them packaged separately means you can pull them out and put them on your CD shelf with your other ‘Stones releases if you so wish. These aren’t up to Japanese mini-LP CD standards, but are decent and come with inner sleeves. The box also includes one of those ribbons, to help you ‘pull out’ the contents.

This is a great and well made set, but at the time of writing it’s £22 more than the standard two-CD deluxe. That price point is similar to the recent Tears For Fears set but Songs From The Big Chair was a six-disc box that offered a boat full of audio and video – this doesn’t do that. I don’t think you get enough to justify the extra. If this was priced between £20 and £25 then that might be the sweet spot where it would be worth pulling the trigger but at the moment it does offer great value.

Deluxe Box Set photo gallery

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The 2CD Deluxe Edition

The two-CD deluxe edition is a standard eight-panel digi-pack. The 24-page booklet has literally no words in it except for two pages of credits at the end – it’s all photographs. You get the extra audio on the bonus disc, but the truth is this doesn’t feel very ‘deluxe’. You can’t argue with the value though, since you can pick this up for less than £11.

2CD Deluxe Edition photo gallery

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The 2LP Deluxe Vinyl Edition

The deluxe double vinyl version of Sticky Fingers features the real zip. The single vinyl version doesn’t. A vertical plastic band is in place to stop the zip from scratching anything within its vicinity. The outer sleeve/jacket feels a little low-grade to be honest. A textured card jacket, perhaps with the same hessian feel as both box sets might have felt nicer to the touch, but still, this is a design classic and looks good in the large format square vinyl setting. The two heavyweight records within include the album and the nine bonus tracks and that’s it. There is no booklet with any of the content from the two books, which you think they might have included – this is supposed to be the ‘deluxe’ vinyl edition. Somehow the 2LP lacks a little ‘wow’ factor which is definitely present with the SDE and to a lesser degree in the small box set.

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