Saturday Deluxe / 20 December 2025

SDE featured in a UK newspaper

On Thursday this week, the Financial Times (FT) in the UK published an article about SDE, featuring an interview with myself, under the heading ‘Mission to keep music physical’. I’m obviously delighted to see such high profile coverage of this website in the ‘mainstream media’ and I think interview David Honigmann did a good job with the article. Here is a link to the piece online, but if you have problems accessing (due to paywall) then I don’t think they will mind me showing the image below which you can click on to enlarge and read. Thanks to David and the FT for this wonderful coverage!

Chartwatch

Kylie Minogue wins the ‘race’ to be Christmas number one in the UK singles chart (make your own mind up about the track, but my (Scottish) mother texted me last night to say “that Kylie song XMAS is shite”) but we are mostly interested in the album charts and the big news is that Pink Floyd are number one with the reissue of Wish You Were Here. Floyd have now chalked up their second number one album of the year after Pink Floyd at Pompeii. Compare this to the rather lacklustre performances of The Rolling Stones’ Black and Blue (peaked at No 40 in November) and The Beatles’ Anthology 4 (No 9 earlier this month) and you have to wonder what is going on? What is making the difference? Is it the product, the marketing spend, or just the evergreen, hip appeal of Floyd?

Wish You Were Here sold just under 25,000 copies in the UK and over 4,000 were blu-rays. Neither The Beatles nor The Rolling Stones issued standalone blu-rays of their releases (no blu-ray at all for the Fab Four). Also Sony really went for it with Pink Floyd, authorising two Blood Records vinyl editions, as well as the yellow flame vinyl, a late-in-the-day white vinyl and so on. No laurels were rested upon. Okay, I’m not particularly a fan of labels doing large number of vinyl variants, but it works, or at least has done in this case with over 13,000 vinyl records sold.

Blu-ray sales resulted in the highest UK chart position for Frankie’s Welcome to the Pleasuredome for 30 years

Wish You Were Here will almost certainly be the best-selling blu-ray audio in the UK for 2025, but I’m delighted to say that the SDE exclusive blu-ray of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Welcome to the Pleasuredome should comfortably be in second place, as the album re-enters the UK album chart this week at No 44 its highest position since the first half of 1995 (when all four singles were reissued). This is almost entirely blu-ray sales (approximately 3,000 units) and comfortably beats the No 70 peak of the same album in early November, after the box set, CD and vinyl reissue. Obviously, it’s a real shame the blu-ray was delayed, since who knows how high the album would have risen to with the combination of all four formats. Them’s the breaks, as they say.

There’s a small amount of stock left of the Frankie blu-ray which is available to order from the SDE shop.

Merry Christmas!

This is the last Saturday Deluxe before Christmas, so I’d like to say thank you for continuing to read and support SDE. Merry Christmas and hope you have a healthy and prosperous 2026. There’s lots to look forward to in the next 12 months…