Interview

The interview album is a spoken-word format in which a public figure is heard in conversation — with a journalist, at a press conference, or across a career's worth of recorded encounters — issued as a commercial record in its own right. The format flourished in the LP era, when labels discovered that fans would buy the voices of stars between songs: *Capitol*'s documentary "The Beatles' Story" (1964) and *Elvis Presley*'s press-conference EP "Elvis Sails" (1958) are early landmarks, and specialist labels such as #Baktabak# later built a catalogue of interview picture discs. Such records trade in access and personality rather than music.