Recommendations Archive

2013

AUGUST

It’s been a while since I have done this. Not sure why, more than likely it’s a time thing as I spend most of my free time telling off my children, or telling off my wife. And as any keen record collector knows, finding excellent and unusual old LPs these days is getting harder and harder, as everyone seems to know bloody everything and want to ask daft prices for things quite a lot of the time too. And I really don’t have endless pots of money to throw into over-priced black wax that often just sits silently on shelf once bought. I have my principles. A good example of what I am encountering at the moment happened a few weeks ago. Quite a rare soundtrack I’d been after turned up for sale on ebay uk. I’ve been after it for about five years. It had a starting price of £75 which I thought was about twice its actual value. So, I emailed the bloke and asked if he’d take an offer, and sensibly he said he’d wait to see how it does at auction. Ten days later it remained unsold – no bids at all, by which time I’d kind of lost interest in it and with the sound clips he’d provided I’d also realized that it was actually quite dull. A day after the auction ended, the seller emailed me and asked if I wanted it for £100, and as a deal sweetener he’d throw in the UK postage. So, the man couldn’t sell his LP for £75, but then offers it to me for £100?!? Bonkers! Then he gets a bit angry when I offer him about £40 (which is sort of understandable I guess). This seems to be the way at the moment. I doesn’t help that I’m far too tight to spend huge money on records. So I have to do what I’ve always done and wait for years until a record appears that I think is cheap enough. But I’m used to it now. Two of the LPs in this list have taken me over ten years to find, one used to sell for about £250 and I bought it for £18 a couple of months ago. So it pays to wait I think. Here endeth the lesson, and these are the records floating HMS Trunk at the moment.

FEBRUARY

Well it’s been a while since I last posted some of these. It’s not that I can’t be bothered, I just haven’t got the time as I’ve been away a bit and when I’ve been at home I’ve been way to busy reprimanding my kids or extremely active checking my wardrobe for moths. In between all this household action, I have been managing to buy records, even though I’ve really been trying not to. But until old military watches become dirt cheap, records will be the most fun things for me to buy. There now follows a list of records that I am currently listening to quite a lot.