Sleeve notes

Anyone even vaguely interested in record collecting will know the importance of condition. The Goldmine methodology regards a Very Good condition record as being worth just 25% of one that's Near Mint, and Good condition drops that to 10-15%.

Sleeves are a factor in this. "Someone might have written on it or stamped a price tag on it" it states for Very Good, whereas "a Good to VG– cover has ring wear to the point of distraction, has seam splits obvious on sight and may have even heavier writing".

Writing may on occasion, though, make up for its value-decreasing impact in other ways. It can reveal a bit of that record's history. I note I posted about the writing on the inner sleeve of my copy of Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd back in 2016 but it was brought back into sharp focus following the passing of Peter Tork earlier this week. 

Whoever originally owned my copy of Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd must be particularly sad today. #petertork pic.twitter.com/A5TkedZAxj

— Darryl Wilks (@dgwilks) February 21, 2019

Curiously three other Monkees LPs I own carry the name and address of a past owner (Cheryl Croker of Bridgwater), along with, I suspect, the date they bought them and, in two cases, they also went to the bother of noting who took the lead vocal on each track. 

I have a Kinks album once owned by Annita Bennett and two (by the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds) from the collection of Sylvie Carpos of St Leonards. Whereas on the one hand I could begrudge Sylvie for not looking after her records particularly well (the Stones LP would fetch around £75 if VG; I'd be lucky to make my pound back on Sylvie's copy), I can appreciate the fact that she clearly enjoyed them. 


One I passed up on (not sure why) featured a critique of some of Aretha Franklin's back catalogue:

Aretha's end of term report. Must try harder. pic.twitter.com/6nOq5cD0i4

— Darryl Wilks (@dgwilks) January 23, 2016

Surprisingly I haven't found any notes or letters; the nearest I've had are the below in a music book. I'll just have to keep on looking.

Like I said... here are a couple of notes I just found inside a book from a charity shop. #haveapintonme pic.twitter.com/g92GL2io4a

— Darryl Wilks (@dgwilks) January 21, 2017

Back to Back to Vinyl

Incredible to see I've gone almost ten months without posting. There are a few reasons for this.

For one, the odds seem far more stacked against any good finds these days. Vinyl has become a 'thing' again and demand is high - even if some people never listen to what they buy. And when The Works start selling a turntable that your records really won't thank you for being played on (as part of their 'Making Music Cool' tie-in with Intempo) it's clear that it's gone beyond the mainstream and into a completely different commercial zone.

There are now three independent record shops in Cambridge, all of which stock second-hand vinyl. So supply is arguably up but two are based near the primary locations of the city's charity shops - could well be that collections that would have been given away are being sold instead. I've also noted before (and I'm not alone in this) that some charity shops are adopting crazy prices for vinyl. In some of the national charity shops vinyl seems to have vanished altogether locally which makes me think it's being sent to a central location to evaluate. CDs on the other hand are turning up in bigger numbers and smaller prices.

But although my gut, and the lack of entries here, says I'm having much less success, a quick look back at some of what I've picked up this year suggests otherwise. Only I've posted them on Twitter instead - it's a quick fix, and at weekends my timeline is awash with impressive finds from other users around the country. And a lot of pictures of No Parlez, but that's another story.

So it's still possible to pick up some genuine bargains with a fair bit of persistence and rather more luck. Here are some of my favourites from 2016.

Prince's death in April drove me to do something that I've never been compelled to do before - I immediately bought a couple of his LPs that I was missing. I was also reminded of the Hindu Love Gods album with its cover of Raspberry Beret - which I picked up a month later during a rare car boot visit (I'm not really a Sunday morning person) for £2.50, part of a four-for-£10 deal along with New Order's Technique, The Beach Boys Love You and a budget Otis Redding compilation.

No, it doesn't have a plum Atlantic label. Misty Mountain Hop is correct on the label. Indeed, it's definitely a relatively late pressing but I think no later than early 80s as there's no barcode (assuming one was placed on copies from the mid-80s onwards).

But I'm absolutely certain that this is the only time I've ever seen a Led Zeppelin LP in a charity shop. And it was very prominent, catching my eye immediately. A mere £1.

This wasn't a sleeve I was familiar with but it looked interesting enough in amongst a pretty uninspiring batch of LPs in a charity shop that very rarely put any out. I'm glad I flipped it over, revealing it to be Anymore For Anymore by Ronnie Lane. I didn't mind running to a whopping £3.99 for this.

It's not always charity shops and car boot sales that throw up decent finds. I had the good fortune to pass a house on my street where the owner had been putting various things outside in advance of moving out - and one Saturday morning there was a batch of records. Curiously they owned 3 copies of Rumours (the sleeve on mine was a bit damaged so I took one) but even more curiously they were discarding a recent re-issue of Big Star's 3rd LP. I can't really mock them for having three copies of Rumours though - my wife went down to have a look at what else they were giving away and brought back the other two copies, so we now have four ...

There are only two charity shops remotely close to where I work. One of them is often piled high with bags of donations they've been unable to sort. They were using what passes as a changing room to store several of these bags, and underneath them was a plastic box full of records. Mostly junk of course. Until I reached a Moody Blues LP, with a gatefold sleeve. So far, so whatever. But there was another LP in the gatefold - and it was only a first pressing (I think) of Pink Floyd's second LP. In rather good nick too. And for £2 I rather did nick it.

I felt almost guilty over this one. It was in the window of a local charity bookshop that rarely has any records so I don't tend to go in. Presumably they'd had a large collection donated and put them out at 50p each or 3 for £1. As I went to to remove this from the window someone else came in right behind me; they were going to do the same. Knowing that I, umm, already owned this (albeit a copy with a lot of sticky residue that I've yet to remove) I did offer them first look through everything else, which they declined (and rightly so - it was all tat).

Other honourable mentions for Self Destruction Blues and Two Steps From The Move (with comic) by Hanoi Rocks at £2 each; a battered but still playable With The Beatles in the same box as the Floyd LP, also £2; assorted new wave singles bought for an appropriate 45p each on Record Store Day (and I didn't have to queue overnight); Soft Boys & Robyn Hitchcock LPs for a pound each; and Lou Reed's Perfect Day / Walk On The Wild Side single for 50p - an A- and B-side combination that's hard to top.

Flying Vinyl - January 2016 issue

With the February edition landing (albeit not quite addressed to me; more on that another time) I thought I should re-visit what January had on offer.

When it arrived we took our lead from the final round of Pointless and, having flicked through the accompanying booklet, put the 5 singles in order of how much we thought we would like each one, leaving the possible best to last.

Flying Vinyl: The Class of January 2016

Thankfully, and quite brilliantly, we were proved wrong. January's stand-out single was one of the first we played: step forward Cameron AG. If we'd adopted the same approach on Spotify we may never have heard the stripped-down joy that is Lost Direction. 

I don't think there's a single act in the January box that I wouldn't be interested in seeing live. So if Phobophobes, Storms, Otherkin, Junk Son or Cameron AG want to add a Cambridge date to their next tours, they can expect an audience of at least two. 

The Monkees: snog, marry or avoid?

Kids. They think they know it all. They think they're the first to do certain things, things us old folk would never have dreamed of doing. Well no. We've been there. Done that. And judging by this inner sleeve, a variation of snog, marry & avoid has been around since the 60s.

The verdict: Snog Mickey Dolenz, marry Peter Tork, avoid both Mike Nesmith & Davy Jones.

Flying Vinyl - December 2015 issue

For those of a certain age, the mere mention of a mail-order music club will bring back memories of packages from Ilford landing on doormats nationwide as once again Britannia Music Club members neglected to cancel the latest 'album of the month'. That introductory offer, which seemed such a great deal in the Sunday supplement, felt less so with each unwanted arrival. But at least you were one more full-priced album closer to fulfilling their membership terms.

A more credible variation was that run by Rough Trade, who I was surprised to discover (just now) are not currently offering new subscriptions. This appears to be a recent, and possibly temporary, development.

I was the recipient on an appropriately-numbered birthday of a subscription to Flying Vinyl. And, having failed to notify them earlier that I didn't want it, thank you very much, I found myself spending Christmas trying to convince myself of the merits of my recently delivered CD of Take That's III.

Now I'm sure I don't need to point out that some of the above may not be true, as I did of course actually receive a nice little box housing five well-packaged 7" singles, some tasting notes and a reminder that The Revolution Will Not Be Digital. My apologies for not broadcasting this on long wave.

Flying Vinyl: The Class of December 2015

Having only limited existing knowledge of two of the five artists, and having briefly heard just one of them, the scene was set and each single was played in its entirety. Both sides. No impatient skipping during intros. No leaving the room and no checking Twitter or Facebook. This was indeed a time for analogue to come to the fore.

Ten sides of vinyl later it was felt that Sweden's Magic Potion just edged it ahead of Glasgow's Temperance Movement. A slightly younger me strongly lobbied for the latter but I think I haven't quite got over the fact that someone once recommended them to me, only for me to find that they had played less than a mile away from my home the day before. But ultimately there were no losers - all five singles will be played again and chewed over. Further recordings and gigs will be sought. And an eager eye will keep watch on the letterbox around January 18th.

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Six sevens (or the the answer to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything)

Well, not quite. More a case of six 7" singles picked up over the years from charity shops which were either unexpected (prototype NY punk in E17?) or unknown to me. But perhaps between them they are the answer to the ultimate question.

Seems only right to start with this, a fresh acquisition that rather stood out amongst the Smokie and Racey singles in my local Cats Protection shop. The stamped labels with their minimal information screamed DIY but I had no idea what the grooves might contain. I took a look online before parting with my 50p and was able to quickly gauge that it was one of only two singles released by Industrial Accident Records, and with a run of 500 copies. On playing it The Institution revealed themselves as a band that tapped into a new wave / reggae sound, not quite ska but also not The Police either. Mrs DGW commented, quite fairly, that it sounded a little like The Libertines. The Discogs listing for Jane And Jon didn't provide much additional information but on clicking through to the label's only other release, Don't Go Away by Sonic Tonix, I found that both bands featured members that went on to form cult indie legends The Jazz Butcher. Nice to find an early slice of that band's history.

I had no difficulty identifying this single. The very song that famously saw the New York Dolls derided as 'mock rock' by smug looking, sorry, Whispering Bob Harris, it was a surprise find in a Walthamstow charity shop, sometime back in the early 1990s. Note the songwriting credit with unnecessary apostrophe. When your record company does that you know they're not wholly supporting your band.


Another purchase from the 90s. Given its release year (1978) and the image of the band, No Dice, on the back of the sleeve I figured this would probably be an underwhelming single from the footnotes of the post-punk era. Instead Why Sugar is the best record the Faces never made.



As discussed in the BBCs 'The Joy Of The Single' documentary, sometimes the b-side of a single is where it's at. Here, the Casinos put out a pretty inoffensive ballad, Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye as the a-side but flip it over and I Still Love You, although not ground-breaking, has one hell of a hook in its verse.

The contribution of The Birds to 60s pop history rests on two things. Firstly, not being The Byrds and secondly, having Ronnie Wood in their ranks. I was aware of their existence and the rarity value of their few releases so I wouldn't have expected to find this in a pile of otherwise junk sleeveless singles. But there it was, far from mint and its over-sized hole suggesting it had spent some time waiting patiently in a jukebox. It's crackly but no worse for it.

I can't claim to have known who I Giganti were. But they looked like they were worth a punt. And again it's the b-side, La Bomba Atomica, that stands out. Curiously I was in a local independent Italian pizzeria recently that was playing 60s Italian guitar pop and I joked that maybe some I Giganti would come on; mid-meal the a-side, Tema, duly made an appearance. When occasionally DJing at a friend's club in the 1990s, La Bomba Atomica was the only song that was allowed to breach its 'nothing pre-1970' rule. Not even the first Stooges album, or the likes of Beggars Banquet or Let It Bleed, got a look in.
 

Eyes down ....

Anyone following Car Boot Vinyl Diaries will be familiar with their list of perennial LPs to be found at car boot sales (also available as a handy bingo card here). Ultimately these are albums that sold in vast quantities in their day but which no longer hold the interest of the casual listener. For that's who would have sent their sales into overdrive - people who didn't regularly buy music but who found themselves at the record counter in Woolies, creating a snowball effect on sales. Put it this way: if you find someone with a record collection comprising mainly of those 12 LPs, you could comfortably say - or sing, if you wish - to them: "You don't really care for music, do you?" and they either won't know what you're talking about or, worse, will get all excited and say "I know that - it's that X-Factor song!".

That is not to say that these are all bad LPs. I was dragged up to the sounds of those Carpenters singles albums, and with its re-recording and segueing of tracks the 1969-1973 collection is far more appealing than the more recent cash-in trick of padding out a best-of with one or two, often poor, new recordings. And although Abba spent most of the 1980s being ridiculed their resurgence in the 1990s with the success of ‘Abba Gold’, topped-off by ‘Mamma Mia’, brought home the fact that although some of their lyrics might have been questionable (but could you do better in Swedish?) their melodies contained more hooks than any medicine show might muster up. 'No Parlez' on the other hand seems unlikely to ever regain the public's imagination; but if it does, I can point you in the direction of one Cambridge charity shop that has at least three copies in stock, along with assorted other selections from Mr Young's back catalogue.

The same phenomenon is being repeated with CDs (which incidentally are getting cheaper in charity shops). So who are the modern day equivalents of the Carpenters and Dr Hook? Apart from one extreme example (along with Lance Armstrong biographies, people have understandably been quick to offload their Lost Prophets collections, though by donating them to charity shops are they seriously expecting anyone to buy them?) they generally fall into the same pattern as their 70s & 80s predecessors – sell by the bucketload and then fall out of fashion.

Brit bubble popped
Blur may have won that battle but there's no denying who won the war, even if Damon & co are the ones getting the plaudits in 2015. As a result it was Oasis who truly crossed over and one CD in particular rears its ugly head rather too often. 'Definitely, Maybe' is too much of a fan's favourite, and even though '(What's The Story) Morning Glory?' was their biggest seller it remains popular and so it's 1997's 'Be Here Now', initially adored by the press, subsequently denounced as bloated and sometimes referred to as the album that killed Britpop, that people are discarding with relish. With estimated UK sales of 1.8 million (only 'Heathen Chemistry' is believed to have made it to 7 figures since), many of those are now available to you for as little as 50p.

Nods from this period also go to the Lightning Seeds best of 'Like You Do', Kula Shaker's 'K' (the K section of Reckless Records' now closed Islington branch consisted of little else) and The Verve's Urban Hymns.

Sisters are doing it for themselves
Eminem's 'Stan' famously featured an extract from Dido's 'Thank You'. This was arguably the best part of either song but the sales of ‘Life For Rent’ and it’s follow-up, ‘No Angel’ showed that several million people were keen to hear more. But not perpetually it would seem. Duffy’s ‘Rockferry’ is another staple, and I’ve noticed a recent rise in copies of Lily Allen’s ‘Alright, Still’. On the flip-side I don’t think I’ve ever seen any Adele (though if she doesn’t hurry up and release a new album the public may turn against her and send her CDs out into the wilderness), and rarely any Amy Winehouse.

Boys Keep Swinging

Or at least Robbie does according to ‘Swing When You’re Winning’, one of many CDs by the ex-Take Thatter you can pick up at your leisure. David Gray’s ‘White Ladder’ used to be prominent; I don’t think it’s recent lack of visibility is down to a new-found love for the album, more that everyone who wanted shot of it did so a while back. Jack Johnson and Army-man-turned-Twitter-comedian James Blunt are common finds.

And the rest ...
From the 90s you can expect to find Simply Red's 'Stars' and Robson & Jerome; the noughties offer up The Scissor Sisters self-titled debut and follow-up 'Ta-Dah' and Mika's 'Life In Cartoon Motion'. It's possibly too early to see any significant trends for whatever the current decade is supposed to be called, although the Only Men Aloud! CD is becoming a regular spot. I'd have predicted Florence & The Machine but their recent promotion to Glastonbury headliners has bought them at least another couple of years in people's collections. 1D look vulnerable, as do Mumford and Sons following the lukewarm reaction to their latest album. Time will tell ...