This weekend after Robot Soap I decided to take myself off and out of the city. I’ve had a really good weekend of wandering aimlessly around a small country town. I’ve always found one of the best things about these little places is the abundance of charity shops and the weird and wonderful records for sale in them.
Countryside village or town record shops are much better for this kind of shopping than in the cities because some other die-hard or DJ type will have undoubtedly beat you to all the best records in the city but out here you’re at least in with a fighting chance.
This is by far my favourite way of buying records, not only are they dirt-cheap but you can find some real gems in there. I love the thrill of looking through crate after crate of utter shite to find one record worth it all. The ratio of hits to misses in this area of record collecting favours the latter by a huge percentage (probably in the 90% range).
This is not for the fainthearted, and you should never take friends because they just get bored too quickly. This is a solitary exercise in music buying, in fact I much prefer buying records alone full stop if I think about it.
And another thing I love is that over the weekend I pulled out such atrocities to music as ‘Byker Groove’ –The girls from the CBBC program Byker Grove singing some horrible pop-house record. ‘Green Velvet’ was another, and no it wasn’t the seminal techno producer of ‘La la Land’ fame – It was a bunch of farmers with brass instruments making a racket in the only inbred country folk way they knew how. Pretty special you’ve got to admit.
So with a total cost of £2 here are my top picks from this weekend:
Yello – The Race
Carly Simon – Why (I actually bought this for the B-side, an instrumental version of Why)
Madonna – Into The Groove (I can see a cheeky re-edit with Duke Dumont on the cards for this one)
Georgio Moroder and Phil Oakey – Together In Electric Dreams
2 comments:
Yes indeed! Charity shop record shopping is where its at! I L.O.V.E. digging through those dusty crates avoiding the Val Doonican and Minstrel Show albums to find some classics for next to nothing.
Its cool to go with someone who knows a thing or two more than you too. But you've got to watch they don't get all the good stuff before you.
I'm currently looking out for a copy of the Grange Hill theme, ha ha ha! ;) If your lucky you can find old SFX and Theme Show albums. All joking aside the FX albums especially are a steal, lots of them were released in the very late 70s and 80s (the BBC of note did some!), ideal for quirky production purposes!
I'll keep an eye out for you, You need to take me shopping for house music. since ND i've been trying to open myself up to buying other than techno/electro stuff
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