My Records.

Somebody yesterday asked me to elaborate on my record collection, which I shall do. It's big, heavy, takes up a lot of room, and is almost without exception worth less now than what I paid for it. Over the years I have acquired a lot of records from local charity shops, and various assorted means, for usually not a lot of money. A few years ago I did have a phase of buying new records from Ebay, Fopp and Rise, but more often than not I have paid less than a few pounds for my records. While this is a good thing when I get very lucky in the case of At Folsom Prison, in other cases it may not have produced such dividends. I have had eBay accounts but usually get thrown off for forgetting to pay for a week or so, and everybody is so impatient these days. In fact one time an Ebayer had actually sent the record to me, and given me positive feedback before I had paid, which was interesting. I did of course pay him in the end. I hope. Anyhow without resorting to the word eclectic, I'm not really certain how to adequately describe my ever-expanding collection without actually listing every record that I own.

 Well, last night were playing some  board games, and this is a list of singles and albums that were played over the evening; Stone roses - Something's Burning, Tubeway Army - Are Friends Electric, Barry McGuire - Eve of Destruction, Edwin Starr - Ooo Baby Baby, Donna Summer -  I Feel Love, Jan Hammer - Miama Vice Theme Tune, Squeeze - Cool for Cats, Dusty - Baby You Don't Know, The Train Spotters (punk band), ? and the Mysterians - 96 Tears, Elvis Costello - Watching The Detectives, Michael Jackson - Billie Jean, Jonathon Richman - Astral Plane, The Gap Band - Oops Up Side Your Head, Giorgio Moroder - Together in Electric Dreams, Gladys Knight - To Make a Long Story Short, along with some Billie Holiday, Sonic Youth and Elliot Smith, Beatles and the Jungle Book Soundtrack on long players.

I would say that this was kind of representative of the music that I play, but of course there are some thing missing. I Tend to play quite a lot of old Blues records, such as Big Bill Broonzy and Bessie Smith, along with Nick Drake, Johnny Cash and the Velvet Underground.

Probably my favourite three albums currently are all by Canadians actually. Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young. There are many things that I love to listen to which are probably not really pub-friendly music, such as say the White Stripes, Captain Beefheart or Sonic Youth, but I would say the majority of it goes down pretty well at the correct time. I'm going to put up a music page here, detailing our favourites, the kind of things that we are listening to at the minute, and maybe listing new acquisitions.

And about the post photograph which I am quite happy with. It was taken on a Nikon D200, 1/20th, ISO1600, 50ml lens at f1.8, using a monopod. The deck is providing the only light source. It is Gladys Knight playing on the deck, and I have a feeling that for the image I may have had to cheat and slow the speed down to 33rpm in order to allow the flicky-red-light-texture- to become more pronounced. The cartridge is just a cheap Stanton, but it does produce a satisfying shadow, I hope you agree.