Do I Love You? Why I'm a rubbish at Collecting Records

“My theory was that my copy of Strawberry Fields Forever by the Beatles which had cost me seven and sixpence was no better or no worse than the copy Andy Warhol had”

Bill Drummond

I was a very young lad, 5 or 6 maybe, when my mum first told me about Elvis Presley. She told me about this kid who wore his hair like the truck drivers and made records to make his mum happy. About how he was a white kid, but sounded black on the radio, but everyone loved him anyway and what colour you were didn't matter but how much you loved your mother did. I was quite taken with him, he sounded pretty cool, but the image that cemented itself in my head was the original record, the first one off pressing of That's Alright Mama that he made as gift for his mother. I wanted to know where that record was. My mum said she didn't know, that she thought maybe it was buried with her. I thought about that record, worms crawling all over the shiny black vinyl inside the rotting coffin. I remember thinking that it belonged with her, but at the same time it should be in a museum. It was quite the conundrum.

I thought about this recently after reading about the discovery of one of the rarest records ever. It's a long story, but I’ll shave it down as not to bore you. Young Frank Wilson from Houston, Texas fancied himself as a singer. He cut a couple of discs under various aliases which did nothing, and decided he wanted to sign to Motown because that's where the money was. Berry Gordy, Motown's boss and lest we forget a disciple to money rather than art, recorded a Wilson single called Do I Love You (indeed I do) but decided that he had enough artists in his arsenal and wanted Wilson as writer and producer instead. The single wasn't released, and that's where the story should have ended. Cut to Northern England in the 1970's. A new scene has emerged of kids dancing to rare and obscure black American soul music. A kid called Simon Soussan, who had an enviable job of ransacking Motown's vaults and discovers a copy of Do I Love You. He promptly bootlegs it and sells it on to Northern Soul DJ's in Britain. The record, a dizzyingly joyful fizzy pop release of a song (which almost hits the same aural euphoria as Happy Together by the Turtles but not quite) is an instant hit on the dance floors. The original copies (two known to be in existence) are now the most sought after records on the Northern scene. The second copy sells for £25000.

Cut forward to England late 2017. It emerges there are not two copies, but three. But this one is even rarer. An original test pressing no less. Everything is scrutinised. The matrix numbers down to the handwriting on the label are put under the microscope. It's true, it's real, the golden egg of vinyl collecting. Estimates are so bold to state that the record could sell for £50000.

I watched on in amazement. I was raptured at the discovery when a terrible feeling come over me. I had absolutely no desire to own this record. What would I do with a record worth so much money? I certainly wouldn't play it (I'd be scared to pick it up). Where would I put it? I've also have a policy of not selling records on (I had to sell some Smiths import 12”s as a teenager to fund that years Christmas shopping. I still wince at the memory) so even though £50000 would come in very handy, I'd have to sell a piece of my soul too.

There is an assumption that if you buy a lot of records that makes you a record collector. This is not the case. I do buy a lot of vinyl, but have no completest urges. Collectors of Beatles have it the hardest. A slight variance of font on the label can increase the records by hundreds of pounds. Do I need two copies of the same album because the lettering is a bit different? No. I own lots of collectible records but not many rare ones. I have two test pressings of Sarah Records 7” singles. One is a white label and the other a Mayking Records factory test pressing. I rarely play them. Half the fun of playing a Sarah record is looking at the sleeve as it spins. This is what makes me a non-collector in essence. I don't buy them to file away like a stamp collection or pin them like butterflies in glass cases. I buy them to play them and enjoy them. I don't like and don't understand the one-upmanship of that world and I don't need it in my life.

Another reason I don't want to own that Frank Wilson record is I already have a copy. It's not an original obviously, not even a reissue. It's a third generation bootleg I bought off Ebay for a tenner. It still goes round and round though, and still sounds incredible. I played regularly whilst Djing at Just Like Honey and would have the pleasure of looking out at a dance floor packed with smiley sweaty people having the times of their lives. There was the girl who came to the booth and said it was her birthday, and we probably wouldn’t have it but she would love to hear Do I Love You by Frank Wilson. I still remember her smile as I got it out of the box. This one? Yes, she beamed. That's the one . It was also the last record we ever played at JLH and still has beer stains and possibly tear stains of the sleeve from that night.. I'm not sure you get these kind of memories from an MP3. But maybe you do and I'm just a snobbish old man. Either way, I hope the eventual owner of the test pressing enjoys his copy of Do I Love You 5000 times as much as I enjoy mine. But somehow I doubt it. 

(Written with gratitude and respect to the fine people at the incredible Soulsource website)

Laughter in the Dark-On Laughing Man by Rain

When I was 14, I was skiving out of doing my homework one night by watching Brookside with my mum. It was a pretty average episode until Mike Dixon, leather jacketed heart throb and rebel with a chin, came on the screen wearing a black T-shirt with the legend Rain printed on it in white writing. At this point I was steadily building my encyclopedic knowledge of indie music, and remember feeling somewhat miffed that a band could slip stealthily under my radar on to prime time television.

As well as building an internal database of indie artists, I was steadily puting together the foundations of my record collection. It was no small thrill when I found in the local advertisement paper coupon entitling the holder to purchase cheap records, namely 12” for £1 and 7”for 50p. I didn't know it at the time, but the shop dropping the discounts, Rainbow Records, was closing down. I had bought my cassettes from there, and found myself daydreaming about the small rack of 45s. No sleeves, just the paper die cut sleeve with the artist and title written in biro. This I found unbearably exciting. No pictures, no labels, no clues.

I was even more giddy when I rocked up one Sunday morning brandishing my voucher,and was told to go upstairs. When I reached the top I found a room containing the shops whole vinyl stock laid out on the floor, either randomly put together in plastic boxes or propped unsteadily on the floor. I've never found a better place to burn my paper round money.

I bought as much as my money would stretch to and my arms could carry (I could have bought the lot for a few of hundred quid) but the pick was a 10” called Lemonstone Desired and 7” on clear vinyl in a gatefold sleeve called Taste of Rain. Both records where by an artist called Rain.

The music was good. Guitar lead, with hints of blues and psychedelia. The music was driven, seemingly honed by years of hard touring, tight but with dirt under the fingernails. I flipped the 45 over to play the B-side. I've never stopped playing it.

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In his lecture, Has the iPod changed our relationship with music?, Bill Drummond describes the downside of having a whole library of music inside a tiny box. The problem, as he sees it, is one finds themselves skipping tracks, whole albums worth, in a bid to find something satisfying. I had the same problem, but came up with my own solution. I split songs into two category's-Ipod friendly and not. The former contain songs with a bit of oomph about them,unfussy and uncomplicated. Good walking music. The latter contains more delicate songs designed for listening to in ones bedroom. When I say that, I don't mean songs to play in the car or do the washing up to. I mean songs to listen to. It's dying art, just listening to a record. Just watching the vinyl of round and inhaling nothing but oxygen and the sounds coming out the speakers. Laughing Man, the B-side of Taste of Rain, is the perfect song for this. It's beautiful, one of my top five. An acoustic balled peppered with slightly Spanish flecks of chiming guitar. Seemingly about someone trying to look after someone else (I see you/You see me/Take my hand/and we'll be free/Just as darkness turns to light/I will help you through the night) but tentatively holding on themselves (The laughing man/Came beating down my door/I'm laughing man/But I can't take no more). It's real 4am,whisky in hand stuff.

I was obsessed by the song, playing it in the dark through headphones, trying to make sense of it. The words, the emotion of the track. Clues were thin on the ground. The band were signed to Sony, something I figured was due to the track Lemonstone Desired,a slightly 60's sounding record which echo's the Byrds.(you can hear the influence of Rain to a certain degree in The Coral but quite majorly in the Stands).

 I could picture some A&R man trying to coin in the Stone Roses buck, down to it's Sally Cinnamon vibes . The sleeves bore witness to this, painted nude women, a mouth exhaling smoke. Who was the Laughing Man? For a while I though it may be based on the JD Salinger story of the same name, then after reading a dedication on the sleeve (“To all women everywhere, we would!”) and changed my mind. I sent an SAE to a mysterious 'Diane' via a Liverpool PO Box written in small print on the sleeve begging for information (and cheekily, some hand written lyrics to the song which gives you some understanding of my obsession) but received nothing back. The band had just vanished in to thin air. The song is possibly the only one I've played regularly since my teens. I love that song.

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So I contacted the band, and one of the songwriter for contribution to this piece, and both , in a reaction eerily similar to Diane's, have been ignored. I was initially a bit pissed off, but once I got over taking it personally, I was actually pretty chuffed. Maybe it's better that it's not possible to find out a song meaning with a quick click on Google, maybe I will paint my own picture of what the writer is trying to tell us. Mystique is wonderful thing. If you read this far, you are probably itching to hear the record. Well, tough. There are no MP3's on Google, no tracks on Youtube. If you want to hear it, then just like me you will have to hunt down the record. With ipod , we are trying to find a track to rescue us, but the best songs are the ones trying to find us. As we get older, I think, we find less and less music that defines us, but it never stops being able to console and heal. A 7” record can change your whole body chemistry in seconds. Long may it run.

For the record-debunking the myth of a vinyl revival

"Well they say "Brian is back", but in my heart he's always been around" The Beach Boys-Brian's Back

"Mums with pushchairs outside Sainsbury's/ tears in their eyes/They'll never buy a Gibb Brothers record again/Their old 45s gathering dust..." Saint Etienne-Teenage Winter

Imagine, if you will, a world where the media gets itself all excited about a beer revival. The BBC makes programmes about beer, full of hazily recreated shots of a heavily side-burned young man entering a 70's pub and wistfully buying a pint in a handled glass. The great and the good trip of themselves to comment about how great buying beer is. "You never forget buying your first pint" says one. "There's that silence, then a clink of glass" chimes another "then you get your first sip. It's like magic". The press flies the flag for beer. 'The Beer Revival' screams the Mail headline. "An online poll of 1,700 beer buyers found that 86 per cent of them said it was their favourite ale format. A third of today’s beer fans are aged under 35. 'Beer is back' says another. "The first half of 2013 saw sales of beer increase by over 33%, based on the previous year’s numbers.' Great, you may think to yourself, I like beer. But hang on a minute, I've been buying beer since my late teens and have never stopped, how can it be back if it never went away?

Of course, the above quotes are not about beer, but about vinyl. It would appear that thanks to an Arctic Monkeys LP an increase of sales of vinyl occurred to the tune of 33%. The only people really trumping this are the major record labels. We should perhaps remind ourselves that we owe these people no favours. In 1979 Sony and Phillips united to introduce a new digital storage disc. The CD (a kind of mug coaster invented by Metal Mickey) was a disaster for LP's and 45's and killed off the cassette tape. The marketing campaign for CD's in the late 80's and early 90's was a simple one: the vinyl record is obsolete, this new shiny disc is all you need. Strangely, the record buying public acquiesced, with 400 million compact discs being produced in 1988 alone. People where getting rid of their weighty, cumbersome, scratchy, space consuming LP's and buying into the slick new age. Then, just as the record companies were doing an Arthur Daley-esque trade in pushing you to buy a record you already owned, it all went horribly wrong for them. After enjoying the Britpop boom of record sales (once again kids where spending pocket money on records in Beatlemania proportions) the 2000's saw the internet triumph. MP3's and file sharing was the new thing daddio. Your music lover could askew the nasty business of having to actually buy recorded music and could simply download that tune they wanted free, or if they couldn't find the songs they wanted, they could buy the ghostly essence of a song from Itunes for 79p. This development pretty much killed of popular music as we knew it in the UK. We lost Tower, Virgin. Our Price, MVC to name just a few. We lost Top of the Pops and 90% of independent record shops. We lost the act of buying a record. It was the Sony wot dunnit.

During all this though, did you actually stop buying new records on vinyl? The other formats all had flaws (tapes chewed, CD skipped, MP3's, well, pretend records hardly constitute a record collection do they? You don't even own it. Your collection of songs downloaded from Itunes remains the property of Apple, and is theirs to take back once you die) but vinyl when looked after can last forever. Don't get me wrong, I own an ipod, I have bought tapes and CD's, but I prefer listening to vinyl. It's my format of choice. I like vinyl. I love buying records more than I love buying socks, but we should remember they are very much the same act.

For my money, there are two kinds of people who buy their records on vinyl. One is the collector, the person who is a bit older and has a bit more spare cash and must have every release by an artist or label, even if it means shelling out £50 for a record they already own because the font is slightly different on the label. This is vinyl as fetishism. Sawdust Caesars building their own little empires of taste. The spotlight was shone on these kind of collectors by Nick Hornby in his book (and eventual film) High Fidelity. In the book, one record shop worker sells a Dylan LP to a gullible customer on the grounds that people will mock him if doesn't own it. It made an A&M pressing of the God Save the Queen 7" the pinnacle of the desirable record collectible and as a result the price of the 45 rocketed. It is perhaps easy to sympathise or even feel empathy towards these fellows. In a harsh and uncaring world, a record collection is a sane beacon of light, one to cherish in mutual understanding. But make no bones about it, these are lovers of vinyl not music. Their purchases are based on their heads rather than their hearts. They buy records as an act of tribalism rather than love, the same way football fans show their allegiance not by going to games but by buying the new shirt every season and any mug, car air freshener, socks, or wallet with the team logo on it. Records are not be played and enjoyed, but bought, filed away and stored, like a stamp collection. A very recent example of this is Pristine Christine by the Sea Urchins, the first release on Sarah records suddenly selling in excess of £200. It's perfectly possible the new owner is spinning it regularly and drinking in it's chiming indie tones with an ear to the speaker and a feeling of warmth all over them, but I somehow doubt it.

The second type of vinyl buyer is the music fan. They love nothing better than to discover a new band or a new label. They can be very easily identified, they play the same 7" over and over again and gently sway the pub conversation towards the new band, song, album, label that you simply MUST listen to. These are music's bread and butter, the reason the world of music is still thrilling and wonderful. There's nothing quite like that buzz of finding something new to fall in love with. It, of course, doesn't have to be a new release. One of my favourite record shops is Beatin' Rhythm Records in Manchester, but it was really special when it was on Tib Street. It was a room full of 45's and a couple of decks with headphones. You could pick up a pile of 7" records, give them a spin and buy the ones you liked the sound of. There was something lovely, beautiful and exciting about that. You may have picked up a record that you will still playing when you're sixty, or it may be a load of shit. I love that gamble. (Through digging there I picked up a copy of Tainted Love by Ruth Swann for a fiver and a copy of Let the Music Play by Didi Noel for two quid. I sill play these records in pretty much every DJ set I do). Of course, you could buy the prettily packaged CD set of 100 best Northern Soul records, with extensive sleeve notes and pictures. But really, where's the fun in that?

Perversely, the nostalgia thing has gone full circle, with people trying to replace the LP they got rid of when they bought the CD. "I used to have that on vinyl" they say, and drift off into a warm daydream, then find themselves shelling out silly money on Ebay. There is a rather confusing quote by head of BPI Geoff Taylor. "The LP is back in the groove. We're witnessing a renaissance for records - they’re no longer retromania and are becoming the format of choice for more and more music fans." he says "This year has been a treat for vinyl aficionados with releases from Daft Punk, David Bowie, Arctic Monkeys and Black Sabbath". I'm not sure how buying a Black Sabbath record isn't 'retromania', but there we are. One thing the majors have got wind of is the genius idea of having an MP3 download code included when you buy a new LP, an idea nicked wholesale from the indie labels the BPI ignore. It means you can enjoy your new LP at home, have it on your ipod when you walk to the pub or burn it onto CD for the car. One thing the BPI cannot smooth over, is where someone wanting to buy the new Daft Punk, David Bowie, Arctic Monkeys and Black Sabbath LP's can do so. With HMV now effectively a t-shirt and DVD shop, how can the BPI trump a vinyl revival when it's impossible for people outside cities to actually physically buy them? Even indie labels who specialise in vinyl releases are feeling the pinch, with the price of mailing them out getting giddily higher and higher, making it virtually unsustainable to ship records over seas. Maybe the resurgence will see the comeback of record shops, but I wouldn't hold your breath.



Look, there is no vinyl revival. People have never stopped buying it they way the stopped buying cassettes. It's always been a format of choice. However heavily glossed up for the press, an increase in sales of LP's is a good thing, but can only be sustained if people go on buying it. Maybe someone buying an Arctic Monkeys LP can buy a key to the wonderful world of buying records. Or maybe their loan foot square purchase will sit in a corner gathering dust. One thing is for certain, every year there is a new label, a new band, a new LP to fall in love with. Your only job is to discover it.