One of the many wonderful things about record collecting, in contrast to say collecting art or decorative homeware, is that vinyl records were the ultimate mass-produced product, especially in their 60s, 70s heyday. There are millions of these things still sitting in people’s cupboards, hidden in their lofts, tucked away under some shelves in sheds (running the risk of damp frustratingly) or even still being enjoyed in living rooms for their intended purpose. As I am doing right now as I write this (with my early seventies UK Charisma pressing of the Genesis progressive thrilling Nursery Cryme if you are curious). So, unlike many other areas of collecting, where the chances of stumbling upon that bit of true buried treasure will be so limited as to represent a once in a lifetime occurrence, with records you can, if you’re prepared to put the time in hunting around, really expect to turn up something truly exciting and revelatory every single week, or daily if you’re able to build your life around it.

I might be making this all sound too good to be true, but I am speaking from personal experience built up over thirty years so there is some substance to this claim. If there is a downside, well maybe it is the amount of crap you must plough through to hit those jackpots. Yes, you will become over familiar with the record covers of Jason Donovan and Jim Reeves, just go and flick through the vinyl at your local charity shop for proof of this. If you, as I do, run adverts for purchasing peoples unwanted record collections, you will answer the phone to many a caller informing you they have masses of records from the fifties and sixties, “you name it it’s in there somewhere, way too much to tell you about over the phone”. So off you’ll go, dreaming that this is the day you’ll be returning home with those original issues of ‘Village Green Preservation Society’ and ‘Odyssey and Oracle’ under your arm, already planning to set aside the evening for a good bottle of wine as I drop the needle on potentially long sought after hot collectables from the fifties and sixties, only to be presented with the actual big sellers of the period. Yes, it is often said that the good stuff can rise to the top slowly, there is no better evidence of this when you consider the albums that are today regarded as the essential classics of the period against the albums people bought by the truckload at the time. The Sound of Music soundtrack, cheap sound-a-like Top Of The Pops compilations, Readers Digest box sets and if that is not bad enough the ever-present artists you find are, far more than the Beatles and Rolling Stones, they are Ken Dodd, James Last, Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck and the aforementioned Jim Reeves.

But if the downside if having to look through a lot of rubbish, the sweetener is that there is always a chance of something wonderful popping up, even among the collections like I just described. There can be many reasons for this, or no explanation at all beyond random luck. Older people selling a collection pulled out of a dark corner of their attic may have had children, and offspring rarely share their parents’ musical taste. So it is that some hard-to-find Reggae or C86 Indie can crop up among the Andy Williams and Tijuana Brass dross. Sometimes an album way off the regular listening habits of the receiver may have been given as a gift, which is exactly how an unplayed fifties Blue Note Jazz original could appear inside a box of predictable Trad Jazz, folk rarely play gifted music that is not to their taste. But to return to my mass-production thread, there really still is an abundance of this stuff hiding out there waiting to be discovered and you genuinely cannot predict what will turn up. I mean, even limited-edition private pressings generally had at least 500 or 1000 copies produced, which is rather a lot when you think about it.

This is on my mind because in the past week I had one such wonderful find. Browsing through a collection of, admittedly unusual but still, quite uninteresting seventies UK middle-of-the-road country, mainly privately manufactured by performers without distribution deals who sold their product around the pub circuit (which is why most of these records turn up signed by the artist with a personal dedication), I found a lovely 1980 album by Mandy Morton on Polydor called ‘Sea Of Storms’. Despite the year, it is a delightful bit of mildly psychy freak folk with its sensibilities firmly rooted in the decade just passed rather than the one already commencing. It surely represented the original owner making a mistaken purchase outside of their usual comfort zone, or this was a speculative present from a more musically clued up relative trying to fight the good musical fight like we all do, us who love to share the good stuff about. You can imagine it, “let’s get him off the Don Williams and open his eyes with a bit of Mandy Morton, he’ll be thanking me for years.” Anyway, the immediately found its home on the Fruit Tree Records shelves and one of the many superb tracks on the album appears on this month’s playlist.