I’ve been away, exploring the Scottish Highlands for a couple of weeks. Presented with a chance to escape the relentless dry, England summer 2022 heat you would assume, surrounded by vast natural beauty, gently rolling waters drifting out ahead of me framed by dramatic, hillside scenery that the last thing on my mind is checking out any local towns I can come across and seeing if I can uncover some vinyl gems for the collection. Well obviously you would be wrong about that, the prospect of a town off the beaten track having a charity shop that has just taken stock of a rare Jazz collection from a recently cleared house or some cases of weird and wonderful 60s / 70s folk recently offloaded by some grandchildren with no interest in their recently deceased relative listened to. Sadly, it can still be the case that people assume the things us vinyl hunters are after are Queen albums and they wrongly assume records they do not recognize are of little or no interest to anyone.

If you do not look you will not find, but please be aware that the days where something exciting is discovered have to be offset against the many occasions when all you will flick through are Jim Reeves and Ken Dodd albums. Nowadays there are regrettably fewer charity shops that bother stocking records and it is those aforementioned musical criminals who are a big part of that decline, them and the likes of James Last, Engelbert Humperdinck, Andy Williams or the landfill fodder of Top Of The Pops LPs and horrible budget Readers Digest compilations. You see what happens is that these collections have been dumped on charity shops in massive quantities over the years, often by record dealers who know they cannot shift them even at giveaway prices, only for them to sit taking up space on the shop shelves. Nobody buys them and eventually the management decide that they will not stock vinyl anymore because nobody buys it.

So, what I am trying to write is that, despite my best efforts, I did not find any real vinyl treasure on this particular excursion. I did find records that I am pleased to welcome back into the collection though, ones that for various reasons have disappeared or were only ever purchased on CD the first-time round. Little audio delights at the affordable end of the second-hand marketplace by names like Paul Simon, Tanita Tikaram and Elvis Costello. The rarest thing I found was a great little late sixties album by Harry Nilsson, one which features his classic cover of Fred Neil’s ‘Everybody’s Talking’; it’s lyric about “going where the weather suits my clothes” encapsulating my trip away perfectly. I have always been more of a jumpers and beanie man rather than a summer clothes wearer; I am well and truly back in the shorts now though!