The world of record collecting always has the capacity to throw up a wonderful surprise but if you want those moments of euphoria you must put in the hard yards. Unless you are very lucky, the occasions of uncovering buried treasure will not come about unless you have spent hours looking through boxes, shelves, attics and sheds containing titles by James Last, Jim Reeves, Ken Dodd, Val Doonican, Engelbert Humperdinck all sitting alongside a tasteless mélange of budget compilations on labels like Readers Digest, K-Tel, Music For Pleasure or indeed any outlet that put out releases with words like Hits or Chart or Pops in the titles. There are so many repeat offenders, so many mass-produced releases put out by blood-sucking music business mercenaries, the Simon Cowell’s of their day, which show up all the time in record collections of people who were purchasing vinyl between the sixties and the eighties. If you think Cowell later mastered the art of selling shit music to people who don’t give a shit about music, a glance through all too many 40–60-year-old record collections will prove that it was not a financial masterstroke of his making. And the thing is, even if in some cases an argument could be made for merit in the music, there is simply no demand for these albums on the collector’s market at all.

Val, James, Jim and Ken were selling in huge quantities because they had a massive audience among the older generation; those who had no desire to tune in and drop out in the sixties; the folks who didn’t mind the Beatles in the mop top years but had no tolerance when they started going a bit funny with drugs; the people whose only reaction to the punk racket was to express a wish to see national service brought back and the casualties in the eighties who yearned for the days when people played real instruments. Still, no two personal album libraries are the same and I was fortunate enough this month to find a box of albums in an auction with something rather special in it. At first it appeared to consist of nothing more than pristine copies of all the middle-of-the-road acts mentioned above and similar but then I chanced upon equally immaculate original copies of the first three Beatles albums. Two were regulation Mono issues (although still incredible in such ‘like new’ condition) but the third was actually a very rare Stereo pressing of their debut Please Please Me album (Stereo equipment was very much a specialist interest in 1963, almost everyone bought Mono). The first thing you look for is the label because the ultra-scarce first editions briefly came out with the old Parlophone label design with gold lettering. This was not, it had the more familiar yellow lettering seen on all Beatles Parlophone releases for the remainder of the decade. But in every other sense it was clearly a 1963 original and crucially, the sleeve was the exact same sleeve configuration seen on the original gold lettering release. Put simply, it is very rare, something of a holy grail item to some Beatle fanatics and there it was sat in the middle of an unremarkable box of bang average album titles underneath a table at an auction.

So, I put my bids in online for the following days sale (I could not attend in person) and hoped for the best, keeping my fingers crossed that no one else had seen what I’d seen. Well, I guess someone had because, even though I won the box, it still cost me over £200 and there is no way anybody was paying that sort of money for the Vince Hill albums also included. Still, an unwelcome drama almost happened when I went to pay and collect because I was close to falling foul of a dirty trick some unscrupulous traders pull at auctions. Because there are often several boxes of records being sold it is easy, during the viewing day, to maybe slip a tasty platter from one box into another on the morning of the sale so absent bidders like myself are unaware that the box they are bidding heavily on for just one collectable title no longer has that album in it. I have the auction porter to thank for that not happening to me because as I was carrying my box out (having checked Please Please Me was still in there, I’ve been stung before) he came and said “I assume you wanted that for the Beatles albums? They’re still there but they nearly weren’t. They’d been swapped into the box next door, but I spotted them and put them back.” Obviously, I thanked him effervescently, but it is a lesson worth remembering if you buy from auctions. There are so many people at these places with such a lively bustle of activity that this little sleight-of-hand can so easily occur. All is rarely fair and honest in any form of collectables trading, when money’s involved people are ruthless.

My Please Please Me with original Stereo sleeve has sold already I’m afraid pop pickers. Because of its rarity and, I won’t deny it, wanting to get as much money for it as possible I auctioned it on eBay. I was extremely happy with the price too but remember, whilst I accept the happy slice of good fortune involved, the number of Jim Reeves records I have flicked past over the years are the dues I’ve paid in full. Enjoy this month’s playlist…