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…

Prompted by the terribly sad news of his passing this month, I have been back on a deep re-examination and appreciation of Karl Wallinger’s music. Primarily within the working vehicle for his songs, World Party, but also covering his too brief mid-eighties contributions to the Waterboys as well as the Peter Gabriel led Big Blue Ball project wherein Wallinger left as big and lasting an imprint as Gabriel himself; it is clear that we lost a notable musical force. Ironically, the overwhelming characteristic burning through if you check out old interviews and read the many tributes in the wake of his passing, is that he rarely over promoted his efforts, preferring to demur behind a very droll English line in self-deprecating wit. You do wonder if maybe just a sprinkling of the kind of self-aggrandizement (something that his former Waterboys sparring partner Mike Scott is happy to emit when required) might not have gone amiss just occasionally, he certainly had the music to back it up. Indeed, among the first to pay tribute when the news broke was Mike Scott himself remembering Wallinger as “one of the finest musicians I ever worked with” which said a lot, especially when you consider the animosity the pair had shown each other for the majority of the previous forty years.

There remains a sense of unfinished business between Scott and Wallinger, not in terms of the sniping but more in terms of how incredible the results were when they did collaborate on The Waterboys ‘This Is The Sea.’ The only joint songwriting credit between the pair, on record, was that albums dramatic opener ‘Don’t Bang The Drum’ but the role Wallinger played in the bands biggest hit from the same album, ‘The Whole Of The Moon,’ cannot be underestimated. Scott did, at times, go to great lengths in interviews to clearly state that Wallinger played no part in the writing of the piece (although I can find no evidence of Wallinger ever claiming it as his own) but that does show how much he left his mark on the recording. It is a track full of little sonic explosions, fantastically so when the lyric sings “came like a comet, blazing your trail” and the crash of a speeding collision pre-empts the first appearance of a saxophone, demonstrating how fully locked into the studio creativity Wallinger was at this point. But it would not even last to the end of that year, as the Waterboys made a left turn into the world of Irish folk music and Karl departed to form World Party with Mike blowing a farewell kiss in his best ‘How Do You Sleep’ style with a sarcastic sounding song of the same name; “climb your own peak, find a new streak, get yourself along to the World Party”.   

During the late 80s/90s period that followed, there is a compelling argument that says Karl’s band were far more in tune with the prevailing winds of the period than Mike’s. Listening today, World Party music actually sounds ahead of its time, quite something when one recalls how back then accusations of sounding a little too retro were levelled whilst all around the faux-psychedelia of the ‘second summer of love’ and the ‘daisy age’ were in full bloom and celebrated by a music press rather more impressed by sixties-referencing music if it was stitched to a dance culture aesthetic and backed by the ubiquitous funky-drummer sample. Wallinger’s genius was evident in how he recognized production values and analogue sounds from thirty years previous as the design classic they, later in the Britpop era, became acknowledged as being and simply used that as his studio canvas. He was no mere Beatles and Dylan obsessive though, the influence of Prince always loomed large in the work of a similarly gifted multi-instrumentalist who always took care of the lions share of playing in his studio work. Lyrically too, his environmental concerns can no longer be dismissed as the hippy-leaning idealism of a man indulging in too much blue sky thinking; indeed, everything he sang about sounds like front page news in 2024.

The execution on the albums he made sounds absolutely flawless today, not least on 1990’s classic ‘Goodbye Jumbo’. It really is worthy of the word ‘classic’ too, boasting a timelessness due to the creation being undertaken with zero intention of merely photocopying sounds of the past, far more realizing the sonic treatment each and every song required and it just so happens that, unusually for any record, every song is a must hear. Recordings remain bursting with untapped potential on ‘Goodbye Jumbo’ where songs like ‘Is It Too Late?,’ ‘When The Rainbow Comes’ and the gorgeous ‘Sweet Soul Dream’ are guaranteed to enjoy extended lives in the hands of TV and film producers for years to come. As messed up as the music business can seem to be, there is a satisfying tendency for the great stuff to rise to the top eventually in many cases. Karl continued to release World Party albums for the rest of the 90s and deservedly won some financial security after Robbie Williams covered his 1997 song ‘She’s The One’, something that, regardless of his mixed feelings about the cover version, he must have felt grateful for when health issues began in 2001, pre-empting only intermittent music releasing and performing activity for the rest of his life. The catalogue he did leave behind though is overflowing with wonderful music and I cannot over emphasize this enough. Occasionally a music related death stops me in my tracks with a sense of oh no, we have lost a good one here (Elliott Smith and Lou Reed spring to mind from the past twenty or so years) and this same feeling has returned with the passing of Karl Wallinger. This month’s playlist therefore has a few representations that hint at the incredible range of his legacy…

This months playlist is headed up by The Zutons, a band that I am more than a little excited to find are returning after being mostly inactive for the past fifteen years. It just so happened that my record shop took in a rare original vinyl copy of their 2004 debut album these past couple of weeks, ‘Who Killed The Zutons’, which was online for less than a day before someone had snapped it up. Luckily, before the sale and largely because there were a few surface scuff marks on the record, I had to play test it before listing it for sale. It played great and just reminded me what a stonking debut album that was twenty years ago. Hence the inclusion of a classic from that album to get this playlist started.

The new material the band are returning with sounds pretty special too if what I have heard already is anything to go by. I do recall how exciting it was when they first appeared, seemingly another classic band from Liverpool (and this was only a short while after The Coral first surfaced) already developed and producing brilliant music. I knew John Peel at the time and can remember him holding their debut album in his hands saying how fantastic the band were and complaining that record companies such as theirs no longer sent him releases like that for free so he had to go out and buy his own copy. To be fair, he probably wasn’t being sent them because they knew he would be unlikely to play it. The Zutons were a Radio One daytime playlist band from the word go and Peel was always reluctant to play much music that was already getting exposure elsewhere. Still, it is worth noting that he rated The Zutons, especially given his high opinion of other Liverpool greats and of course, he was right.

Within a couple of years The Zutons world changed indelibly when Amy Winehouse covered their ‘Valerie’ making it, almost instantly, one of the most popular and familiar songs of the decade. It is hard to not believe that this must have had a demotivating effect on the band, especially with all the financial security that singer Dave McCabe, by his own recent admission, still enjoys to this day. It could indeed be the reason that, as of today, there are only a frustratingly paltry three Zutons albums to look out for. But, that is about to change, maybe this time they can stick around for the long run…

I seem to have spent the month of January in the most stimulating song exchange with a close friend which has had the knock on effect of keeping me away from listening to anything new. Instead I have been delving back into my extensive lists of archived playlists and music libraries trying to pick out whatever appropriate response song I can lay my hands on. Putting together the monthly playlist today the temptation was to just compile a 75 track summary of the back and forth of tunes we have been sparring with but the majority of them have appeared in previous monthly playlists and so, as my rule is a song only gets included once, I have had to do a speedy late sweep of new music missed in 2024 so far alongside other older tunes that were languishing in the in-tray.

Considering this state of affairs, it is actually quite pleasing to end up with another five hour list that is as fresh sounding and far reaching as this. It helps that some of my enduring, ever dependable favourites are dropping new music in plentiful amounts; names like Sleater-Kinney, The Black Keys, Hurray For The Riff Raff and Nadine Shah are back with superb renewed perspectives and there is even a brand new song by Billy Joel. In tandem with that, my recent obsessions with Cleo Sol and Blossom Dearie show no sign of abating whilst alongside all this I am about to reignite an old alliance with a close vinyl dealing friend and potentially get involved with clearing a house of some three thousand records. Keep an eye on the Fruit Tree Records store on Discogs to see if that all comes to pass. For now, watch out for the return of my Fresh Juice posts for the one thing my end of the month hoovering up of missed tunes has proved is this, there is a lot of exciting new music to be getting excited about as 2024 revs up…

As readers of my accompanying piece for the December playlist are aware, I have no shortage of available archive / vintage music to explore in my daily life and often a new obsession can lead to months of ongoing discovery and musical joy. Many people my age seem to have suspended their listening habits around their teenage years and much beyond their twenties they do not keep up with (not a statement that applies to my close music listening friends I should add). I even know a few serious record collectors who are perfectly happy just sticking to a past genre like Northern Soul or Acid Jazz or Seventies Prog and letting that journey uncover their thrills. I occasionally ponder whether I would be capable of going through a new release dry spell, all too aware that there is now more than enough already recorded music that I am going to love waiting for me to hear.

The problem with that would be that I do not appreciate just one or two styles of music. I would still be riding the genre waves, not anchored to one specific stream. And that being the case, I would invariably come across new present-day music. And as this latest playlist reveals in clarity, I am going to hear music that I will love and need to find out more about. I cannot imagine hearing any of the tracks on this playlist and turning a deaf ear to them because I am not interested in contemporary music. It is unthinkable. That means I would not be alert and alive to the sensational Cleo Sol, that alone is a circumstance that I cannot give any consideration to. Not only that but to deny myself recent music would be to also miss out on the live experience. As much as that remains an outlet rife with its own annoyances (over loud gig chatter, people not in the moment as they pointlessly capture mobile phone footage) in the average year there will be more than enough soul stirring performances to easily outweigh the negatives. Every once in a while, you catch something life changing.

So, I do not see a time when I will ever be indifferent to new music. Every January for a while now I have used the first monthly playlist of the year to round up my top tracks from the previous twelve months that escaped inclusion. And every year I end up pleasantly surprised at how easy the selection process is, I am simply overwhelmed by the sheer volume of contenders to pick from. If there ever comes a year when there are a lack of choices or getting up to seventy-five tracks is like arduous work, then maybe that will be the right moment to step back from the fresh juice. But I do not see that happening. I do not regard my tastes as representing anything remotely mainstream however, if my favourites were so ridiculously niche then there would not be so much of this stuff around. It is good to cast your net wide and it can be rewarding when you uncover something that is outside the popular consciousness. Just as much though, it is vital to have no rules and be ready to be excited by the unexpected. That is why you see an Olivia Rodrigo song in this list, that red alert explosion when you hear something for the first time and shout “bloody hell that’s brilliant” is so important.

Without that penetrative moment, I doubt any of us music obsessives would exist, we would all be satisfied with sticking on a supermarket CD at Christmas and partying annually like it’s 1994 (or whatever your peak younger year might be). For me I could never lock music away in a cupboard like that. It is not a background to other activities; it is not something I only need at parties and neither is it my nostalgia shelf. It is my primary artform, a vessel that lights up my life every single day. It is more important than movies, more accessible than books, more of a life crutch than my favourite football and cricket teams. Simply, it is the only thing that makes me feel happy, sad, blue, ecstatic, nostalgic, thrilled, amused and delighted; that moves me both emotively and physically; that can simultaneously induce tears of sadness and delight; the art form than can bring the past vividly back into the present moment or paint a clearer vision of the future. It is everything and the way it works its powers on the human emotions are mystical, it has a power that is almost magical. It is hard to imagine this ride ever losing momentum while I breathe. Let 2024 commence…

I went to a Record Fair this past month with a couple of friends both of whom are approximately twenty years younger than me. Other than the obvious cultural difference of trying to convince them that they are not called “vinyl’s,” it did occur to me that the major change in their visiting a fair as a punter to my record hunting two decades ago is that they are searching for things they have already heard. My mission was almost always based on the desire to find things unavailable for me to listen to, the discovery of exciting fresh sounds both newly released and from previous decades. Tracks that do not get played on the radio, or those that were given a spin once by the more eclectic late-night DJs only to vanish from your life, destined to be added to an expanding list of holy grail finds you are on the look out for. All of that has gone now in an age where pretty much everything is available to listen to, even tracks unavailable on download facilities or streaming services can at least be found and listened to if you plough the internet deep enough. Personally, I do not even have a list anymore, Record Fairs are a place I search for things that I am already familiar with but would like to own a decent quality vinyl pressing of.

Obviously, there are still things I never found back in the twentieth century and now appear so obscure even the internet has not logged thus far, but as time passes and people increasingly upload old video tapes and cassettes to YouTube the more these dark corners of music’s back pages are uncovered. I had this proved to me a few moments ago, as I started this paragraph, I recalled a song Mark Radcliffe played on his late-night Radio One show around 1995-96 called ‘Expecting Joe’ by The McTells. I wrote it down at the time and have kept half an eye out for it for nearly thirty years. Even when Discogs and eBay appeared I would occasionally type it into a search and come up blank. But I have just heard it for the first time since that radio play, it is sitting there on YouTube with a grainy old video clip to add to the time capsule. Turns out it was released on a cassette in 1987 which might explain why my looking for it on vinyl came up short. It does prove that my taste for lo-fi pop and scuzzy garage-rock sounds has been present for a good three decades, it would appear that the McTells were loosely associated with the C86 movement but were a little too rough around the edges to be fully embraced even by that scene.

The sad thing is I do not really feel like I am looking for it anymore, I sort of feel like I found it, but the payoff is not so sweet when there is no physical artefact to show for the conclusion of the hunt. So maybe I am still looking? I dare say if I find a copy of that particular cassette I would buy it, if it was cheap enough as I do not really collect tapes, but the heart and soul of the mission was to hear that music again, which is a desire that has now been satisfied. I do not mean to appear lukewarm about record collecting, those moments when you find a clean original pressing of music that you love, take it home and play it being sure to really listen to those sonic details can be magical. This month’s cover star is Sandy Denny in the late sixties fronting Fairport Convention and I recently enjoyed such an experience listening to their ‘Unhalfbricking’ on an original 1969 Island Records pressing. They really were one of the all-time great Rock-era bands around 1968-1969, a period in which they released a mind blowing three classic albums whilst struggling to overcome the turmoil of a motorway van crash with fatalities. No wonder this combination of their line-up splintered before the seventies for, on top of the tragedy and in addition to the wandering sprit of Richard Thompson’s genius, they also had a singer in Sandy Denny who threw all her raw emotions into her art and music. That is what I love about the above photo, she looks wound up and annoyed which, if true, was sure to have fed into the music Fairport Convention were playing that night. One of their most rousing pot-boilers from 1969 opens this month’s playlist, a selection which represents the range of music, both new and old, I would love to source on vinyl pressings when looking around a Record Fair…

I have been watching the superb football based TV comedy ‘Ted Lasso’ this past week and have been loving it so much that I am already more than half way through all three seasons. As with all the best series, there are certain characters who are so well acted, written and realized that they become larger than life favourites unintentionally evolving to be central to the show. In this case it has been the character of Roy Kent, depicted on this months cover image in football sticker form, a man so obviously based on real life former football now TV pundit Roy Keane. The parallels between the two are hardly subtle, from references to Roy being a former champions league winner, a ruthless competitor and on-field tough guy, right up to his transition into media work and the reputation he forged there as a straight talker with an aggressive dislike of weak excuses and flannel. They even give a nod to the real life Roy’s recent preference for extreme changes in beard length.

The reason so many people love the real Roy Keane, even those who never supported his teams or in rarer instances those with no interest in football, is because someone so straight forward in their assessments and opinions as well as a TV voice with such reliable unflowery honesty is a rare thing. Roy’s head seems completely unturned by so many modern day evolutions, not just in sport but in society too, and his criticism of large chunks of the middle class football crowd, even at his beloved Manchester United, as well as the unwelcome commercial distractions inflicted upon the modern footballer have always made him a loan voice of common sense amid a sea of “best league in the world” hype and propaganda. Despite this, there has always remained the suspicion that underneath that sharp exterior lies a man with a heart of gold who only wants to inspire the best out of the people around him and have those he comments on to aspire to be all they can be. It is that side of the man that the Roy Kent character has cleverly tapped in to. In fact the quote on the badge (above) comes directly from a scene in ‘Ted Lasso’ where Roy kindness bombs a recently divorced character re-entering the dating scene for saying the guy she had begun seeing, who Roy felt an instant distaste for, was “fine”.

Of course in real life social interaction we rarely speak with such candor to anyone other than those we are closest to. I found myself in a social situation this past month, sat in a village hall alongside people I had only recently met and may never, or rarely, see again. We were taking part in a quiz, sat politely at a trestle table drinking the beer and wine everyone had to bring along themselves because the venue did not have a bar. A question about music came into play accompanied by an audio clip of The Beatles ‘Yellow Submarine’. Of course everyone at our table knew who it was and in that lull between questions a lady, who I had probably spoken no more than twelve words to at that stage and carried herself with an air of authority, leant over to her father and said “I always thought the Beatles were very overrated”.

Apparently that is the thing that triggers me nowadays because without missing a beat, ignoring the fact that she was not even speaking directly to me, I gatecrashed the conversation with a firm “that’s bollocks!” Now, I have said in the past that anyone who tries to argue that the Beatles were not any good gets a line put through their name in my head as I subconsciously file them away in a compartment labelled ‘not worth talking to about music’. The ladies response to my little explosion was to solicit her father for support but to his credit he simply said “no The Beatles were great songwriters”. So she turned back to me, asking that I name my five favourite Beatles songs. However, by then the next question of the quiz was being read out and I waved the enquiry away, implying I would come back to it later. On a second attempt to re-engage me I pushed the offer away again, saying we did not need to discuss things further; turns out my in-brain filing system had already been doing its work.

There is probably an inner Roy Keane in all of us, coaxed out of hiding by whatever the individual holds close to their heart. I used to argue with people about music a lot thirty years ago but age mellows you and eventually you accept that no one else sharing your exact same taste is a positive thing, not to mention very normal. But people publicly announcing that the Beatles are overrated? You cannot let that shit go unchallenged. I hope you enjoy this months playlist but clearly, I could not care less if you hate it…

This months front cover image appeared on the front page of The Guardian a couple of days ago. It features a group of Kate Bush fans in Folkestone dancing to ‘Wuthering Heights’, dressed in homage to the artist as she appeared in the 1978 video for the hit single, on the occasion of Kate’s 65^th birthday. I love the joy on their faces and the fact that this was such an open, public celebration. The idea that a few passers by might have had an interest in Kate Bush sparked up (“you know her, she did the ‘Stranger Things’ music”) can only be a good thing. Any time I hear music I love forcing its way into a public space or into the mainstream consciousness I feel the universe is moving in the right direction. Equally, I feel we are on a terminable slide into mediocrity when I hear EDM blasting out of a passing car or I am assaulted with auto-tune-hell muzak in a high street shop.

There is something so personal about music that ensures it is a very unusual occurrence for someone to play me something and I instantly offer approval or ‘feel it’ like they do. Friends over the years have noticed me playlisting or listening to an artist only to comment “you said you didn’t like them when I played them to you”. It seems for music to truly speak to me (I accept I am far from being alone in this) I have to find my own way to it, that way it somehow feels like my own. I found this over the past month when staying with a family of folk music aficionados who spent the whole time bombarding me with relentless Paul Brady and Jackson Browne. I have been aware of both over the years without ever getting into them but the unchosen, daily exposure did not work. Far too much brow-furrowed reverence to guitar technique and craft and way too little feeling for me, in fact it made we want to reach for the nearest, trashiest, fuzziest Rock album I could lay my hands on to relieve the tedium… and I am a massive fan of Folk and singer-songwriters!

Maybe the day will come when I find my way to both these hugely respected artists and they will suddenly click with me. I wondered if the problem is me and I am missing something so did some internet research (it obviously is me, both artists seem to command massive critical acclaim and respect) which uncovered the little nugget of information that Paul Brady appeared in the film ‘Charlie Is My Darling’ stood outside a theatre in Ireland in 1965, waiting for a Rolling Stones performance. I had recorded the film off the TV recently but not got around to watching it so gave it a viewing. What a film! The best I have ever seen about the Stones. Originally intended for release in 1966, it actually only surfaced in a restored format just over ten years ago but it is already up there with classic music documentary films like ‘Don’t Look Back’ or ‘Jazz On A Summer’s Day’. The thrill of seeing the Stones in such up-close, unfiltered clarity in their early years; the deranged energy their live performance provokes in the crowd (who kill one performance with a stage invasion); watching an iconic looking Brian Jones plugging in and unleashing such atom-splitting riffs on his electric guitar; Mick and Keith lovingly jamming on some of The Beatles most recent material in an Irish dressing room, it all makes for the most riveting time capsule that I thoroughly recommend checking out.

Anyway back to the top, this months playlist kicks off with some classic Kate Bush and then unfolds with a fair representation of the music that’s excited me over the past four weeks; no Paul Brady, Jackson Browne or even any Rolling Stones for that matter. In fact, if you’re anything like me, if you listen to it at all you probably won’t even like that much of it but rather use something found within as a prompt to head off in your own direction and uncover the music that speaks to you. That is, after all, how all record collecting and music discovery should work. Finding your own taste, not adopting someone else’s, that’s the way forward…