RECORD SHOPPING

 

If you happened to be in Soho yesterday afternoon and saw an elderly bespectacled gentleman bearing a walking stick and overstuffed carrier bag and needing to sit down every hundred yards or so, that was probably me. This was a rare foray into the once-familiar world of record shops. I only do this maybe once or twice a year, or if you're talking Cambridge Circus and Berwick Street it's more like once every 2-3 years. I used to be able to do both all the time without even thinking but as regular readers know to the point of ad nauseam my health isn't what it was. I'm much happier ordering things online - special thanks to Resident Music in Brighton, the HMV "vault" in Birmingham and very occasionally Piccadilly Records up there in Manchester (none, you'll note, in London) - or, these days, ordering secondhand CDs of albums I know very well but have yet to convert from cassettes (avoiding Amazon wherever possible).

So yesterday saw a bit of a splurge, all paid for by money I have legitimately earned through work and also saved by not wasting it on buying weekly travelcards, when all I need when I'm working from home two days a week is a bus pass, or purchasing any "hot" or "trendy" new records. An extremely rare splurge, mark you, which is unlikely to be repeated until Christmas and even then will probably happen in bookshops rather than record shops.

The not-so-terrible truth is that, as a man in his sixties, nostalgia is my fuel. I absolutely love re-buying old favourites in formats I never had before, records whose content I know to my bones, and the marvel and wonder which result from their rediscovery. I'm actually looking forward to getting the forthcoming deluxe 2CD reissue of the first Elastica album - which I only have on tape, purchased from HMV in Oxford Circus one Friday afternoon. These records' arrivals feel like weekly Christmases.

And I am deeply sceptical, not just about what is happening now in music, but what has been happening this whole century thus far. We have to find some space in the house, hence are planning to get rid of a lot of albums whose presence now we cannot really figure out. Admittedly quite a lot of these are things we bought for Then Play Long purposes, and now that blog is done we don't need them any more, certainly not for reasons of pleasure.

But here's the thing. I look at what we have from the twentieth century, musically, and don't really want to get rid of any of it. It's pretty much all solid classics or merely (!) excellent albums to which I have a deep emotional attachment. Whereas in the twenty-first century...well, where do we even start?

In a lot of ways, offloading is liberating. I'm old now. There's no more need to find excuses for horrible, capitalist, misogynistic, homophobic and violent R&B and rap, and don't even get me started on "bro" country. Bye bye Ed Sheeran, obviously (yes, we actually liked his first two), farewell Pink with the possible exception of your greatest hits, off to the charity shop with you Roisin and Moloko, and as for Jay "I think we're done with kneeling"-Z, I'm keeping The Blueprint and The Grey Album but everything else is destined for the poor-of-the-parish pile. The wonder is that we were conned into buying these things in the first place. Arcade Fire? They're long gone, or at least exiled to the streaming wing, and that felt and still feels like a personal betrayal.

Hence, as I run out of time, energy and patience, I'm now a lot more fussy about what I let into the house. I'll give you a prime example. Two days ago was the music industry's "Super Friday" when the best part of twenty new albums were released. I had compiled a pre-emptive playlist of the lead singles from most of them - bar boring old farts like Beck, Bonnie Prince Billy and Seasick Steve - and wow did that make for a magic hour of new pop. It's on Spotify; get over yourselves, purists.

Then Lena and I did speed-listens to most of the albums on Friday evening, just before dinner. Out of a shortlist of nineteen, I ended up buying...three of them yesterday. More money to spend on nice old things, then, but also a salutary reminder of how important singles still are, and how so many albums seem to be a way of conning you into buying a lot of mediocre stuff. Examples with ratings follow: 

 

Good old Echo and the Bunnymen. We already knew and loved the Heritage Chart number one single "Brussels Is Haunted" and the rest of the album is...well, it's Mac and the lads doing just what they have always done, and it's really comforting, and his voice is in really good shape (contrast with Jim "Strepsils Now!" Kerr), and the songs are pretty terrific, and it's nice to think that in the long-running battle, the Bunnymen have probably come out of it better than U2. Will Sergeant can still play guitar like no one else. BUY

 

Refreshing to know from The Meaning Of Flowers' lead single "Laymelli" that Duran Duran's "The Chauffeur" is still a major influence on musicians today, and this album generally is music-making at a very high level (I particularly enjoyed "Tangerine"). Agnes coming back after some years away and kicking the ball effortlessly out of the park, as the best French musicians tend to do. No problems whatsoever with this one. BUY

 

Ah, Beabadoobee, what are we going to do with you? Loved "Sun Has Set" but the rest of this album is just workaday, playlist-friendly "indie" fodder and it doesn't sound as though her heart is in it. SINGLE ONLY

 

Albums by GAYLE and MNEK are currently on streaming only so no comment about either right now.

 

"Crowns Of England" is one of my favourite protest songs of the year (it is certainly one of the angriest). The rest of this album is perfectly decent knees-up stuff which probably sounds great live on a Friday night but I raced to play side one of Red Roses For Me by The Pogues, which has everything this solid, workmanlike record doesn't. Sorry, guys. SINGLE ONLY

 

Mule by Orville Peck - fabulous single ("Too Little Too Late") but gaydar country studium otherwise. SINGLE ONLY

 

Miley, or MILEY!, or Look What My Innards Resemble When The Make-Up Comes Off The Brand plc, is trying way too hard. The album's title track"Bass Persuades" is another of 2026's greatest songs ("The kids don't wanna dance, the kids don't wanna DANCE!"). If she wants to be Britney at 34 then fine, but so much of the rest of the album resembles murky AI slop. SINGLE ONLY

GET MEAN by Boy Harsher, who are a synthpop duo from Atlanta, Georgia. Well there needs to be a lot more of those for a start. The single "Jeans" is terrific but the album sees them quickly draining their reservoir of invention. The singer's voice reminds me of Maggie from Swans Way/Scarlet Fantastic - ask your parents - but they only really end up with one basic trick, and Confidence Man do this sort of thing so much better. Should keep an eye on them, though. SINGLE ONLY

 

What a comeback single, what a slightly flaccid and overall too doom-laden album (Estrus? What is this, 1975?). Alas, Tove Lo, our resources are not endless. SINGLE ONLY

Now this was a real shame. I really liked "2515" but it quickly becomes apparent that they don't really have any ideas, that this is fundamentally two solvent Sloanies feeling sorry for themselves, and Lena found listening to it rather unpleasant. MISS

I saw Throwing Muses' first gig at what was then the Town and Country Club in late 1986, third on the bill below the Cocteau Twins and Dif Juz - that turned out to be a horrendous night for too many reasons - and was blindsided by their first album. Other than House Tornado and The Fat Skier in 1987 they never did anything as singularly good or original again. Kristin Hersh persists, however, and that abominable cover (not to mention its title - Sugar On Blackstone?) nearly put me off listening to this at all. "Dark Eyed Junko" remains messily enraged and striking, but we couldn't really get on with the rest of it (see also Hips And Makers, with that incredible Michael Stipe duet and...erm...what else?). SINGLE ONLY

 

Another album with an awful cover. This is thirty-eight more minutes of Rhiannon doing what she does - nothing more, nothing less - all very technically skilled and emotionally worthy, but it's like enduring a double history period in school with added aniseed. MISS

Now this is GOOD (Canada comes through again); eighty-four minutes of straightahead but quietly inventive pop, and how refreshing to hear a voice untrammelled by Xanax-induced hazes of cheap plug-in push-button effects. Yep, no problem with this either. BUY

Good old reliable Neil, singing of things you will understand in your essence if you grew up in Canada. The title song and "Soon I Might Be Going" both sound like classics but as usual I don't think we need to spend any actual money on him, other than finding a good copy of Freedom somewhere. WITH ALL DUE RESPECT, MISS

Angel by Lizzy McAlpine. I quite liked "The Light In The Painting" but by the time the Fleet Foxes duet rolled around, Lena's tolerance was exhausted and so was mine. MISS

A triple concept album, nearly two-and-a-half hours long, most of which seems to consist of children's songs. Reminds you how good Agnes Obel is. MISS

 

This was problematic. I like Nicole Atkins and these songs mostly sound very good indeed, but this is an album perhaps to be more admired than loved. The two duets sound contrived and the engine rather runs out of steam before the record's end. Maria McKee did this sort of thing so much better on Life Is Sweet three decades ago. RELUCTANT MISS

So there you have it. Streaming really does have its advantages, sorts the wheat out from the worthy chaff. Amongst the far worthier things I purchased yesterday were all three volumes of the Soul Jazz BOOMBOX early rap compilation series which go for crazy prices on Amazon but if you head for the Sounds Of The Universe shop on Broadwick Street they're all there in the rack. Lena regards the music herein as kind of a Rosetta Stone, and I certainly see her point; what rap used to be like and could have been like. Bear in mind this is an old man speaking but I think recent history has proved me correct (oh yes, also in clear display at Covent Garden FOPP was the ghastly new album with its ghastlier title and yet ghastlier cover by Chaka Khan - NO THANK YOU).

Then it was round the corner, back down Berwick Street to Reckless Records. I had really been looking forward to this - and especially the lovely and sorely-needed bench outside the shop - as it seemed to offer me the opportunity of finding great old albums for not very much money. In general Soho these days is mainly populated by tourists and visitors, some with families, as opposed to the low-lives you used to see lurking about the place - and call me Mr Reactionary (except don't) but I rather prefer the current situation to be the case.

Reckless Records itself is now mostly inhabited by visitors from overseas - including a lot of very polite and courteous Americans - rather than the Budgie Bird types of old (again, this is to my mind a good thing), mostly looking for 12-inch polyvinyl chloride records. The CD section, which used to be at the front when you walked in, got shifted to the back during the pandemic, but the chief advantage of the "v*nyl revival" is that nobody bothers with CDs so you're left alone to get on with it.

But (dons Pete Seeger tribute hat) where have all the CDs gone? So many of the albums I'm looking to upgrade, mainly from the eighties and nineties, and most of which were really popular in their time, have now literally vanished from sight, including some enormous hits. Yes, I know, streaming and all that. But a lot of what I saw looked frankly unsellable; warehouse over-pressings, who ARE these people in the first place, a lot of very sad-looking compilations and "box sets." It was the same with Sister Ray across the street - so many things just seem to have gone out of print, or remain so prohibitively expensive that why bother with them?

And yet, in Reckless, I did manage to find a few things, chiefly these two wonders which made me gasp out loud. Both pretty impossible to get anywhere for less than a king's ransom (yet both very reasonably priced), and one of them survived to find me because somebody had filed it in the jazz section rather than the sixties one where it should have been. Lucky comprehensive me, I guess. It is these moments which make the back-aching, seemingly endless trek back to the bus stop on Regent Street worthwhile, but will I ever do it again? Probably not; I need some peace in the autumn of my life. Now, about all those Sophie Ellis-Bextor and Olly Murs albums (so much for that peace, then; too much still to be sorted out indoors!)...