Vinyl Jackpot

Went to our friends' house the other night for dinner and came home with a crate of records under my arm. Our hosts had a heap of old 33s and 45s in their attic and were looking for the kind of chump that can't say no to a stack of dusty old vinyl. Hey, if the cap fits and all that...

It can be hard to find good second hand records in Dublin. The charity shops were quick to cotton on to vinyl's new-found popularity and are pricing things accordingly. So no bargains to be had there. Meanwhile, most second hand stores seem to have a lot of trouble shifting used records which means that every time I drop in I find myself looking at the same old stuff. So an unexpected crate of old records is quite the jackpot for a vinyl lover.

And what a jackpot it is - including LPs by the likes of Bowie, Abba, ELO, The Jam, Dexys, The Blue Nile, Neil Young, Simon & Garfunkel, Kris Kristofferson and many more. It was like Christmas morning in our house today. And then there's the stuff I don't really know at all. There's records by CSNY and Pink Floyd waiting for me to discover. And Billie Holiday and Patsy Cline. There's some Jim Reeves in there too.  It's all good. I'm almost more excited about the oddball things that I'd never pick up (I'm looking at you, Val Doonican) than the records I know and love.

The thing I love about it that the collection is gloriously democratic. This is someone's actual record collection from the late 70s and early 80s and it pours scorn on the idea that there was some kind of dividing line between 'cool' and 'naff' music back then. Turns out it *was* possible for someone to own 3 Abba records AND The Gift or New Gold Dream in 1982. Elsewhere, the collection of 45s includes singles by Wings and The Sex Pistols. Now, that isn't something that the talking heads on BBC4 documentaries are prepared to accept was possible in 1977. 

I'm going to be pretty busy making my way through this lot in the coming weeks. Expect to hear a lot more about it!