Utrecht International Record Fair 2016

I have seen adverts for the Utretcht International Record Fair for a few years now and always wondered what it would be like to see it for myself. I live in the UK, so getting there wouldn't be that difficult, but I'm far away from being a comfortable seasoned traveller. This is not helped by the fact that I have one of the greatest disadvantages of being English. That means I belong to a country where the language is spoken nearly the world over and so, many English people, myself included, don't ever feel the need to even try and speak another language. Don't get me wrong, speaking other languages gives a person great confidence and potential, but my problem, apart from being English and being awfully lazy as well, is that I'm just not cut out for languages at all. I can barely master English (as many of you readers may well be aware of) so I'm awful at other languages. This doesn't help one's confidence when planning to go abroad. I personally would think it ignorant if someone talked to me in England in another langauge and just expected me to understand them and help them. So I think it's ignorant of me to be the same abroad. But then, if I had to learn another language to go abroad, I simply wouldn't travel. So I drag my ignorant arse around other people's countries with no attempt at the local languages. This makes me ashamed to be so ignorant and lazy, which puts me off travelling. Thankfully I have a wife that isn't so ignorant, so she drags my sorry ass to places I wouldn't dare to go myself, because I'm pathetic!!

This holiday was supposed to be different. I really wanted to see if the International Record fair would restore my faith in record fairs in general and in the traders as well, after all it should be the pinnacle in record buying. So I talked about it with my wife, who said I should go. As usual, the idea excited me no end, but the prospect of dragging my ignorant arse across Europe quashed that excitement harshly. I know the rest of the world probably think that most British people are drunk, inconsiderate twats when abroad and so most foreigners expectations are likely considerably low anyway, but I have a problem with re-enforcing negative stereotypes. I like to think that as a person with strange dress sense and an alternative view on life, it's a life bonus to hit people that have a stereotype with a persona of intelligence and moral fibre (rarely found in many walks of life). I don't care what people think of me, I do care what I would think of me if I bumped into myself on the street. My wife says I think too much....which was the whole problem, I was going to go, then I talked myself out of it, then changed my mind again, then decided against it.

After a couple of months fighting with myself over the decision to go, my wonderful wife offered to go with me and just get the thing booked. So we did.

The flight only took an hour to Amsterdam. We booked a hotel in Utrecht right next to the train station, which was actually reasonably priced for it's location and was only a stone's throw away from the location of the record fair as well. The trains from Amsterdam Airport to Utrecht are every 15 minutes and it takes about 30 minutes travel time. We took out extra luggage space for the flight, just in case I found loads of stuff at the fair and needed to bring all that heavy vinyl back in a suitcase ( only hand luggage was included in the flight price). I had no idea if I would return empty handed or packed to the gills with so much stuff that I would be overweight at the airport check in on the way back....I had no clue if this fair would be the same as all the other UK fairs and be a total disapointment, but just bigger, or be an absolute delight.

The fair runs over two days, Saturday and Sunday. If the pickings were amazing, I may do both days, if they weren't, I may be going crazy by lunch time. We booked 4 nights at the hotel, so if my worst fears were realised we would still have time to look around Utrecht and even Amsterdam. Besides which, Holland has so many record shops, surely the backup of those may rescue an otherwise disastrous trip. There was plenty to do otherwise. So I booked tickets just for the Saturday in advance, that way if the fair was awful, at least I wouldn't have wasted a weekend ticket. If the fair was unbelievably good, I could still go on the Sunday as well and buy a ticket on the door. The tickets where about 12 Euro's each for one day and the weekend ticket wasn't much cheaper than buying the two days individually. There are supposed to be around 500 stall holders, but I have seen this before where exagerations border on complete lies.

The most difficult thing about the trip would be inconsideratly dragging a bored wife around with me for 5 days. Usually when my wife books a holiday, I remain totally ambivalent to the prospect, even right up to the day itself. This is mostly becuause of the reasons explained earlier and also becasue of the uncertainty that usually goes with a holiday. I like to know what to expect and have every scenario covered, which when it comes to holidays abroad is just unreasonable and impossible. This time, although there were still so many unknowns about this trip, I was excited and my wife was completly non-plussed. Once we got on the way to the airport though, we had everything planned and discussed beforehand. I just bought the Saturday tickets for us both with the option of doing Sunday if needed. I printed off a booklet of my 4AD collection from Discogs and also another booklet of my wantlist from Discogs too. The plan was for me to hunt through the records on each stall and when I found something that had potential, my wife would look the item up on my list. That would keep us both involved and hopefully try and minimise her boredom. She took her kindle book reader anyway just in case.

We arrived in Utrecht on the Friday afternoon and booked into the Hotel NH Utrecht, a surpisingly nice hotel. We had a tip to get a room as far up as possible as recent renovations had started at the top of the tower and worked down. The room was wonderful on the 15th floor and had an amazing view over the south of the city. After settling in we went out into the city to get something to eat. The Utrecht Centraal train station has quite a few fast food eateries that open quite late. The city centre canal has quite a selection of places to eat. We wanted to find some traditional Dutch food, but found that difficult to find. Instead, like in the UK, there were loads of Italian, Indian, Turkish and Greek restaurants and after a long day we just settled for an Indian, which was wonderful. While in there waiting for our food to arrive, two men just finishing and leaving the restuarant asked me if I was a trader at the fair, he thought he recognised me. They were traders themselves and like many we bumped into over the weekend, especially at the hotel, they had set up that day ready for the weekend.

The fair opens at 9am on Saturday. I planned to get there early to maximise the day, although I had read a review of previous fairs that told me that the Saturday is for enthusiastic collectors and Saturday morning brings the highest prices. Sunday tends to be cut price attempting to lure the passer by rather than the avid collector.

There is a map of the trade hall showing the hundreds of traders and who they are and which pitches they hold. Each one also has a small description of what they sell, if they bother to tell you. From those I put together a battle plan of the most likely top targets to hit first. There is a whole section in the fair devoted to Metal / Punk / New Wave, but the list of best potentials seemed to be all over the place. At least I had a plan, which was a start, which gave me a zig zag through the floor and at least gave me a focus to start on.

Although the fair is advertised as being held at Jaarbeurs which looked on a map to be part of the Beatrix Theatre, in fact it's accross the road and is a massive exhibition centre. On the Saturday morning after a quick breakfast stop in the train station, we made our way to the exhibition centre. I wasn't sure how many people would be lined up at the entrance at the opening time and I even wondered if it would be best to hit the fair a little later to miss any initial rush. There were streams of people walking their way to the entrance, strangely a mix of all sorts of people. This mixture made me wonder if we were going the right way as a 50/50 gender mix is not the record fair norm at all. When we got in I realised why. The entrance queue moved pretty quickly as the tickets were all printed barcodes which got the public through pretty fast. Once zapped in, I was all ready to go, trader map in hand. But in front of us was a massive hall of antique traders. As far as the eye could see, there were tables of bronze and old wood. I remembered another review of the fair which talked about getting past the other halls of traders, non music related. We moved into another hall and the antigues had turned into comics and movie collectables. We couldn't find any music at all, just hundreds of traders and people looking at "vintage" collectables. Out of the corner of my eye I could see a yellow sign that stood over a stall which said "45's". As we neared the sign, the next hall showed a mixture of scruffy looking and poorly labelled traders selling cheap vinyl mixed with other souvineer stalls, this still wasn't the fair I was looking for. Through into another hall there was a half empty expanse and I thought that this would be it. There were a buch of food traders selling allsorts of fast food and more cheap vinyl traders that looked like the records had seen too many poor days. Through the food retailers though was another hall, filled with lots of vinyl traders covered in banners and hanging "eye catchers" as their backdrops.

My poor wife, I was really concerned with the hell I was going to put her through for the next few hours, but she had a brave face on and we started to tuck in. The first stall was just on the outside of the main hall and looked sparse. The guy with his missus behind the counter was wearing a leather jacket and looked like a full on metal rocker and his stall was half empty. When a trader lays out his stock flat on the table, he hasn't got much to sell. That stall didn't last long, onto the next one. The hardest thing moving from one planned stall to another was closing my eyes to the draw of signs such as "New Wave" and "Alternative" sections on other stalls. I was determined to stick to my plan and get to the what I thought was the most likely best hitters.

After the third or fourth stall and finding they had practically nothing of what they had advertised as having and nearly a half hour of finding nothing even close to any 4AD stuff on sale, I started to get frustrated and pulled away from my plan by the section signs on other traders stalls. The problem with the fair is getting lost if you randomly have no method of going through the stall holders. I should have crossed off the ones I had visited as after an hour, I couldn't remember which stalls I had been through already. I'm usually not lost easily and I'm well coordinated, yet already I was struggling. I think just starting at one end and working a way through may seem a logical way to hit the rows one after the other, but that just may take a week to work your way through. The size of the fair just can't be under estimated, it's fucking huge!

After about an hour and half way through my list, I still hadn't bought a thing. I have talked before about how easy it is to recognise early if you are onto a winner. If there are no Cocteau Twins or Pixies, there's every chance that you won't find anything else. I had found practically nothing and was suprised that I hadn't bumped into any Cocteau Twins at all, anywhere. I had on my list a reminder to drop in on the Discogs stall and simply just thank them for a great site. With all the problems that I do have with Discogs, next to what I had before, which was an annoying Excel spreadsheet, it's an absolute godsend of a site. I turned up to the Discogs stall still empty handed. A lovel lady greeted me and asked if I had used Discogs. Of course I had to tell her how much I liked Discogs and also how much it also annoyed me as well, particularly the online snobbery of some of it's ardent users. She asked me to get in touch with her about any behaviour, but you can't stop people being gits online, otherwise there would be practically no-one on the internet. She left me her card and gave me a free vinyl carrier and some Discogs stickers. It was good to put a personal face to Discogs.

After a quick loo break, I finally bought an item. I was off finally after nearly two hours of nothing. There were quite a few items over the next few stalls that I already had. I was purposefully avoiding the UK stalls as I have practically everything on UK releases. It was amazing how easily I could spot a UK stall without talking to the trader or looking at the trading sign above the stall. Every UK trader had the same predictable stuff that I trawl through when at home at record fairs. There was more than once when I got halfway through a box and said "I think this is a UK stall" and lo and behold it would be.

In the centre of the Metal / Punk / New Wave section of the fair was an amazing trader that sold tons of Dark Wave, Industrial and Goth stuff. In there was the first Dead Can Dance stuff I had found as well as loads of cool stuff, unfortunately all ridiculously priced. There were a couple of Love Is Colder Than Death vinyl LP's both of which were priced at over 100 Euros each. The stall also had a Dead Can Dance picture disc, a bootleg, but a nice one. At first I thought the 20 Euro asking price was too much, but I changed my mind later in the day and by then it was gone. That's a lesson right there, if you see something and you are thinking twice about getting it, then just get it, because it may well be gone before long.

One other great stall was a Japanese owned stall of just Japanese releases. I got a Cocteau Twins and a This Mortal Coil releases from there. A lot cheaper than getting them posted from Japan. That stall also had good quality releases and all labeled very clearly. It was one of the best laid out stalls in the entire fair, very professional. By lunchtime we had resorted to just going up and down each aisle and picking out any New Wave or Indie section. The vast majority had absolutely nothing at all. Overall it was very surprising how few pickings there was. I still think that the main vinyl collecting market is still stuck in the sixties and seventies.

At lunchtime we pigged out on a disgustingly sickly waffle which just dripped with fat and sugar but filled a hole for a few hours. By the end of the day, this is what we had picked up :

The Breeders - Pod (4AD, Rough Trade - RTD 168) LP,
Cocteau Twins - Echoes In A Shallow Bay (Virgin, 4AD - 15VB-1064, BAD 511) 12"
Colin Newman - A-Z (Beggars Banquet - BEGA 20) LP,
Colin Newman - Provisionally Entitled The Singing Fish (CNR Records, CNR Records - 656 010, 656010) LP,
Colour Box - Breakdown (Second Version) (4AD, Megadisc - BAD 304, VR 22633) 12"
Dead Can Dance - Spleen And Ideal (DG Discos - DG-219) LP,
Modern English - After The Snow (Expanded Music - EX 28) LP,
Pixies - Monkey Gone To Heaven (Rough Trade, 4AD - RTD 052T, M1-266) 12"
Pixies - Surfer Rosa (4AD - VG 50372) LP,
Pixies - Surfer Rosa (4AD, 4AD, Rough Trade, Rough Trade - MD 7917, RTD 72) LP,
This Mortal Coil - Filigree & Shadow (Virgin - 60047) 2xLP,
This Mortal Coil - It'll End In Tears (4AD - YQ-7045) LP,
Various - Doctor Death's Volume I - Cette Enfant Me Fia Mourir (C'est La Mort - CLM001) LP,
Various - Lonely Is An Eyesore (DG Discos - DG-214)

...and also a non 4AD release I had on my wantlist, an LP I have been after for a while and is hilarious. 

Bad News (3) - Bad News (EMI, EMI - EMC 3535, 74 8310 1) LP,

My verdict on the Utrecht International Record Fair? It left me slightly warm. It was huge, there was a massive amount of vinyl on offer, but out of all that vinyl there small pickings from the 900 items I have on my wantlist. Record traders seem to be an internationally poorly organised set of beasts with a crazy variation of prices. There were a couple of items I already had that were priced in the range of a hundred Euros that just weren't worth that kind of money. Maybe on the Sunday they would have gone down in price, but after a full eight hours of searching, I was knackered and didn't fancy starting to rifle through A-Z boxes with all mixed genres in a hope of having a small amount of luck. My wonderful wife was also extremely knackered as well and hadn't moaned once all day. If it had been the other way around, I would have struggled to have been that patient and supportive. I am a lucky sod really.

I think I would go again. I would probably go row by row next time and pick out the labelled boxes on each stall. I may even confine myself to a Sunday to see if the prices are any better, although the pickings may be even slimmer by then as well.

Deciding not to go back on Sunday, gave us two days in Holland to do a spot of sight seeing. Utrecht is a wonderful place and well worth a visit. On the Monday we made a train ride to Amsterdam which in contrast is too busy and filthy next to the cleanliness of Utrecht (maybe because of all the drunk and stoned Brits that visit Amsterdam). There was always going to be an element of record shopping that had to be done when in Holland and the record fair just wasn't enough. So once again I dragged my poor wife around Amsterdam looking for what one website called the best record shops in Amsterdam. After hours once again spent looking through records, I finished with just one purchase :

The Birthday Party - Prayers On Fire (4AD, CNR Records - 656.009) LP, 

By Monday afternoon both my wife and I had had enough of records and went around Amsterdam on a boat trip trying not to waste our tour money by falling asleep in our seats. 

The whole experience was absolutely knackering. It was great to get home and get some rest. It's hard to know if it was all worth it for just 16 records. I suppose it beats doing it all online and I got to see some of Holland as well. Utrecht is a great city.

On a final footnote, if you ever go to a large fair such as this, take some hand cleansing gel with you. Once back home, I noticed that both my eyes had started with infections and it was only at that point I realised that I was handling goods that hundreds of other people had also rifled through. A good anti bacterial cleanser used occasionally may be a good idea.

Thanks for reading and sorry for taking so long once again to add a post. I will once again endeavour to make an effort and keep posting

Top Ten 4AD Covers, What's Yours?

A reader got in touch with me recently and asked me to do a feature on my top 4AD cover designs (Thanks Ar Ti).

The late seventies and early eighties independent music labels became renowned for their artwork. Of course 4AD, along with Factory, became synonymous for a label identity created through their cover art. All art is so very subjective. I did a blog entry on my favourite 4AD albums, but I'm sure there were many people that scratched their heads wondering why I picked what I did. I think visual art is even more subjective and opinion seemingly more open to ridicule. Nevertheless, I know what I like and why. My opinion has been asked for so I shall give it.

It is my opinion though which tends to cause some arguments. I have always had an issue between the lines of art and function or art and business. The past couple of decades have seen very clever people in business using clever strategy to sell something as art, that basically isn't art at all. Many of us are drawn to limited numbers, a special opportunity to experience something that only the appreciative will get to experience, but marketing anything as limited doesn't make it an instant collectible. Limited edition Mars bar anyone? In a similar way, just because something is marketed as art, doesn't make it art in my opinion. Designers are the problem. That half way house where an artist uses their talent to spruce up a functional item. While I respect the talent, I think many of these examples are simply not art. If a ceramic artist creates a cup, it's still a cup, no matter how talented the artist is. Selling it as a piece of art is just marketing. A cup is not made to represent any kind of emotional state or to represent the feelings or despair of its maker, it's simply to drink out of. A car is a functional item and, while it is nice to drive a nice looking car, it's not a work of art. Instead it is an object that has had the food budget of a third world country spent on it just to get potential buyers to go weak at the knees at the sight of it rolling around the streets of an eerily deserted city road.

The music industry is where sonic art meets visual art and a greater clash between representation and pure marketing uncomfortably meet. There's a blurred line between music made purely for commerce, cleverly marketed and packaged as the "real deal" against music made by artists that primarily make music to express themselves. My opinion is that designers for labels such as Factory and 4AD, although true artists, inadvertently helped blur the lines between function and art. For me album design is just on the right side of art, like a beautiful piece of painting on the side of a cup. The cup isn't neccasirly art, but the painting is. It doesn't matter how much artistic talent a designer has, if their work is poured into a functional item, for me the item doesn't become art.

But then I am an over opinionated walrus!!!

I've always loved the visual side of collecting music. I was always in awe of Roger Dean's designs in the seventies of strange other worlds on his Yes album covers. There was nothing better than sitting listening to Budgie's Never Turn Your Back On A Friend while studying the gorgeous full colour gatefold sleeve

I always thought that the Cocteau Twins cover design for Love's Easy Tears was very similar to Pink Floyd's Meddle

Anyway, onto my top ten 4AD covers, in no particular order, let's get on with it...


1 - Birthday Party - Junkyard

You may think that I would completely bow down to 23 Envelope but thats not true. I don't care for popular opinion or trend of thought. Just because I love much of what 4AD produced, there is no rulebook that says I have to be elitist in my personal taste.

This picture was created by an artist called Ed Roth who was a custom car designer and builder who put his talents into cartoons and illustrations. His character Rat Fink (with the gun) was a sort of alternative Mickey Mouse. I think that this cartoon represents the music perfectly, tight and structured while on the verge of chaos and both simultanious implosion and explosion.

2 - Dead Can Dance - Aion poster

Not the actual cover, but the UK tour poster. I like the actual cover of the album itself which is a very small part of the Garden Of Earthy Delights by Hieronymus Bosch. The poster covers the tour around the UK for the Aion album, a tour I had a chance to witness but regrettably I didn't go to. The tour poster is probably my favourite peice of 4AD artwork and looks fantastic framed and displayed. The quality of the colour and print is remarkable and must have cost a sweet sum to have had printed. If you ever get a chance to purchase this, you won't be disappointed. Of course the album is amazing too and featured in my Top 10 4AD Albums list (in fact, a lot do, so am I biased towards the sleeve design).

3 - Dead Can Dance - Within The Realm of a Dying Sun

This cover always reminds me of Joy Division's Closer album cover in a small way. It's a step between life and death as the figure almost looks like an actual person cloaked and not an actual statue in a graveyard. The cover's photograph was taken in Paris, at the Père-Lachaise cemetery. It features the grave of the politician Raspail. Can you get more gothic than this and could the music be anymore gothic as well. Another fine example of the cover reflecting the mood of the music therein.

4 - Colourbox - Baby I love You So

I'm a sucker for reds. I know nothing about the images on this release, I just love the feel of the image. Very velvety. Let's hope that somewhere out there, there exists a poster for this. For me the font and text are irrelevant. "Sacriledge!" I hear you scream, but this is where function has to be performed for me. This would be even better without the text, yet maybe the 45 in the centre I would let stay. Don't get me wrong, the choice and style of font and the presentation of text is amazing, but it is functional in my opinion and would be better without it. But needs must as the devil grinds the marketing wheel. Still an amazing cover though

5 - Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgares - Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgares

Used for the background of this blog. Reminds me of a drowned former glamourous life like a memory on a sea floor of some luxury liner. I wouldn't say the music is as atmospheric as the cover suggests, perhaps one small example of where the cover doesn't always accurately reflect the music within. I love the music on this album, but Bulgarian folk music can be quite harsh and beautiful at the same time, something not really reflected here. Still as a piece of artwork stood alone, it's a magical piece of photography.

6 - Pixies - Doolittle

The original UK release of Doolittle came as such a great package. A plastic bag with the cover printed on it, a full colour 12" 16 page booklet and an inner sleeve. Also 4AD sold a set of postcards with the artwork from the booklet. This is a full art set, an amazing collection of photography reflecting the songs of the album. The graphical element added to the overall look of the artwork and fits the metronomic feel of the songs. The images fit so well with the music on the album, even if the cover is overtly obvious with it's interpretation of the song Monkey Gone To Heaven, the artworks only negative reflection.

7- Coctea Twins - Treasure

Maybe it's because V23 liked to reflect the music in their covers that I like a lot of the covers for Cocteau Twins releases. I like the music and the covers reflect the music, so it should go that I like the covers as well.

This cover for me is very gothic. Hints of the Victorian and a melancholic wedding. The use of material gives you a reminder to your senses of something that you have have touched before and felt in your fingers, material that feels soft to the skin but coarse between a finger and thumb. Eerie and beautiful, it looks almost derelict, decaying. Incredible gothic beauty


8 - Cocteau Twins - The Spangle Maker

Victiorialand would be included in my top ten except for the beige surround which ruins the cover. But The Spangle Maker is a beautiful piece of work.

The original UK release came with an embossed sleeve where the frame was slightly raised around the photograph by Gertrude Käsebier called The Crystal Gazer. Once again that Victorian feel blends with the gothic feel of the music and the blurred, distorted edges reflect the wash of effects used on the Cocteau Twins signature guitar sound. There are no fonts and text needed here. The tour poster is quite an incredible piece as well.

9- Cocteau Twins - Head over heels & Sunburst and Snowblind

Head Over Heels along with Sunburst and Snowblind is just the most brilliant photography. Nigel Grierson did some of the most unusual things to get shots like these. The high quality and sharpness in the variation of colour is just breathtaking. The photos encourage you to not only look deep into the detail and the range of colour, but to look more closely at the every day beauty around us all in the seemingly randomness of patterns in nature, things you wouldn't normally look at closely. A set of posters from these photography sessions looks incredible framed and mounted. I know as I have them in my hallway.

10 - Lush - Scar

The reason I have included the rear sleeve here is because the whole cover (even inside the outer sleeve) is a collective work of art. Once again it reflects the harsh and soft combination of the music. If this is shoegaze, those are some interesting footwear. This was released in an era when computer generated graphics were all the rage and years on look really tacky. But here Vaughan Oliver and Christopher Bigg have resisted the trend and produced something much more timeless.

All comments are welcome, remember these are just my personal choices and opinion, which I have a right to, even if you think my opinion is total tosh. Would love to hear your preferences....

Will I ever fall in love with Record Fairs ever again?

Over the last two weekends I have visited two record fairs in the vain hope of not relying solely on the internet to find the stuff that I want. There is a certain pleasure in rummaging through loads of boxes of interesting music. The elation when finding something you've been looking for for a long time is there for the picking, in good nick and priced reasonably is hard to put into words. It's mostly hard to put into words because I can hardly remember the feeling.

The vast majority of record shops have little in the way of anything different or away from the norm. I always know how poor a shop is going to be in the first five minutes of entering one. If the shop has no Cocteau Twins or Pixies, stuff that's can be easy to come by on the internet, there's practically no chance of finding any Dead Can Dance, Throwing Muses, Birthday Party or Clan of Xymox.

I don't just limit my searches when out looking to 4AD stuff. There seems to be an English vacuum in second hand goth, industrial or anything more alternative to Wonderstuff. It would be great to find a section with Front Line Assembly, Diamanda Galas, 1919, Ausgang, Sopor Aeternus and on and on. That would be a dream. But when a simple list as that is just a pipe dream what chance do I have to find any Cold In Berlin, Soviet Soviet or some of the other remarkable music that's around lately. Go online I guess

But I keep trying out shops and record fairs and the last two weeks have been fine examples of disappointment. The first fair was in Derby a couple of weeks ago. I had been to the fair once before and there was a guy with a stall that had mostly punk and new wave stuff, so I was eager to see if he had any new stock on. After over three hours in a record fair with about 7 or 8 traders with stalls, I didn't find a single item on my want list of nearly 900 items. I did pick up a few interesting little other items though including a Gary Numan LP, 2 Crime And The City Solution singles and a Shellyann Orphan single

At least I walked away with something. It is disappointing to still have the same amount on my wantlist, to find nothing at all for my 4AD collection is extremely disheartening when a record fair supposed to be the best place to find these items.

So I decided to travel a bit further affield a go to a record fair that was billed as "the biggest outside of London". Surely that would be what I was looking for. Advertised as 100 tables with traders from all over the country, attended by buyers from all over the world it sounded too good to miss. One of the things I always find funny about these fairs, is how late the traders turn up to the event. 2 minutes before doors open and traders are still wheeling boxes of stock into the venue, leaving you thinking "this is your trade, wake up earlier in a morning".

There may have been 100 tables (I didn't count), but there were only about 15 to 20 traders, three of which had been at the other fair in Derby just a week before. On asking they had no new stock since the week before. Then as usual there were the bargain basement traders. These have hundreds of CD's, usually mass bought stock that no-one can sell. I know even without spending hours looking that there's gonna be nothing in there. After about three minutes of walking two loops around the tables, I knew only one of them had any chance of anything remotely like what I was looking for. Still I persisted and stretched my patience as much as I could tolerate, knowing I would be writing this blog, and searched though as many of the traders stock as my willingness allowed. But my initial hunch was right, as aways. Only one trader had anything worth buying, the one I had picked out in the first three minutes and none of his stock hit any of the hundreds of items I was looking for, except one.

The NME Peel sessions compilation was the only find out of thousands of records. I did pick up Cocteau Twins and Birthday Party bootlegs as well as an Xmal Deutschland peel Session release, but none from my list. The bootlegs were quite recent and the Peel session was some years later after Xmal Deutschland had moved on from 4AD.

It is dis-heartening at times. I would have thought after this long that I would have picked up some specialised trader, eager to find the stuff I want. Instead I generally get "good luck with that" in a semi-sarcastic voice based on the experience of how rarely 4AD stuff is picked up and how quickly it's bought up. As much as buying online is nowhere near as satisfying as browsing through physical boxes looking for that special gem, it's the form I have to keep relying on.

As a finishing note and as mentioned before, I'm accruing quite a stock of duplicates again just wanting a good home. So watch this space as there are plenty more 4AD items to give away. Here's a sneak preview and you won't believe some of the items I have that just maybe you could own soon. Tell me if you recognise any...

...and as a last note Andy and I are back in the studio again putting together another song. After months of just not feeling it, Andy has managed to kick me into shape and we're composing again.

Until next time....guess the releases

Get the wish list below 900 by the new year (Check back Regularly)

28th November 2014

One package today and at last, a release actually on the existing wantlist. It was the German vinyl release of the Modern English album After The Snow. That leaves only another 13 versions of that album left to get my hands on.

That's the wantlist down to 930. My goodness that seems like a huge ask now to get down to 900 by the year's end. The goal post most certainly keeps moving and Betty's useless, she hasn't bought a single release for me yet!! Oh well, the search goes on....

27th November 2014

At the beginning of the day, the postman came and went and I was left empty handed. But then a courier turned up later in the day with quite a large box from the US with my name on it. Inside were two CD longboxes of the Pixies albums of Doolittle and Bossanova. Longboxes have an interesting history. They were introduced to help customers moved from the large packaging of vinyl to the smaller and more expensive CD. It also helped to display CDs in vinyl display areas and because of their bigger size helped to reduce shoplifting. Here is our dog Betty demonstrating the size of the 12" longbox

Here is a wiki on the longbox.

It seems, although most CDs were sold in longboxes, most customers saw them as throw away packaging like a plastic bag and threw them in the dustbin. Now they are quite sort after.

At last some items delivered. Problem is, these two release weren't on my wantlist as I wasn't sure if they existed. So the wantlist is still stuck at 931. This is not looking promising at all!

26th November 2014

I got really excited when a small parcel landed on my desk this morning, at last maybe the count can actually go down. It was not to be. I had forgotten the DVD called Sanctuary that I had bought a few days back. It's a documentary about Lisa Gerrard, which I am excited to get, but was hoping to hammer down the wantlist even in a small capacity. The wantlist stays at 931. I'm still struggling to find anything on ebay, but have found a couple of decently priced items on Discogs.

I did listen to The Sisters Of Mercy's album Floodland last night. It is funny how time changes one's perception of music. In the late eighties I really loved that album, but got sick of the worship it got a few years later, like it was some sort of goth must have. It was good, but not that good. On this listen I noticed how an EP's worth of ideas can be over stretched out to an albums length. The first two tracks Dominion and Mother Russia are one song without even a chord change, the album title track is used twice, the main single This Corrosion is mixed out about twice as long as it should have been and 1959 looks like a bolted on afterthought because there was 5 minutes left to make a full labum's worth. The album is ok and it did inspire a lot bands to go into territory they had not gone before, but nearly 30 years later it made little impact on me again. Not a patch on Clan of Xymox's Medusa.

25th November 2014

Nothing was delivered yesterday and nothing came today either. I'm running out of stuff that I can find on ebay again, it's as though I was just lucky the last couple of weeks and now the luck has dried out. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of items from my wantlist that are on ebay, they're just not reasonably priced especially when adding the postage on top.

I then noticed this morning that the album Sleeps With The Fishes by Pieter Nooten and Michael Brook has a Spanish vinyl version, a Japanese CD version and another UK version not previously listed. Therefore my wantlist has gone up, while my achievements have flatlined. Time is running out!

Wantlist = 931

22nd November 2014

Visited a small record fair this morning about ten miles from home. I was there to meet a vendor I had met at another record fair a month ago and said he may have some 4ad stock for me and would bring it with him. I emailed him my wantlist a couple of weeks ago and went to the fair with a smattering of hope. No luck once again though, he had been busy at work through the week (he's only a weekend music trader) and didn't have time before going to the fair to go through the huge build up of stock that he struggles to find his way through. Still, there's some hope that he still actually might have some interesting stock at some point for me in the future.

There were only about five vendors there, of which only one other had anything remotely alternative. I would have come away empty handed after two hours if it hadn't have been for finding a specially remastered version of The Sisters Of Mercy's Floodland album that shouted at me to take home. I think that album will be making the album listening night this coming Tuesday.

At least the wantlist count has stayed at 928 for a day, seeing as I haven't found anything as yet to add to it, thankfully.

21st November 2014

Two parcels have been delivered today. The first one is a magazine called Debut from 1984 in which each edition came with a a compilation LP included. The magazine is 12" x 12" and looks like a gatefold album with a thick booklet in the middle. The reason this magazine is the collecting list is because of the inclusion of a Colourbox track called Fast Dump (very likely a song about an emergency poo).

The second package was a US pressing of the Modern English album Ricochet Days also from 1984. That has moved my wantlist count down to....928. That would have been 2 down, except that the German compilation called Formel Eins Space Hits I found out today, has a cassette version not currently in the list. 2 down and then 1 up, I'm still yo-yo-ing. Oh well, there's a local record fair on tomorrow, let's see what that brings

20th November 2014

A couple of days ago I discovered a copy of Ultra Vivid Scene's 12" single of Mercy Seat on ebay. There's a  version with a green sleeve with a circular hole cut from the centre of the sleeve and another sleeve of the same release that has no hole cut but in grey. I have both of these, but the photo on ebay looked like a version that should not have existed, a green sleeve with no hole cut. I asked the vendor what colour the sleeve was, just in case the camera shot was not colour accurate (which can happen) and the answer came back a resounding GREEN. I had little to lose, it was only selling for a couple of pounds, so the risk was worth taking....

It wasn't green, it was grey, of course. Even my photo of it (above) comes out green. Oh well.
So you would think that my want list would be at the same number, but no, it's gone up by one. Today's count is 929 because of a fellow collector called berndhugo who has recently acquired Birthday Party's Junkyard album on a UK cassette, which many believed didn't exist. Berndhugo was good enough to send me some pictures and I added it to discogs, hence the extra release.

Let us see what tomorrow brings....humph!

19th November 2014

Dragged myself into work this morning, still feeling a little spaced out, that's man flu for you, nastiest disease in the world. I actually dropped three from my wish list today, as one release on discogs was added incorrectly and so was deleted, WooHoo

Waiting for at work was the Birthday Party album Junkyard, this time the New Zealand vinyl version and also a test pressing of Wolfgang Press' single King Of Soul.

Count is now down to 928. Some more beauties to get to me yet, but the purchases are starting to dry up. I need to find some more releases and pretty quick


17th November 2014

In typical fashion, when everything I purchase I have delivered to work, I haven't been into work today because I'm chocked up to the eyeballs with a cold. So no work, no pick up of deliveries and nothing to add to this blog as promised. Fate has a funny sense of humour doesn't it? Chances are, there are deliveries on my desk at work that I can't tell you about yet. Between the running nose, sneezes, coughs headache and sore throat, is a desperation to get back to work. There are some lovely purchases making it's way to me, let's just hope I can shake the sweats and get back to work....watch this space....a bit longer


14th November 2014

As promised, I'm here again. Today has been a typical day. I started of with a want list of 928 and although I have had a delivery today...the count now is....931. Today's post revealed a Birthday Party CD of the album Prayers On Fire.

All looked good. It looked like the UK release with the catalogue number CAD 104 CD, bought from ebay. The only give away that it wasn't the original 1988 release, was the matrix number near the centre of the CD itself that has GAD104CD on it. The GAD code was used by 4AD to re-release lots of albums in the 90's with. So any release with a GAD code is not an original. Buyers beware. Darn it! This morning I also found another three items not on my list and I had to reluctantly add them. It almost feels painful to find yet another release that I don't have listed in my wish list. Oh well, lets see what Monday brings

Tour De France, Tour De York, Tour De Record Shops

Last weekend I had the great privilege to stay in the city of York to watch the Tour De France stage start from there. I always love seeing the Tour De France, having watched it on the television since 1985. But this was also a great opportunity to go and pay a visit to all the record shops in York. On the Friday I had made a trip to a local record shop at home first. It's an interesting shop, thousands upon thousands of records, cd's and cassette tapes.

As an experienced record shop visitor, I can usually tell quite quickly if a record shop is going to be of any use to a 4AD collector. Cocteau Twins and Pixies have to be the easiest and most prolific releases to find. If a shop doesn't have any releases of these two artists, there's a very good chance that there is practically no chance of anything more obscure such as Dead Can Dance or Clan of Xymox. It's not a hard and fast rule, but is an easy indicator. I was determined that weekend to put aside my previous judgement of UK record shops and thoroughly search through them to see if my prejudice was justified or not.

The local record shop did actually have some Cocteau Twins and Pixies, so things were looking up. But the first hurdle was the lack of discipline in organising the records into their sections. I found 4AD stuff under Goth, Indie labels, rock and 80's pop. It would take days to go through every section on display, so some sort of common sense was needed. There were about seven or eight Cocteau Twins releases, of which The Spangle Maker was three of those, all the same (except for one which was an original embossed - at the same price as the other two). All of the release were English pressings of which I had all of them. Except for Cocteau Twins and Pixies, there wasn't anything else and certainly nothing outside of the typical English releases.

Knowing that there was a real mix up in the discipline of releases between the sections, it meant that it was likely worth going through some of the unlikely sections to try and find a hidden gem. But I always find that kind of search soul destroying. Looking through masses of 80's pop, with tons and tons of cheap chart topping drivel, selling at 50 pence a time (which is still overpriced), with practically no surprises and having done this so many times before, getting sick of seeing the same faces, the same graphics as hundreds of previous searches over decades of record collecting, the will is sapped.

After a couple of hours searching, I leave empty handed, not even close to finding anything of interest. Bearing in mind that I have over 930 items in my want list and the fact that I'm also interested in picking up anything else of interest that I may find. The word disappointed doesn't even come close.

At least I had the weekend in York to look forward to and a list of five record shops to go and interrogate.

With my phone and a list of handwritten post codes I set off for the first shop in the centre of the city. There were two close by on the list and while looking for the first, actually found the second instead. It didn't look promising. In the shop window was a selection of classical and jazz releases and I feared that it would be a more specialised shop than I was looking for. Inside, there was jazz music playing and first couple of sections were listed as Jazz and Classical. The main reception was all CD's and along the back wall was a section of Rock, Indie and Pop. The rack had a few hundred CD's and was very helpfully split into lots of artists and an alphabetical catch all of every thing else. In about a half hour I had looked through them all and found one compilation CD of The Birthday Party, Mutiny / The Bad Seed EP. I couldn't remember if I had this already, so bought it anyway. At the back of the shop was a small collection of vinyl of which there was nothing of interest at all.

Across the road was another of the listed record shops. Entering it though, it looked more like a brick a brack shop, than a record shop. There was about four boxes of vinyl, three of which was all new and sealed stuff. The fourth box just had charity shop quality stuff, easy listening and pop albums. No luck there then.

Another shop was right in the very centre of the city. My lovely long suffering wife had brought a book with her and it came in handy as the shop actually had a little bench outside in the sunshine, just perfect for the record shopper widow. I always thought that shops miss out on a treat here. Record shops should have a widow waiting area with tea, biscuits and usual shopping magazines. Clothes shops should have a bloke waiting area, with a games console or a tv with Rambo or some such crap on, that way the other half can spend more time shopping guilt free.

This third shop had a couple of thousand pieces of vinyl, with no sections at all, except for a couple of boxes of dance 12"s. I started at A and worked my way through. I could tell from the start that the shop wasn't going to have much. By the finish of C and no Cocteau Twins, my expectations had fallen completely. The whole shop had nothing at all.

The third shop on the list was on a small lane, again right in the centre of the city, but was up the attic of another shop and supposedly easy to miss. I couldn't find it though. The lane only had three shops on it and none of them had anything going up into an attic room. Another record shop bites the dust.

The last one was about two miles out of town. It was a lovely red hot and sunny day, so we walked to it. I hoped for a good record shop. Being out of town probably meant better rent and therefore a bigger shop and a better chance at some luck.

After a grueling hot walk in the sunshine, we finally got to the record shop in a little York suburb. Once again, the sections were poorly disciplined. There was a punk / new wave section that had no Cocteau Twins at all, which was a bad sign from the off. I asked the owner where I would likely find the stuff I was looking for and he pointed me at a bunch of boxes on the floor marked as 80's. The shop didn't have any surprises in it at all and was typical rock albums mostly. The owner moaned about his work experience youngsters he had in recently just to put the vinyl into order and selections and I envisaged a couple of spotty teenagers without a clue of what they were sorting through as the owner sat around doing nothing at all while all his stock was a mess.

I left once again with absolutely nothing!

5 Record shops over a weekend and one CD bought. When I got home, I realised I had The Birthday Party CD, only I had the original and the purchased version bought in York was actually the re-release from around 2007, which looked almost identical except for the matrix on the disc itself. The telltale sign was a GAD number on the matrix against the CAD number on the sleeve. GAD was the number given to whole lot of 4AD re-releases.

I used to love going to record shops a couple of decades ago, but the experience is just not the same anymore, and I don't think the difference is from me. The record shops just don't have the stock or organisation to compete against the online competition even though online you also have to pay for postage as well. Maybe I'll give one of the large fairs a go?

Beg, steal or bootleg?

I’ve taken it upon myself to have a go at trading online. Maybe it can help fund this epic project at least in some small way. I have therefore been buying in stock where I can find it cheaply. While doing this I noticed and bought an item that has brought up interesting questions about authenticity and bootlegging.

The greater problem I have is with defining at what point does a demo or promo start to look dodgy and counterfeit? The cost of making vinyl and the equipment needed to do it, meant that a counterfeit copy had to make more than the cost of making it. So to a certain extent very common and generally easy releases didn’t justify the effort needed to copy them. But cassette tapes and CD’s are very cheap to copy. An issue arises when you see a demo tape or promo tape for sale. Sometimes these can be quite polished and well finished, looking as professional as the full release it promotes. These aren’t too bad to take a risk on as they would cost more to replicate, so a counterfeiter may not have bothered to replicate one of these. Some demos and promos though, are little more than a TDK tape with handwriting on the label and a cover of handwritten song names.

The big problem is knowing what is genuine and what isn’t. The TDK tape with handwritten labels may be genuine, but is it worth part of a collection. It’s not a release, it’s just a promoter at the record company copying the album onto tape and sending it out for review.

Then there’s bootlegs. These are unofficial releases. They can be either a counterfeit copy of an album or an interview or live performance cut onto vinyl. The Birthday Party’s Junkyard LP is  a fine example. The album was released in Germany on the GeeBeeDee label. But there is a white label version (which you may think would be a test pressing) with the same GeeBeeDee label on the cover. The only real giveaway is the poorer quality of the sound and the poor reproduction of the cover of poor quality card, it also has no matrices on the run out. It does make you wonder why someone does this. But then I found and bought it for 15 Euros (Muppet!). Should these be collected, well I think I need it so as to be able to distinguish between what is real and what is counterfeit.

http://www.discogs.com/Birthday-Party-Junkyard/release/2495539

Then there are other bootlegs that have more value. These are demo versions, live recordings, interviews etc. For me these are valuable in a collection. They don’t steal work from the record label, as the record label could easily release stuff like this themselves.

They add another dimension to the portfolio of work from a band. The greater downside is that the band themselves don’t receive any loyalties. But then they don’t always from the label either.

http://www.discogs.com/Cocteau-Twins-Night-Must-Fall/release/1868594

The other downside to some of these recordings is the state of the production. Live recordings are usually made by a guy stood at the back of a venue with a little tape recorder and a cheap handheld microphone. The quality can be atrocious, and can be mixed in with the general chit chat you usually find at the back of gig, some drunk arsewipe singing badly to the songs, or some dimwit boasting to his mate about how he took this “bird” home last weekend. I used to see the bootleggers at record fairs in the eighties. Rows of cassettes with badly photocopied covers of all the gigs the guy had been to with his trusty tape recorder.

So I suppose the question is what should I collect and what should I not. I include some bootlegs and not others. My argument at the moment, is that straight copied releases such as the Birthday Party example are fraudulent and illegal copies. The example such as the Cocteau Twins interview picture disc, are not copyrighted releases by the label and so are a greater insight into the artists themselves.

Saying that though, I still went and bought the Birthday Party bootleg. At least I know the difference now though between the bootleg and the actual release it copied.

A History through catalogue numbers

Another gem acquired recently is the Spanish release of the Dead Can Dance debut album. I love this album and, as mentioned in the previous blog entry, non UK versions are rare to find. I had never seen a Spanish version, although I knew of it’s existence.



This was released under the Label Dro. The catalogue number is useful to help piece together when a release was licensed and distributed in another country. The pattern I have noticed with overseas licensing is that when an original release is licensed to another label, the license generally covers that version of the release only. Any subsequent re-releases by the owning label, seem to be given to yet another label overseas or re-negotiated again with the original one.

The Birthday Party’s album Prayers on Fire looks as though it reflects this. Before moving to the UK, the Birthday Party were signed with an Australian label called Missing Link. When 4AD signed the Birthday Party and released Prayers on Fire, Missing Link had the original license to release the album in Australia. Missing Link then re-released the album in 1988 on CD. In 1990, however, it was Virgin Records that got to re-release the CD again. By 1996 the license went to a label called Shock to release the album again on CD.



The history of these releases can be traced by following the catalogue numbers. A lot of labels, in a similar way to 4AD, have a catalogue history of sequential numbers. By looking at the release dates of other releases by the same label and the history of the label  itself, you can put together a time line. The Shock release of the Birthday Party’s album Prayers on Fire, has a catalogue number of CAKE2. The label Shock was founded in 1988, so wouldn’t have released anything before that date. The CAKE catalogue numbers looked to have been released between CAKE1 in 1996 and CAKE7 in 2001. So it would make sense that CAKE2 would between these two periods. If you do the same with the other releases, you generally see a pattern of periods where the licensing moved from one label to another.

This method helps to identify when the Dead Can Dance album was released in Spain. The Dro label was started in 1982 and has a long string of sequential catalogue numbers. This helps show that the debut album from Dead Can Dance was issued in Spain around 1984.

This method doesn’t always work, but it’s another piece in the puzzle which helps the detective work.

It is quite amazing to think that Dead Can Dance were distributed in the first year abroad. I also find it amazing that I managed to get a copy of it too. I know, I’m easily pleased aren’t I?

4AD Top Ten Albums

So after I gave you my all time top ten albums, you lucky people, I thought I would share the pick of my top ten 4AD albums. In rough order of release, these are the albums that have led me to want to collect 4AD. They show a great diversity of style for release from the same label.

So here goes -

Bauhaus - In the Flat Field

One of the enjoyments I get from music, is finding something different, something new that is totally different to anything I have heard before. Most of these albums did that for me. I discovered Bauhaus in the late eighties, by which time they had completely gone as a band and split into their separate projects. The first Bauhaus album I discovered was Mask. Mask was led by David J’s bass, a sound at the time I was obsessed with. Bauhaus did it differently to everyone else though. In time I appreciated this debut album more than Mask. It has an eccentrically English feel to it, unhinged and steeped in a old world of perversion behind closed doors. Steampunk?

The Birthday Party - Junkyard

Junkyard hurt your ears. It was loud, unapologetic, raw, and wonderfully disjointed. The birthday party were a rip off of The Pop Group, but took the idea further. In a similar way to Siouxsie Sioux’s vocals, all the instruments sounded out of tune and yet together somehow worked. It sounded ,on first passing, as though a bunch of 5 year olds were playing punk, until you notice interesting time signatures, mad silences, and complicated runs. The more you listen, the more you enjoy and love hating it at the same time.

Clan of Xymox - Medusa

Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares - Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares (Volume 1)

I started listening to this only recently as I continued to pick up more pieces to the collection. Two things seem amazing about this album. On the first few plays, you can hear some of the sounds that must have influenced Lisa Gerrard as she heard the folk music of many cultures as she grew up. The second surprise is the picture that forms in your head of the quite young choral singers that must be making up this choir, the voices sound so youthful and alive. I got quite a shock to see the photo’s of the general choir member, generally middle aged and showing faces of wisdom and experience. Hardly the angelic innocence that washes over you as a listener. You can only be impressed that this sound is the countries folk music. It’s a reflection of the geographic place Bulgaria finds itself, stuck between East and West mixed with Baltic influences with a disregard for the 12 note western standard.

Various - Lonely is an Eyesore

This album is a 4AD legend. It nicely wrapped up 4AD at a point just before the introduction of a new direction for 4AD with the signing of The Pixies. The whole album flows like a concept piece, which is remarkable to say each artist is different in their own way and yet the album feels as though it keeps a constant theme running through it. It changes mood from a sampled covered opening track from Colourbox which wakes you up and pulls you straight in into This Mortal Coil’s mellow Acid, Bitter and Sad. Yet the transition seems seamless. The Colourbox track may be brash, but it still retains enough calm within it to allow This Mortal Coil to follow. This sums up the whole album, nothing is out of place. This also came in several formats, the original LP had a wallet like sleeve, with all the 4AD releases so far, listed on the inside with a key as to whether still available or deleted. There was also a limited edition release, which had a 4 sleeve foldout inner and 12” colour book all in a card box sleeve. Then there was the ultimate 4AD release, some would say, a wooden box version of the album. Limited to 100 copies, 70 of which were given to 4AD band members, staff and the like and only 30 sold to the general public. This was a wooden box containing the LP, cassette, CD and video of the album, along with individual pieces of artwork unique to every box.

Lush - Scar

This was only a mini-album, but still an eye-opener for me. At the time, Indie music was taking off in a big way in the UK and hidden within this surge was a style called shoegazing. I personally never liked the shoegazing scene. For me it had too much of a fixation with the beat generation of the sixties, which never did anything for me, yes, even the Beatles. Although Lush were kind of lumped in with the rest of the shoegazing crowd, I heard something strangely new. This was the first time I had heard loud fast guitar music mellowed with a soft slow and sensual female vocal floating along the top of the white noise. There was also a track called Etherial, and to me this title summed up the music completely. Now the term Ethereal is used to describe even Dead Can Dance, which I still class as world music. Ethereal still conjures up for me what Lush introduced me to, the musical battle of noise and angelic harmony. They never did this again and got sidetracked into Britpop

Pixies - Doolittle

In 1990 in the UK, everyone was going Pixies mad. This was their fourth album, but this one got them a lot of attention in the UK. I had never heard anything like this before, it was completely new, had a sexual depravity akin to Bauhaus and was also mentally unhinged. Doolittle was a revolution in music for me like punk was more than a decade before, yet it took nearly two decades for everyone to slowly realise it. When you heard Nirvana a couple of years after this, Nirvana sounded like very poor, quick fix imitators to me. I never rated Nirvana either. In the UK, this had a special release at independent record shops which had the LP with a 12” book, a set of 12 postcards all in a Pixies Doolittle plastic bag. Very nice

Dead Can Dance - Aion

This Mortal Coil - Blood

I listened to this constantly in 1992. This album can keep you gripped musically, but it’s also fascinating as a project. There’s so much to find out about This Mortal Coil. The session musicians are from all over 4AD and beyond on this album and many of the songs are cover versions. The track that always leaves me close to tears is the cover of the Byrds “I Come and Stand at Every Door”. An individuals musical history of discovery is always interesting. I heard this version years before I heard the Byrds original version. This Mortal Coil’s interpretation of this song is incredibly moving and powerful. The original version is very good, but very much of its time in a sort of hippy, preachy way. So I prefer This Mortal Coil’s version. But is that because I heard that one first??


Lisa Gerrard - The Mirror Pool

Lisa Gerrard works on a level unlike no-one else. A true independent and individual artist. She has a way of expressing music that is deeply spiritual and beautiful without having to use any traditional language. To see Lisa perform live is a opportunity not to miss. This was Lisa’s first solo album after a career as one half of Dead Can Dance. Originally released on CD, it was later possible to get the album on vinyl, which is a real treat. The Mirror Pool is possibly less accessible to a pop fed audience, even less so than Dead Can Dance possibly are. But as with all great music, time devoted to it is paid back in multitudes. I always wonder when I hear music like this, how can anyone that says they love music, not be swept away with an album like this?

Most of these albums are from the first decade. Although many believe the nineties were 4AD’s best decade, I feel the nineties were the turnaround in music, where the number of artists shot through the roof, but the diversity fell dramatically. This was typified even in 4AD.

I would recommend any of these albums, the Lonely Is An Eyesore compilation would be fine introduction though.

Until the next post, thanks for taking the time to read through a man’s dribbling fondness.