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

4AD original releases, re-prints and releases - Tips and Guide

Hello again. I have been spending a little time trying to put together a simple buyers guide to buying 4AD from the second hand market, particularly of course the first ten years of 4AD's existence. It can be very frustrating when you think you have found one of those lovely original 12"s, only to find out much later that it's a re-release or a second print and actually isn't that rare at all. So I have been going through what I have acquired so far to try and find some pattern in the releases from 4AD in the UK between 1980 and 1990.

It turns out to be a very interesting decade. I know because I was a new consumer in that decade and things were changing so very fast. I remember seeing a TV programme called "Tomorrow's World" that highlighted the newest technology. I saw the now famous episode that introduced the new format, the Compact Disc and demonstrated that you could eat your dinner off it and it still played afterwards. Of course, we now know that you can eat your dinner off a Compact Disc and it will play, but don't get a fingerprint on it or a dog hair becasue that will completely bugger it up!

In the eighties, the 12" remix became king. While it cost about £7 for a new vinyl album, it cost about £15 for a new CD and that was those fortunate enough to be able to afford a CD player in the first place. Cassettes became commonplace and the 8-track disappeared. Then the trend for everything see through came into fashion. Cassettes followed the trend of Swatches (or was it the other way around?) making the mechanisms of technology observable by changing whatever the tech was clothed in transparent. Plastic see through watches and plastic see through cassettes.

Strange represenatations of a zebra's back started appearing on products everywhere. The struggle to find a price at the checkout at the store was replaced with that annoying beeping sound as barcodes took over the world.

CD sales went up, taking vinyl sales down and loads of second hand record fairs became more popular as fair traders struggled to get rid of the masses of stock bought at rock bottom prices from people swapping their record collections for CD's. Folk didn't want their turquoise lettered Led Zeppelin LP anymore, they wanted it on crystal clear CD instead. You could buy masses of rare vinyl for next to nothing by the late eighties. Record companies must have really thought they were onto a winner as people took even less care of their CD's and cassettes than they did of their vinyl. CD's were bullet proof, you could eat your dinner off them and cassettes were very convenient. It was not until the nineties that folk realised that CDs didn't last forever and that they had lost all those albums on cassette becasue their Sony Walkman or in car cassette player had chewed every cassette tape up.

The portable cassette player was a bit of a joke. Adverts with joggers and their hip strapped portable cassette player were common place in the late eighties. The adverts failed to warn you though that the tape would also jog around inside the player and wrap itself around the pinch rollers that guided the tape across the playing head. Everyone had tapes where on a particular track the music would go all whirly and druggy as the previously crinkled tape had been pulled back in a botched repair attempt. Those cassettes were the lucky ones. Many times they had to be thrown away because the tape had unraveled so much you couldn't get it all back in, like some war wounded soldier with his intestines spilling out. If the cassette unraveled in a car stereo player, you had little chance of salvage. The tape would bounce around in the jossle of the car on the road and get stuck around those pesky pinch rollers and get wrapped around them so many times that if you were lucky enough to get the cassette ejected out of the player, there would be a black spaghetti like trail dragging back into the teeth of the machine, and like a dogs locked jaws, it was never going to give you your tape back. Portable in car cassette players were thrown away left right and centre because of mangled cassette tape around the pinch rollers becasue the players were so portable, you couldnt get inside them to remove the tape and sometimes the whole cassette without breaking the whole player. It's a miracle that any cassette tape survived the eighties at all.

So, I've scrutinsied the best I can of the stock I have so far and looked to see any patterns from the changes in that first decade of 4AD releases. Some of this info may be wrong and if I find it is, I will come back and update it from time to time. There are quite a few signposts that can help a collector figure out what's genuinely original and what's a re-release. It was a useful decade for collectors becasue of the many changes.

In the begining....

As we know, 4AD started its life as AXIS. So in 1980 the first four UK releases had the AXIS red labels on them, all 7" singles

For the rest of 1980, the blue and white 4AD square box was on the labels of all that years releases. This also meant that the Bauhaus Dark Entries 7" single that originally had the AXIS labels above was re-pressed again with the blue and white labels

All of the 1981 UK releases had this crumpled paper black and white picture label on one side of the label. So far I haven't found one that doesn't.

In 1982, the folded paper picture was done away with and the three picture types below were all used instead. The female wrestlers in black and white in both positive and negative and a male wrestlers in negative. So far the compact disc didn't exist commercially and the barcode zebra hadn't made it to the shores of the UK. The tape cassette was also not on the format list for 4AD in 1982

In 1983, another three types of black and white picture labels were used grass, grit and lights. That's a daft naming convention I know, but look at the samples below

At the end of 1983, 4AD issued their first cassette format release. This compiled an album and an EP together of the Cocteau Twins' Head Over Heels and Sunburst And Snowblind. The cassette was made of white plastic with labels glued on. From the end of 1983 to the end of 1986, only albums appeared on cassette tape. The see through clear plastic cassette tape wasn't introduced until 1985 by the record label Warner. There is an interesting site about the history of the compact cassette tape
here

In 1984, 4AD went full colour on their labels. Still no barcodes, still no clear cassettes and still no CDs from 4AD

In 1986, 4AD began issuing releases on CD. They also went through some of the back catalogue and re-issued some earlier releases again on CD. For the next couple of years from 1986 to 1988 they re-issued a number of albums.

I hoped that by looking through the CDs released in those two years, I would be able to find a pattern of some sort that would help distinguish the years specifically, but that seems a task too far at the moment until I get my hands on a few more releases. There are some distinct CD print styles from 1986 to 1989, all silver CDs with varying print styles from sparse amounts of text to band logo fonts and then text which shoots off in all directions on the CD. From the CDs I curently have, I can't seem to find any clues to get them down to any time frame. The first few CDs of 1986 were French made CDs and have a small ring on the inside of the outer CD, here (below) it shows black, but on the actual CD is a goldish hue. I suspect that the original batch of CDs made in 1986 where manufactured in France where a lot of the vinyl was also cut, but a very short time later, 4AD could have started to use a manufacturer in the UK either alongside or instead of the French manufacturer. As yet I can't make a judgement, if this did happen, the change was very quick

The same can be said for the re-issues made of pre-1986 albums onto CD. The design of the CD print changes quite quickly over the next couple of years

During 1987, 4AD issued its first video cassette for the label compilation Lonely Is An Eyesore

Also in 1987 was the first cassette single from 4AD Throwing muses Chains Changed, still on black plastic cassette with paper labels

Originally I suspected that the first CD single issued from 4AD must have been for the chart topping No 1 single from M/A/R/R/S Pump Up The Volume as there is a CD version of the single, but the copy of the CD I have is also the one showing on discogs, which is an English made black CD, which doesn't fit in with the style of the other CDs printed during the same period. I reserve judgement on this one for now, as the black print on the CD could be a clever use of text print in negative, where the text is clear showing the silver CD underneath and the rest of the non text part of the CD is black. Full coloured CDs weren't introduced by 4AD until 1989

The first clear cassette from 4AD appears to be in mid 1987 for the Lonely Is An Eyesore compilation. As of yet I haven't seen a cassette of this compilation on a coloured plastic. As with the next release from 4AD on cassette, which was Dead Can Dance's Within The Realm Of A Dying Sun, there are non paper label versions with red text printed directly on the cassette and no paper labels. At this moment in time, I suspect that these are later re-prints.

All the releases up to the end of 1987 can be found without any barcodes anywhere on the artwork. Sometimes you can find a release with a stickered barcode attached, most likely added by the retailer. The first release of 1988 from 4AD suddenly appeared with a zebra strapped to it's back.

In a decade obsessed with size, technology just had to get smaller and smaller. The CD was the way forward, or so the industry thought, smaller, compact, but annoyingly for them still not as portable as the cassette tape which could fit into a small player you could go jogging with. Mobile CD players at the time where useless and wouldn't stop jumping everytime you breathed. Out of this industry obsession came the DAT tape, carrying on the myth that digital sound was superior but packed into a tiny little cassette tape like the type you used in an office dictating machine. The biggest problem was for the industry was that you could record onto them. The Compact disc must have been a dream for the record industry. It was smaller, so a lot less needed to be spent on packaging, the average man on the street could easily be duped into thinking that the quality was so much better than vinyl, it could be sold at many times the price of vinyl just because it was amazing futuristic technology and best of all, it was a format that couldn't be recorded on. The record industry hated cassettes because of home copying. They even had a massive campaign in the eighties to try and make the public ashamed of copying music and sharing with their mates. Remember this?

The DAT may have been the next big format, but the industry hated it and the equipment cost put the public off buying it. Still, in 1988 4AD released their one and only DAT release, Cocteau Twins' Blue Bell Knoll

In 1989, after a couple of initial CD releases on the usual silver disc, the UK CD releases from 4AD went full colour! Well, black to start with anyway with Pixies album Doolittle

4AD soon moved onto coloured and picture CDs at the end of 1989 and into 1990. This pink beauty is Lush's Scar

Then in 1990 with Pixies Velouria came the totally clear cassette with no paper labels from 4AD. This may be the period that the afore mentioned red text printed Lonely Is An Eyesore and Dead Can Dance's Within The Realm Of A Dying Sun were re-printed.

Later in the 90's, 4AD went on another re-releasing spree on CD, but at least had the courtesy of labelling them with new catalogue numbers which helps collectors no end. These were labeled with a GAD number and started to appear around 1998. A GAD catalogue number is a sure sign that the CD is way after the event of it's original release, at least as far as the first decade releases are concerned.

Well, I hope that is a lot of useful information for you collectors. May I remind you all that none of it is definitive and so far just an observation from the releases I currently have and may be changed in future. In fact scrub that, this is very likely to change in the future as there are a lot of 4AD knowledgeable folk that read this blog. At some point in the future, I will have a go at observing the other major countries releases and try and ascertain any patterns from those too

Thanks for reading

Throwing Muses - Dizzy

I will try and show all the versions of a release when I complete collecting them. I've decided to make an executive decision though and not hold out for matrices variations and test pressings. If I have or notice any of these, I think I will add them, but as we saw with the Bauhaus - Dark Entries, it gets to a point with matrix variations where you wonder if the development of yet more discoveries mean that collecting it never ends.

Now I have an awful confession to make. While I find most bands that signed to 4AD in the first decade of its existence brilliant, interesting, beautiful, inspiring and many other heart or mind activating words, throwing muses always left me a little cold. I have lived through a period of explosion in music and while still listening to new music in the late eighties and early nineties and also trying to catch up on three decades of already released music by that time, I made a conscious effort to not be swamped with an impossible task of listening to everything. I learned very early on in my musical exploration that some music reveals its greatest depth and life after tens of hours of repeated listening. Some music just gets better and better the more you listen to it. This means that the battle of getting the real meat out of a piece of music takes so much time that new discoveries have to be limited or picked carefully first from the ocean of music available. 4AD was always a pretty good bet for me, the label gave a kind of partial guarantee of satisfaction.

My introduction to 4AD was mostly through the Lonely Is An Eyesore compilation in 1987. On that compilation was a track by Throwing Muses called Counting Backwards. From all the amazing music on that album, the Throwing Muses track along with the Wolfgang Press and one of the Dead Can Dance tracks left me a little unsure as to whether I liked them or not. The Dead Can Dance and Wolfgang Press tracks just grew on me the more I listened to the compilation. The Throwing Muses track however, just didn't do anything for me to the point that I started to get annoyed by it getting in the way of the rest of the great songs. Because of that track, I never gave Throwing Muses a chance really.

Listening to Dizzy now, The Throwing Muses single from 1989, it still reminds me strongly of that track from the Lonely As An Eyesore compilation and still leaves me cold. Now I know.....this is sacriledges, I'm dissing a band from the sacred 4AD vaults. But this is only my personal opinion and I'm sure there are many, many 4AD fans that absolutely love Throwing Muses. A 4AD collection wouldn't be very complete if I decided to leave a band's releases out just because I didn't get their music.

So for those that do like the Throwing Muses 1989 single Dizzy, here is the complete list (so far) of all the versions of the single

(1) UK 12"
(2) US 12" Promo
(3) UK 10" Gatefold
(4) UK 7"
(5) US CD Promo
(6) UK CD

As far as I know, all these releases were all released in 1989.

(1) UK 12" - 4AD - BAD903

(2) US 12" Promo - Sire - PRO-A-3395

This US promo only sleeve used part of the sleeve design from both the Hunkpapa album and part of which can be faintly seen in the UK singles sleeves. Dizzy wasn't released to the general public as a single in the US, so I assume that the promo 12" and the US promo CD were used to promote the Hunkpapa album, which had the Dizzy single included.

(3) UK 10" - 4AD - BADD903 - Limited to 5000 copies

(4) UK 7" - 4AD - AD903

(5) US CD Promo - Sire - PRO-CD-3618

This CD Promo from the US has a grey back sleeve, but no front sleeve, with the single title and release code printed.

(6) UK CD - 4AD - BAD903CD

The full details of all these releases can be found Here

Listen Here

This is all I have on this release so far and, as far as I know, is everything released for this single. If I find anything else, I promise to add it to this page. There will no doubt be a test pressing for each vinyl release, but these will be hard to come by

Thanks for reading as always

Grab a Piece of 4AD History

So its the year end. I have had a good year, this humble blog has hit 20,000 views which I never thought would be possible. In the UK, the popular magazine "Record Collector" has published the 200 top collectable music releases from the UK. In that listed featured the Lonely Is An Eyesore 4AD wooden box set. I still don't have this, and each year its worth just seems to soar and soar.

http://recordcollectormag.com/

It has made me think of how this magazine and the book they regularly publish, which I got for Xmas, called the Rare Record Price Guide 2014 are only published from a UK point of view, UK only releases in Pound Sterling. The pricing guide I can understand, but music is no longer national and record collecting in the last five or so years has become totally international. Most new releases such as the new Dead Can Dance album although printed in one country, does not belong to a single countries release area. When a release is sold online it can originate from anywhere in the world.

I suppose that is one thing that is making my collection interesting, is having completely unique releases for many different countries. The US, Canadian, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Greek releases all have unique labels, codes and matrices in the cases of many of the eighties releases. It's a shame that Record Collector don't get with the times and become more universal in the way that music collecting is.

I suppose you want to know what the most highly collectable music release had the number one spot for the UK? It was the former Beatles group The Quarrymen, with an acetate record recorded by them in a 'record straight to a record' shop. There was only one made and Paul McCartney owns it and it's worth about £200,000. Thank goodness I don't collect the Beatles. Although the estimated price for that seems to have stayed the same over the last couple of years, I have been wondering over the last year, how wise an investment music is. So since August 2012 I have been keeping a track of the worth of my collection on Discogs, using the average selling price and not the highest or lowest, and comparing that against the number of items I have in my collection. Although not incredibly accurate, it does give some inkling as to what the market is doing. Of course, there are some elements that could skew the figures, such as the fact that I may already have the cheaper items in my collection so newer items collected may be worth more and therefore give a false perspective. But I suppose I can only go on what I have. On the other side of the argument is the fact that new releases when limited, always fetch a high price to begin with as traders buy possible collectables to sell. This initially inflates the second hand market, but then after time the worth decreases. So I think overall, the tracker could be reasonably accurate.

As you can see from a half years worth of data, the general worth is slowly creeping up. It's certainly not conclusive, but I will be carrying this on over the next year to see what the trend does in future.

I have also been tracking since August 2012 how much progress I am making towards my target. It is a depressing state of affairs. As I have noted before, acquiring a release is another step towards a complete collection, but then I also find more items to collect. At the moment the count of wanted items is stable and thankfully slightly falling. It is a stark reminder of how difficult this project is. The awful state of traders quality to detail doesn't help either. The number of times this year that traders have advertised, incorrectly listed, or posted the wrong release seems to be getting worse, which just makes the process even more frustrating.

Which has happened again, which means that once again, I have a release to give away for the new year. This is another Cocteau Twins release, this one is a great freebie. I am giving away the original debut album "Garlands" released in the UK in 1982 on vinyl.

To win this great freebie, posted for free to the lucky winner, find me on Facebook under the name Jonny Halfhead, friend me and send me a message telling me why why you should win this original piece of 4AD history. A winner will be randomly picked from the entries as before.

Jonny Halfhead Requires Charitable Donations

I am very excited. I have been wanting to let tell you all what I have managed to acquire this week, but didn’t want to chance my luck until the item finally arrived safely and in one piece.

There are many releases that are exciting to acquire when collecting 4AD. Some are quite rare and yet fetch surprisingly low prices. Some are ridiculously priced, not only because they are rare, but also because they are very much sought after.

I remember a 4AD collector being asked what his most prized collection piece was. His answer was the My Captains single “History”. He had been struggling to find this single over a number of years and have never seen it once, not on ebay or at record fairs, nowhere. And yet I never had this problem and found a copy quite easily.

 

Probably the most expensive piece of 4AD to try and acquire is the “Lonely Is An Eyesore” compilation. This was a 4AD release from 1987. It came in a standard release of either LP, CD, cassette or video. This version of the LP was fantastic enough, with a strange fold out inner sleeve with all the 4AD releases listed so far in 1987, many already deleted. 4AD released a more limited edition of this LP. The limited version had a thick book inside with lots of great artwork and a second sleeve that folded out  like a tryptych. But then 4AD also created 100 copies of a wooden box, which had inside the LP, CD, cassette and video, with individual pieces of artwork created for the box inside. The plan was to give all the contributing artists a copy each, but some of the artists didn’t want their copy. Of the 100 made only about half were taken by individuals in 4AD. The rest then got sold to the general public.

 

A few years ago I saw one of these go up for sale on ebay for about £400. I didn’t have the money then, and I also found it difficult to justify spending that kind of cash on one music item. A couple of years later another sold for just over £1000, again on ebay. I didn’t even see this one until it had gone. Now if you see one for sale it’s generally going for around the £2000 mark. I have seen one for sale at this price and it becomes hard to try and justify spending that kind of money.

Unfortunately, this is not the item I have acquired as yet.

This is what I have just got my hands on.

 





This is the debut release from Clan of Xymox. Released in 1983 and self financed, it has quite a story behind it. Getting behind the story though seems full of controversy and ego. Don’t take my word for it, see this great biography on the story of Clan of Xymox here

www.unruhr.de/

The reason why Subsequent Pleasures has become so sought after, is because “The Band” decided to destroy most of the 500 copies. Why is the ultimate question! Nevertheless, the few copies that remain fetch a good price and are generally difficult to get hold of for less than £200.

Ouch, I’ve think I’ve just had a wallet attack!

To sweeten the pain, when the item arrived in the post, I was delighted to find inside a set list from a Clan of Xymox gig, with a backstage pass stuck to it and signed by the band members. Finishes it off nicely I think!
 

Well at least this is one of the more expensive items on the collection grabbed. I see myself fortunate I didn’t decide to collect Led Zeppelin or something similar, otherwise I would need another mortgage.....