Tag Archives: Record Collecting
2016 REPORT FROM THE FIELD — PART 1
Top Five Secondhand Record Purchases It is revealing that there was more than enough material in the acquisitions book to produce a Top 50 list of secondhand records entering the Vinyl Connection domain during the past twelve months. We are talking fifty highlights, by-the-by, not gap-fillers, pass-markers and also-rans. So much good music and such […]
SPACEMILLS OF YOUR MIND
It is late. The television is the only light in the room. You slouch, alone, on the couch. The movie you’ve been determinedly watching through to the endless final credits has been disappointing. What were people raving about? Unfulfilled, you surf a few channels, hoping for…what? Something to prod you out of this torpor; a […]
7 STEAMIN’ ALBUM COVERS
When the boy was little we took an afternoon drive around the ring road to Altona, home of Victoria’s Railway museum. To me it seemed, on that Autumn afternoon, a windswept mausoleum, but the youngster enjoyed clambering up, through, and around the old steam engines. Despite their size (big to enormous), it seemed to make sense […]
7 SMOKIN’ ALBUM COVERS
It may be anti-social these days, but not long ago a cigarette was considered a cool accessory to casually include in your album cover portrait. This selection ranges from the ultra hip to (attempts at) confrontation. Yet remember, however good the artwork, it’s still very bad for your health, kids. * * * * * * * […]
RETURN TO MIDDLE EARTH
Perhaps it was the screening of the Hobbit films on TV this week, but for some reason I found myself wanting to revisit Middle Earth to wrap up of the Lord Of The Rings series from a few months ago. It returns us to where we began, with John Sangster and Hobbits. Sangster has written a […]
HIGH CONTRAST
With a morning to myself and a pile of chores, I sat with the start-me-up coffee and pondered what to spin. What would get me going for a few hours of productive office work? How was I feeling today? Pretty heavy, actually. A chesty cough and a bit distracted by a knotty work issue. Something […]
8 ALBUM COVERS THAT SCREAM “EIGHTIES!”
With this selection of bold and colourful 80s album covers, I’ve tried to steer away from the dead obvious – rolled up jacket sleeves, bushels of big hair, heavy metal cartoon covers – yet capture something of the vibrant self-belief embodied in these sleeve designs. Naturally there were many others vying for inclusion – Joe Jackson’s Beat Crazy and Cyndi Lauper’s […]
RETURN OF THE SILVER THING
By the time I found the resources—both personal and financial—for a first trip out of Australia, it was so long after most of my peers had ‘done Europe’ that my plans caused barely a wrinkle in the social fabric. Yet the very idea ruffled my feathers, furrowed my brow, and tended to turn my […]
10 SPACIER ALBUM COVERS
Space: The Vinyl Frontier This is the second voyage of the starship Vinyl Connection, its mission to collect space-themed album covers for your extra-terrestrial enjoyment. (The first voyage was here) Most of these are curated. That is, I’ve used the Connection tractor-beam to draw in covers to make a (hopefully) pleasing and aesthetically interesting constellation of covers. The […]
KEEP OR CRATE?
Record collectors know how there slowly accumulates, around the gems and the sparkling finds, a considerable meterage of albums having an unsteady foothold on the beachhead of the collection. Those LPs plucked from the bargain bin where they rightly languished; that gap-filling reunion album that should have stayed where it was; the so-called ‘supergroup’ that […]
10 SPACEY ALBUM COVERS
After the Tomita article, there was a quiver of interest in album covers featuring space (It’s the final frontier, don’t you know). A couple of fine suggestions were made, and I recalled one or two LPs posted a long time ago in a galaxy far far away. Well, that was enough to get me thinking… what else […]
CAST AWAY
“If you gotta kill people, kill them with love, you fuckers!” John Power bellows at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire audience where his post-La’s band Cast are performing as part of their Troubled Times tour in 2012. As analysis of that extraordinary exhortation would require a major thesis*, we’ll just skip over his muddled proselytising and […]
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