8

IN WHICH… I ASK HOW MUCH MINT MATTERS

By now, you’ll have realised I am deep in the grip of an addiction. You might even have the propensity to join me in it. You might already be deeply mired in it. But how are you supposed to know? A true record collector stumbles into collecting. It happens almost subliminally over a period of time.

You may set off initially to purchase a particular record you’ve remembered, heard on the radio, online or on TV, or which you’ve read about, been told about, or has been recommended to you. You visit a shop you think may have the record for sale. But while you’re there purchasing what you came for, you look around to see what else they have in stock. You see a record you think you might like, but you are not convinced you should buy it. But you put it to one side, just in case. Then you come across one you know you’d like, so you put that to one side as well. What’s this? Another record that you don’t know you’d like, but you have already decided, perhaps because of the cover, maybe because of the name, or a member of the group, that you want. So you add that to the growing pile you are beginning to create. Then, the clincher – you see another record you don’t only think you’d like, but know you would, and already want it so much that you actually need to own it just so that when and if you next decide you have to hear it, it is going to be there for you even if that day may not be coming for weeks, months, years, even decades down the line.

Now you’re hooked. Now you’re a record collector, and now I’d like to discuss a question/conundrum which seems to divide opinion amongst us vinylatelists. There is a great deal of pride and exhibitionism connected with the second-hand record industry. There are whole websites devoted to people boasting about the valuable records they have. I did manage to retain some of the more desirable items which came my way as a record reviewer, and which are now so valuable that I barely dare to play them for fear of affecting their value. Not that I am ever going to sell them.

I will admit to buying CD versions of some records so that I can keep the equivalent LPs in decent nick, but I must admit that I don’t really ‘get’ what seems to be one of the key features of record collecting for some today. Who buys ‘mint’ vintage records and why? And how or why have those albums stayed mint for all these years?

The matter came to a head for me when I visited a London shop selling second-hand records alongside film and literary memorabilia, and the proprietor proudly showed me a ‘mint’ copy of an album by a very obscure group called The Paisleys. So obscure that their one album was only ever issued in tiny quantities. I collect ‘psychedelia’ for want of a better catch-all term for what I like, but although the cover looked to be sending out all the psychedelic signals I could pick up, I had never heard of The Paisleys. He told me that it was from a small, privately released limited edition, and was for sale for £650. I was intrigued. I wasn’t going to buy it at that price, despite him telling me how good the record was, but I wondered why it should be so expensive. After giving a couple of unconvincing reasons why, he told me that really, he reckoned it was because the record had changed hands regularly between dealers, all enjoying the kudos of owning something almost no one else has.

Thus, over each successive transaction, which each purchaser had almost certainly made with an eye on future profit rather than enjoying the sounds contained in the grooves, the value grew substantially every time it changed hands, to its present, ludicrous level. I am convinced he won’t be able to sell it at that price. But that, if he does, it will soon reappear on the market at about 800 quid.

I went away and listened to some of the record on YouTube. Yes, it was my type of thing, albeit not the best I’d ever heard, but pretty good of its kind, with plenty of Beatles-influenced material. I sent off for a CD copy at just under a tenner. I played it when it arrived and maybe a total of five or six times since, which would mean it would have cost me some £80+ a listen had I bought the mint vinyl – which I’d probably be unwilling to play lest I should inadvertently damage or scratch it.

There was another option. I eventually found at a record fair, and bought for a mere tenner, a brand-new copy of the 2015 Sundazed reissue of the LP at a time when I could find just one original copy offered for sale on Discogs, in ‘Very Good+’ condition from a seller from the ‘Russian Federation’, at £436.78. I was passing the shop in question again, some six months after my previous visit, and The Paisleys were still there on a top shelf, accompanied by equally overpriced copies of Art’s Supernatural Fairy Tales, a Downliners Sect LP and some Chocolate Watchband and 13th Floor Elevators for company. All of which I recognised from my previous trip.

I have never collected as an investment. I’ve collected in an effort to own as much of the kind of music I have always liked – particularly the stuff which was obviously being made alongside the successful artistes of the mid to late 1960s and early 1970s, but which, like The Paisleys, achieved very little exposure at that time.

Seal is without doubt a fine singer. ‘Kiss from a Rose’ is a remarkable track, and I own a couple of examples of his work. So, Seal records are not a problem for me, but ‘sealed’ is definitely a problematic area of record collecting.

An online message from Giorgio Guffanti, a member of a Facebook group of very keen and knowledgeable collectors to which I belong, sparked some serious thinking about sealed records:

‘Open in this moment for a spin for the first time in almost 50 years. Did I (make) a wrong choice?’

Giorgio – whose first language, as you may notice, is Italian not English – was posting that he had just taken a previously sealed disc from the cover in which it had been concealed and therefore unseen for half a century or more, and was now about to remove its virginity by playing it.

The record, an LP by The Tea Company entitled Come and Have Some Tea with the Tea Company, was released in 1968. I was not instantly familiar with the title but, according to a website I consulted, this was a psychedelic band and album.

Almost immediately someone else in the group observed of the sealing breach:

‘Some dumb collectors get furious, haha.’ Then added, ‘Let it live!’

Giorgio appeared to agree – and to be unrepentant:

‘As you know I’m not a dealer. Just a music lover. If I don’t have it, a sealed copy (the only one I have) is a bad choice. Listening in this moment for the first time in my life . For some records I want to let the surprise side intact.’

Bravo for him, I thought. As did Arv:

‘Records are meant to be played. I got a sealed Moving Sidewalks. I opened and played it. I don’t regret it for one moment.’

Giorgio pointed out, though:

‘But (sealed) is always a good investment.’

Another member of the group, Stephen B M Braitman offered an alternative take:

‘I’m against older sealed albums because one can never predict the actual condition of the disc inside.’

I did then ask Giorgio whether he himself had owned the album for 50 years and was only now playing it, or whether he had just acquired it. He said he’d bought it in the previous week at a Milan record fair, and added in his charming broken English:

‘I was attempted to left it sealed. But I never heard this record in my life in any format. So left it sealed sounds like a stupid choice . Don’t care about loss of collectable value.’

Watching and contributing to this debate I found myself automatically on the side of those wishing to play rather than preserve the record. But I felt something of a fraud when I began to check what sealed records of my own I might have lying around. I have castigated ‘mintys’ for as long as I can remember but, once I began looking through my collection with a view to trimming at the edges, I began to discover that I too had mint copies, and needed to find out why. Why had I never played albums by, for starters, Chaka Khan, Cheap Trick, Deep Purple, Dion, Jay Ferguson, P J Proby, Eddie Rabbitt, Rough Diamond, Joe Tex, Wishbone Ash – and a double psych collection, Insane Times? Nor even the reissued new copy of The Paisleys’ LP.

These were all sealed records and therefore one assumes them to be mint – not necessarily the case, of course, as they could have been resealed after use. But even if that were the case I wouldn’t know – as I have never unsealed them myself.

The price tag of 50p probably explains how I came to own a record with one of the longest titles I’ve ever come across – Deep Purple and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Malcolm Arnold, in live concert at the Royal Albert Hall: Concerto for Group and Orchestra, composed by Jon Lord.

Crikey, apart from the odd single or two I have never been a Purple aficionado, (remind me to tell you about the time I falsified a Top Ten chart in the Weekly Post in order to convince a fellow hack that the bet we’d struck about Purple’s ‘Strange Kind of Woman’ hitting Number one had been won by me) and as for Lord, God rest his soul, I’d rank him alongside Keith Emerson in the pantheon of show-offy keyboard tinklers, whose ability to swoosh and thump the keys for hours without a break is a skill in which I have zilch interest…

So, even if the price did induce me to purchase, it can only have been in the expectation of being able to shift the record on for a profit or in hope/expectation of my tastes changing gradually as I grew older, more mature, and more sensible – none of which happened, as you may already have deduced.

It came out in 1970 and I still have it. A quick perusal of a website which calculates today’s values compared with earlier years, suggests that today a 1970 £1 would be worth £15.67, which would mean that, in order even to claim a ‘profit’ from the Purple record, I’d have to sell it for more than £7.83. I’ve tried. Quite hard. No one wants it on Amazon, eBay, or amongst my circle of friends. Not for today’s £7.83, or even a 1970 50 pence piece. So, should I rip the sealing off and have a listen? What if I really like it? I’ll get more than £7.83’s worth of self-punishment over how much pleasure I have foregone for nearly 50 years by depriving myself of hearing it. How would I live with myself after that humiliation?

There is, bizarrely and a little troublingly, something about a sealed record which deters me from actually opening it up and deflowering it. Whether this is a telling psychological flaw of mine, I’m not sure. Why buy the thing in the first place if I had no intention of listening to it? If I’m now never going to listen to it, why not just flog it off for whatever pittance it might command? Somehow, I can do neither, and there it remains… a permanent accusation that I just cannot make up my mind.

I can try to justify it any way I want, but how can I explain why I splashed out a three-figure sum to buy the Pretty Things’ box set, Bouquets From A Cloudy Sky, when it was released in 2015? This despite the fact that I already owned most of the contents of the box, and had bought many of the component parts over the years. Today, the box set is long sold out of its limited edition, but there are still copies up for sale, albeit starting at about twice what it cost originally. I spotted one this morning offered for £1030.32 which, I strongly suspect, will not sell.

Yet I am neither tempted to try to sell my copy, nor can I bring myself to open it up. Not even to remove the cellophane wrapping. Not even when I know that each copy contains an artwork by lead singer Phil May – and one of them the original of that artwork. As far as I know I could have that original. I have not seen any reports of who does. But even if I knew it hadn’t been won and that there were only a few unopened copies out there, I’m pretty sure I still wouldn’t open mine to find out. Why is that? You tell me. To quote Badfinger, ‘Maybe tomorrow’, I’ll be able to explain why.

But first…