collector scum

Ten years ago I bought a copy of the Coloured Balls' Ball Power from an op shop in Heathcote, and gave it to a friend who I don't speak to anymore because his wife doesn't like me. Yesterday, I saw the LP in question (obviously I don't know whether it was the same copy) at Greville records for $400. To be fair to my friend, he told me a short time after I'd given him the LP that he'd discovered it was worth a lot of money, and he offered to give it back to me on that basis. I declined, essentially because if you give someone something you don't take it back under any circumstances. I know this seems like some kind of weird, I don't know, humble brag? But I actually think it's a shitty album, it has one good song ('Flash') and the rest is banal, like a lot of music (note I am not saying Australian music - a lot of music) from that period. And actually, now I think about it, like a lot of music, no qualifications. In the same Greville visit I bought Neil Young's Everyone Knows this is Nowhere, on the basis that it is by far my favourite NY album, and maybe (I also have the excellent Carnegie Hall 1970 live album) the only one I really need. It cost $55, a new LP. It just makes me wonder what records are worth. The market doesn't seem to make any sense on this. I also bought the LP pictured above, which is definitely the kind of cheesy crap I like (I haven't played it yet - when will I? Well, I bought The Faust Tapes about twenty years ago and cannot remember playing it ever, until yesterday). Play Eurovision Bestsellers was 50c. My question to you is, is Everyone Knows this is Nowhere 110 times better than Play Eurovision Bestsellers? Admittedly, EKTIN is new, and PEB is second hand, so that's something to consider, but that's the only other element I can take into account. 

I also bought two albums for ten dollars each. A Nigel Olsson LP for ten dollars (I really like the other one of his I have, but this one is from a bit later, 1980) and Squeeze's East Side Story. ESS has my (and everyone else's, surely) favourite Squeeze song, 'Tempted', surely about as close to a perfect pop song as you're likely to get from white english men. (As an aside, I note on youtube that there are two videos for 'Tempted', one really drab 'live on stage' style mime where the main focus of the cameraman's interest is shots up the fronts of the backing singers who don't have microphones because if they did it would make it hard to film up their fronts and also they're miming so who cares; and one which someone on yt has labelled the 'original video' when clearly it's the version they did in the 90s. What I was looking for was one I very definitely remember where the group are performing to a whole lot of mops waving before them like the heads of an audience, but I am prepared to concede that I was wrong and this wasn't the video for 'Tempted' but some other song. Or, this video has been suppressed). 

I will have more to say on the topic of record collecting shortly but right now I have actual work to do. I will say just this: going by side one alone (I wish I'd bought this LP in 1981 when it came out not only just yesterday) East Side Story is not five and a half times lesser than Everyone Knows this is Nowhere, which is incidentally, though, a very good record.* Maybe I should just average out the prices. I bought four records (and I picked up a free 12" of Streisand/Summer doing 'No more tears', from the Greville chuck-out pile) so I could say, I paid an average of $15.50 per thing. That actually feels pretty good. Counting free things in the pile really helps. 

*Additionally I have fond memories of listening to it while shelving books at the agriculture library at the University of Sydney about thirty years ago, that and Jona Lewie's album On the Other Hand... both cassettes I bought at a street stall for negligible moneys at the time.