congratulations on adding to your collection

...that's what discogs says when you buy some record or other on discogs. I hate it. I don't think of myself as having a 'collection'. But I am also aware of how I have developed, bizarrely really, a big fat record 'collection' again in the last few years, almost despite myself. When I helped to make the Broadway album in, um, 2016 or thereabouts, or was it earlier, I funded the recording primarily from selling my albums, getting a few hundred dollars at a time. I don't even remember what they were. It wasn't indiscriminate selling, and there are some I would never part with, but essentially I was like 'I don't care about albums that much, and I'm downsizing anyway - what difference does it make'. Somewhere along the way I've started building it all back up again, but very different. There's a lot more non-English speaking stuff in there, which builds on a few bits and pieces I've long treasured like Skaldowie, with amazing things like Barbara, and all those incredible Awesome Tapes from Africa LPs. Oddly enough while I love a lot of records from Finland they are often in English eg Tasavallan Presidentti and did I ever mention I kind of like this group called Pintandwefall? But I am also getting into Litku Klemetti, her songs are in Finnish, remind me to tell you about her sometime. 

Anyway this evening I saw this advertised and I was like, hmm. I don't have a copy of The Modern Dance  and this one is white lol. I could easily have nabbed it 'for my collection'. But I kind of like being a massive PU fan but not owning the album everybody who doesn't know anything thinks is their best. I do have two copies of Art of Walking though, you know, the one that was supposedly a mispress of an earlier iteration, and the other one. I'm the only person who likes that album. It is the greatest though. It fucks, as young people say. 

So I am in a way interested in what the artefacts you do and don't accumulate say about you. Not you. Well, maybe you. I also don't have any records by The Beatles, Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Genesis, The Sex Pistols, Public Image Ltd, Kate Bush, Fleetwood Mac, Queen, AC/DC or Michael Jackson. Now you won't want to come round when I ask you over to listen to records will you! You know it'll end up being a procession of Pintandwefall sides mixed with the Bee Gees. Ugly. 

barry gibb's unreleased 1970 album is 9/10ths bad

I don't know how I got to it but apparently Barry Gibb made an album straight after the Bee Gees broke up for realz in 1970ish, which may or may not have been called The Kid's No Good. What you see above is not its cover, but someone's imagined idea of what the cover might have been if it had come out. Well, anyway, it should of been called The Album's No Good, get it?! It's so weird how Barry is always pushed as the real solid centre of the Bee Gees but (notwithstanding he was probably worn out completely by the prior five years) this album definitely suggests that he was not much at all without his brothers. Then, anyway. They weren't much without him either although I think Robin's Reign is probably a pretty great album all in all, certainly massively better than this pile of shit (yeah, it's available on youtube by the way, or a version of it is at any rate). That said I think some of the value of Robin's Reign is similarly he didn't have his brothers around insisting he polish stuff, but in that case it kind of worked. Barry's Kid's No Good has songs like 'The Victim' for which the first ten seconds are incredibly good, could be a Stereolab instrumental or something, but why does he have to sing it like he is a tetchy idiot? Ugh, don't do it. (OK I admit it's pretty good really but I don't want to flimsify my bad-tempered argument).* OMG Maurice's album from the same time, The Loner, is also on youtube. And OMG it's ten times better than Barry's fuckin' album!!! O M G! 

But still the Bee Gees' obsession with/default to country music, which was clearly for some reason something they really wanted to do, was and remains kind of sick, well, because their take on country music was usually pretty shit. Yeah, I know, 'Lonely Days', 'Islands in the Stream', I mean sure, but most of the time it was horrible.  

In other news, I went to see if I could find anything called 'Killed By Death' that I had done. I have to concede I might be wrong about this. I found these little square pages of comic strip that in my memory had included something called 'Killed by Death' and I was totally wrong about that. I suppose it doesn't matter. I did find some other things I did about thirty years ago, which I probably never did anything with, excerpts:

I don't know why I found that funny, or why I still do. 

This is a curiosity that I might have done any time in the last twenty years, it won't mean much to you but it's a character from the graphic novel I'm working on now, only I've just drawn him with some harem pants and shoes on and added this rather extraordinary name, which isn't his name, next to him. I'm such an enigma to myself. 

*Update 19/4 I've actually decided that 'Victim' is basically the best song Barry Gibb ever wrote. I'm not sure whether this means that the overall average quality of the album goes up, or the extraordinary contrast between 'Victim' and all the other tosh creates a universal vortex that sucks the entire thing into a black hole.