Remember this classic album pop pickers?

I think that I should do more for other people in the upcoming year, but for no reward or personal gain. Spare time is something I have very little of but at the moment I am on Christmas holiday from Crown Court so I decided to reply to a call on Twitter from the Sue Ryder charity shop in Hockley, who wanted someone to help them to sort out their vinyl record collection ready for sale. A quick few tweets later and I had offered my services and reported for duty at ten o’clock this morning and worked through without lunch (although I did go out for a few smoke breaks) until about twenty to six. I was led upstairs to a store room full of the results of household clear outs all waiting for a new home. My job was to make some sense of a heap of records, some in boxes and some in random piles in a corner of the room. It made Rob’s Record Mart look like a highly organised operation.

The shop is expanding on their music sales (and getting a foothold in the revival of vinyl records) and needed everything sorting into genres so customers have some idea of what they’re looking for. I also checked for scratches and damage and repaired ripped sleeves before boxing the records up in something resembling a system. After a while I had the following categories: rock (including AOR), pop, easy listening, soundtracks, comedy, Christmas, party sing-along, classical, opera, compilation albums (original artist), compilations (not original artist), and ‘weird shit’ – bagpipes, choirs, religious, Hammond organs and other such oddities.

By the end of the day I had done this

Buying records in charity shops is a task that requires patience due to the large amount of rubbish that you find in the boxes. Charity shop LP records uncover a curious other world of music that couldn’t possibly have existed, could it? It amazes me that these things were made in the first place, never mind that enough people obviously bought them to make it a worthwhile venture. The easy listening piles contained names that tested the ‘easy’ element to the very limits, people like Max Bygraves and Perry Como among others who seem to have made more than their fair share of albums. Labels like Music for Pleasure and K-Tel dedicated a lot of energy to the ‘weird shit’ category when it would have been nice if someone in the office had thought to give some of their pressing plant to people with talent who couldn’t get a foot in the door of the cutthroat world of popular music, unsigned bands and singers could have thrived instead of forcing another Top of the Pops compilation on the world.

It was the home VHS market that enabled standup comedians to showcase their acts to those who didn’t see them live, but some of them used to release concerts on LP, Jasper Carrot has quite an impressive discography for example. Another quirky market seemed to have been for exercise records, something that also thrived with VHS.

This is volume two!

There is one person who seems to have released far too many albums is a man called James Last. I will admit that I didn’t have the first clue who we was until I looked him up and found that he is (yes ‘is’, he is 85 and released his last album in 2011) a prolific bandleader and composer. Part of me wanted to buy every album I laid my hands on today, simply because I don’t like the idea of any vinyl LP being unwanted and unloved. Most of these albums will struggle to find a new home, the ugly dog at the rescue centre that nobody wants to adopt, and I find that heartbreaking. It upsets me when I see children’s toys outside waiting for the bin men and sometimes I ‘adopt’ them (a Pokémon character is sitting on my desk-side drawers – I have no idea what Pokémon is but this thing needed a home). I would have even taken Bernard home…

However, I am a man of ideas and when I am dead people will realise what a visionary person I was, so I have hit on a plan to try and help my new friends at Sue Ryder (Goosegate branch) and shift some unloved and unwanted records. Sue Ryder (Goosegate branch) is situated in Hockley. So I will use Hockley in order to bring the LP trade to Sue Ryder’s door and I think I know just how to do it.

I will make a CD compilation of James Last tunes and hand copies of it to all of the coffee shops and bars in Hockley for them to play. The hipster crowd will get used to hearing his musical offerings but will have no idea who or what they are listening to, so I start a whispering campaign around these venues. All I need to do is wear a lumberjack shirt (buttoned up to the neck) and roll up my trousers and infiltrate the herds to tell them that James Last is a brand new artist and that “I don’t expect you’ll have heard of him yet”. This will be like a punch in the stomach to them and so they will pretend, in that pretentious way they do, that they are big fans of James Last. That will be my cue to tell them that a load of his albums are available at Sue Ryder (Goosegate branch) because “he’s giving something back to the music scene by making his records available in charity shops, he won’t want a fuss about the charitable nature of this gesture, anyway, who’s for another knitted yoghurt and soya milk goats cheese latte?” (This is how they talk).

"I knew James Last before he went commercial"

There will be a stampede of hipsters (if you can stampede in flip-flops with your trousers rolled up) to the shop to snap up all of James Last’s albums so they can say that they had heard of him before the rest of Lee Rosy’s and I will have helped my new friends at the charity shop to shift a shitload of records.

I mentioned this idea to Mandi who tried to pour water on my scheme by saying that once the pretentious hipster crowd saw what James Last looked like the plan would fail. Would it though? Take a look at the man; silly hairstyle, sculpted beard, daft patterned shirt. They will think he is their God.

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