I pulled another shift as a volunteer at the
Sue Ryder shop in Hockley this afternoon, sorting my way through the mountains
of vinyl records to try and categorise them ready for sale. As much as I am
enjoying this and hate the idea of someone else taking over from me and doing
it wrong, I doubt I’ll be able to give this too much attention after next week.
On Monday (5th) the world returns to normal and everybody goes back
to work, so my days will be spent in court and then I have a lot of writing
commitments on top of the weekly podcast, combined with my sometimes broken
promise to Mandi that I won’t do anything work related on Saturday as that is
our only day together. Finding the time for something else, even something that
is both therapeutic and charitable is going to be difficult as spare time and I
just aren’t acquainted.
Even if I don’t commit to a regular volunteering
post with the shop, I still want to go in enough times to get this collection
of records under control. This might add to an already worrying obsession with
James Last, a man I had never heard of until I first started digging through
and now want to do something about. I was only half joking the other day with
my plan to turn Last into a hipster favourite, but a part of me wants to come
up with a way to promote an old man who probably doesn’t want promoting. I’m
sure he made plenty of money in his working days as he travelled the world as a
band leader and released around two hundred albums, and according to @Gailsman
on Twitter (who fed me several follow up bits of information about the photos I
tweeted) sold 200 million. Two hundred million LP records. That’s in the days
when record sales meant something, and this rolled through punk and every other
movement and came out of the other side unscathed. There are other people who
made an inexplicable amount of albums too and I may turn to them at another
time but I am chiefly bothering with James Last for the simple reason that I
don’t have the first clue who he is, or at least I didn’t until last week/year.
I was thinking of asking a pub that does Sunday lunch if I could DJ in there
during food serving hours to offer a background ambiance of James Last’s
sounds. It would mean buying all the James Last stock from Sue Ryder (and there’s
a lot of it) and some vinyl decks, and transporting all of this to the pub, but
it would be worth it.
If you see a James Last
themed ANYTHING happening, especially in Nottingham,
and if I haven’t mentioned it on Twitter or Facebook, then my idea has been
stolen.
It would give me a warm glow to think of an
old man in the autumn years of his life being alerted to the fact that he had
somehow been gifted with a last wave of popularity before the final curtain
came down. Maybe he could be coaxed out of retirement to do one last concert
performance? Wouldn’t that be something?
Just so you know, I know it may look as though
I just shit silly ideas all day, but I have got quite a bit of work done and
only think of James Last while I’m giving myself a tea/cigarette break.
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Details on my audio books and other work for sale and how your donations
can help me to create free entertainment can be found on my Shop & Donations page.
This week’s edition of The Sunday Alternative
is here.
