How much is your record collection worth ? (A Pop Quiz)

As i continue to sell my life away on E-bay i find flogging old CD's & Vinyl is a bit like gambling. Or perhaps i should say 'playing a game of Russian roulette'. The value of music has plummeted so much over the years that i seem to have no idea nowadays what is rare and collectable and what is worthless.

This means that i either waste money trying to flog stuff that no-one is interested in or i suddenly find i've quite clearly undervalued an item because 30 people are watching it and are waiting to pounce in the last 30 seconds before the auction ends, just to get it as cheap as possible.

Anyway this brings me to a great new pop quiz for you.
Every now and then i'll show you 4 items i've listed to sell at some point. All you have to do is guess which one went for the most amount of money and which sold for the least (or perhaps didn't sell at all). I'll post the values tomorrow in the comments section below with a short description of the interest shown by bidders.

You might find it interesting if you yourself own some of these records and are thinking of flogging them (or throwing them away). All are listed as "Used" and "in Excellent condition, both Sleeve and Vinyl/CD" as well as being originals from the time of release, not re-issues or re pressings. It's always a gamble of course and i could have got different prices at a different times, but this is how much i got when i tried selling them.

Queen-One Vision 12", Awesome 3-Hard up CD single, Jean-Michel Jarre-Zoolookologie 12" and Paul McCartney & Michael Jackson-Say say say 12".

I'll give you a clue with these first four. Three sold, one didn't.

All our yesterdays

I was in Blackpool a few weeks ago and took this picture. You may wonder why ?. Well i think it's one of those pictures that mean nothing now, but in a few years time you'll look at it and say "look at all those phone boxes!!!".
Even now i can't remember the last time i saw so many in a row. Eight of them, and all empty as usual.

I know they have been killed off by the introduction of mobile phones, but for the sake of a little nostalgia i decided to take a look inside one and was reminded of another reason why they are dying a death.
The smell of piss nearly burned my eyes out. and the type of graffiti on the windows would have made a soldier blush.
This was the cleanest, but I'm still not sure I'd use it, even in an emergency.

Antiques of the future

Sinclair ZX 81 Personal Computer, Browni Carolina 8 Track in car Stereo, Texus Instruments TI-99 4A.

K-Tel Presents

Long before Now that's what i call music and Telstar there was K-tel.
A company making money out of releasing and advertising compilation hits albums of the day, and very popular they were to.

The problem was that packing 10 tracks on each side of a vinyl LP reduced sound quality.
Mass production and grooves that were so close together meant that a high pitch vocal could wobble the needle so much it jumped onto track two if you didn't have a brand new stylus or there was a slight warp.
And as most of the people who bought these albums thought that balancing a penny on the arm to weight it down would rectify the problem the chances are the needles hadn't been replaced in years anyway.
Some of the oldest K-tel albums i own are visibly marked were the stylus has dug into the groove of the record so deep you can actually see the plastic burring.

K-Tel also had some brilliantly tacky accessory products that were also on the edge of quality control

Do you remember or did you own a record selector ?

This clever little invention held 24 Vinyl albums, one flick forward of the first album and all the other albums would slowly flick in turn like the pages of a book, clever eh ?

However i also seem to remember that once over half of the albums were leaning to the front the bloody thing it was so top heavy that the whole stack fell over in a heap...

Happy days !, bring back Disco Rocket (LOL)

Wages of sin

I found this amongst some old documents and bits of paper the other day.

A wage slip from my youth. I think you get more than that for sitting on your bum nowadays. But you could buy a 12" single for 79p back then and I'm pretty sure the vast majority of that cash was turned into vinyl.

It certainly didn't go on cloths judging by the picture i found with it.

When i look at my record collection now i note that 1981 was probably the year i spent the most amount of money on music. I seem to have bought anything and everything.

There was a time when i owned the entire top 40 every week. Just buying the new entries and a few of the new releases each Friday when i got paid. It didn't matter what the new entries were, Depeche Mode-Just Can't get enough or Joe Dolce-Shaddap you face, because i, like an idiot, bought it. I was playing at being a DJ at the time so i did have an excuse i suppose. Although i never remember mixing Soft Cell Tainted Love with Julio Iglesias Begin the Beguine so what the bloody hell did i buy that for ?. All that money up in smoke.

Worth every penny.

Beware of the dog

Scene & Heard

A long forgotten record shop that served me well over the years.