I'm headed back to England next weekend, the trip was unexpected and sadly its not all fun, but I'm there for a couple of weeks and hoping to get some record shopping in, maybe a few days on the mainland too.

 The UK are competitive hunting grounds, with lots of domestic recordings as well as decades worth of imports, more DJ's, collectors and obsessives per capita than anywhere else, a nation of black music lovers and taste makers, every record store is expensive and the dealers educated and mercenary to the core. I'm no expert record buying there by any means, but I did grow up there before coming to the states and have a couple of theories. Firstly forget the big cities, you will find plenty of what you want but it will be hanging up in plastic on the wall waiting for a tourist such as yourself to come buy it for the top end of market rate, where is the sport in that? When I go I hit up the small coastal towns north of London, especially the dying and forgotten resort areas. Strange, grey, windswept, Victorian built colonies often in beautiful settings, but full of unwelcoming eccentrics. These places had their hey day in sixties, seventies and early eighties, in the era before cheap flight and package holidays to Southern Europe shrank their economies and turned them into seaside nursing homes. There would be small discos and nightclubs in the larger more popular beachtowns during the British northern soul and jazz funk eras, and I have found remnants from those collections from time to time.

 I was thinking about the last time I went, and pulled out this record that I bought at a village post office near Cromer, old ladies would line up to get their pension money or send a postcard, and by their feet were boxes and crates of records, taking up most of the floor space. I pulled out a minty copy of the spacey 'disco burner', Candido's Thousand Finger Man as well as a bunch of other brit funk, turns out the post master was a collector back in the day when the cliff top caravan parks were full of city dwellers on vacation and looking to party. A typically English digging experience if you get off the beaten track. This recording isn't from the copy I scored there, its actually a late nineties remaster from the original master tapes, I heard it and thought they did a great job so I'm using it instead..

Candido - Thousand Finger Man (12" version)