I was just going through the stack of records I brought back from the UK. Digging there in the big cities was, for me at least, a fairly fruitless experience. Its a nation of record collectors and taste makers, the dealers are educated in all genres down to the last most obscure detail, and people have deep pockets when it comes to vinyl. You never want to be going head to head with a British or Japanese record nut with access to liquid assets. Forget it. But, the best thing about digging in the UK was that all the younger collectors seemed to congregate in London, Manchester and these sorts of places, and wouldn't be seen dead in a provincial town or small city, and these sorts of places are my natural habitat and bread and butter. The coastal boonies are full of killer records left over from the 70's/80's UK soulboy DJ circuit.
I went into a small record shop with pictures of Elvis and 60's garage acts all up over the walls. I asked the tea drinking proprietor politely if he had any disco or eighties dance music, and he casually points over to two boxes I passed as I walked through the door, both with big hand written scrawls on the side saying "ONE POUND EACH". Now a pound sterling equates to about $400 USD or thereabouts it seemed, but still, its pretty much the smallest denomination possible in Great Britain. I asked him why the boxes were almost placed out the door and in direct sunlight, and he said it was so if anyone came in to try and steal records they would just take the easy route, nick some disco and leave, his rock'n'roll records safely untouched by their thieving hands. We had a chat and he gave me a stack from the boxes for a fiver. He knew tons about disco, modern soul and it's current market value. He just hated it that's all. Here are three I picked out that were interesting.
Fashion were a darkwave dance act from the early eighties London scene, I have a couple of their other records, but I had never seen this one before, it was a double 12" single. The bands producer 'Zeus B'Held' often created dub versions of the bands instrumentals that he would term 'mutant remixes', this one comes off the flip of the bonus disc:
Something Special is a classic electro boogie monster, I love the instrumental on this:
The shop owner said an old rep for Pye Records who was now living in Essex came in and dropped a bunch of promos off that were sitting around his garage. Pye would carry releases from a lot of English independents in the late seventies, particularly small glam rock labels, and some of these glam acts would often put a disco B side on their singles in an attempt to cash in. David Boydell was a pure disco act, there is an LP of his out there somewhere, this single came on cool white vinyl, Red Light is a quirky disco funk instrumental that appears on the flip"
