Tag Archives: Vinyl Exchange

The Paranoid Ward

crate digging, lost classics, music, Patrik Fitzgerald, record stores, records, single records, Small Wonder Records, Vinyl Exchange, vinyl records, , , , , , , ,
The Paranoid Ward (Small Wonder Records 12", 1978)
Babysitter / Irrelevant Battles / Cruellest Crime / The Paranoid Ward / The Bingo Crowd (Instrumental) // Life at the Top / Ragged Generation for Real / Live Out my Stars / George (Small Wonder Records 12″ EP, 1978)

Who needs to sleep, I play pinball ’til three in the night. Ain’t got a job, ain’t got a home, but I like the lifestyle. I listen to Bowie, I ride with him out through the stars. I live out my heroes, try to touch them, I live out my stars.

 

 

Another classic find, purchased a few years after I had first heard it, from Vinyl Exchange in Manchester, the price sticker here peeled carefully from its cover and affixed to the inside paper sleeve.

The 12″ single was not a common format in the seventies, and so to find this used for a respectable one-pound-ninety-nine pence after being reduced four times, well, I was pleased. My younger brother had this originally on a 7″ single when it first came out, long lost now, from back when he had more money than me and would introduce me to new acts on an almost weekly basis.

This could have been the first time I’d heard Patrik Fitzgerald. He wouldn’t have been played on daytime radio, and none of my heavy rock loving school friends would have known about him. This impressive introduction – eight songs on my brother’s 7″ single, there are nine on my 12″ copy – being something of a revelation to me too.

The first being how the world of music had suddenly opened up to reveal much more of itself than had existed previously in my small-town world, and secondly it was just how varied one could still be within the newly established punk rock year-zero code of musical restriction.

NB: The impact that the Sex Pistols’ offensive verbal farrago on the BBC’s The Today Show one evening in December of 1976 had on the tender ears of the nation has been widely and somewhat excessively documented elsewhere. An inebriated presenter Bill Grundy goaded the band and received a stream of expletives in response. The next morning the newspapers had the story splashed across their front covers; The Filth and the Fury being my favourite headline from The Daily Mirror newspaper that my dad would read every day.

Here’s how it might have been for me at that time.

My dad was not a particularly communicative man, and would leave most of that difficult dealing with children later becoming teenagers stuff to my overworked mum. Consequently when taking his sweet time to read his daily newspaper he would not want to be disturbed at all. Mum later informed me that he was quite dyslexic, which would explain why it could take him anything up to four or five hours to peruse his Daily Mirror, and he would also somehow want to read everything that was in it.

I was fifteen years old and in that restless phase between two stages of life, and likely to have been hoping for something incendiary to come along and shake up the mundanity. It seemed as though the Sex Pistols would be it, if only I could have read, seen, or heard anything of them to help make up my mind. There’s also a distinct chance that had I read the cover story on the paper that day I would not have fully grasped what all of the fuss was about anyway.

This was because The Today Show was a regional arts-based programme available in the London area only, and I lived in the North of England where our equivalent was called Look North. To have faced a void of nothingness regarding the Pistols one day, and then to suddenly have them all over front covers the next was a very curious and now confusing thing. Now, if only my dad would hurry up and finish reading the paper I might find out what the fuss is all about!

Fast forward to 1978 and the music world has now fully opened up to me. From an era pre-Pistols where I wasn’t even particularly aware of any small and affordable 7″ single records being available that weren’t what was in the charts at that time, to suddenly find so much choice in such different styles, pressed on different coloured plastics too, and with images of all kinds of excitement printed on their picture sleeves. Well, this was a revelation to me and I couldn’t get enough of it.

Patrik Fitzgerald was signed to the tiny London independent label Small Wonder Records – home to The Cure’s debut single Killing An Arab amongst many others. The label heard Patrik for the first time via a cassette tape recording he made in his bedroom, freezing cold, and yelling his songs via acoustic guitar into a condenser microphone on his cassette player. I know this because four of those demo recordings make up the second side of the 12″ of The Paranoid Ward I have here, which was his second release for the label.

To have journeyed from a time when I naively thought that you had to attend a record company in some castle somewhere – I was pretty naive at the time, kids – then to suddenly find that you could mail them a cassette tape of your songs and from it one day make a record, well, this was a music future I could very much relate to.

On this second record Patrik veers from acoustic guitar pop songs with witty lyrics, to a home organ instrumental, to a tiny spoken recitation over a hum drone, and a further side of almost folk-like songs featuring his wonderfully lyrical turn of phrase. Try to get to hear it if you can, or any other of his earlier singles. They’re very good indeed and to be so bold with his switching between styles less than a year after the punk explosion speaks volumes about his confidence in himself.

But there are two specific and very trivial things about this fine record that I would like to share with you today;

One is regarding the lyric I quoted up there, where Patrik talks about listening to David Bowie. It is a minor bugbear of mine as an avid reader of the music press to constantly learn of pop stars I admire having in the seventies listened to a diet of nothing but David Bowie, Roxy Music, Iggy Pop, Kraftwerk, or The Velvet Underground, and typically only those five acts in one variation or another.

These people in bands that I admire are often just a couple of years older than me, sometimes even younger. How come they weren’t listening to Slade or The Sweet, Alvin Stardust or Mud like the rest of us? Methinks that some artists have what I term ‘selective memory loss’.

They wouldn’t want to be thought of in stupid loon pants doing a dance called ‘The Bump’ or squeezing spots into a wall mirror surrounded by pictures of David Cassidy. Oh no, it was all decadence round our way, mate. You couldn’t move for arch glam icons tripping over each other in our record collections…

The second concerns my favourite team sport of rugby league. A very good friend of mine sends DVD-R copies of rugby matches that he records from the UK TV channel Sky Sports, and I keep up with games in that way, through my all-regions DVD player. It’s hard enough living in America to find anyone with even an interest in rugby league – if they like the sport at all it’s usually rugby union that they prefer, which is a slightly different game – and not their preferred premier league soccer.

So when the customer meets me at the counter of my day job and learns that I’m from England they typically ask me what my favourite team is. When I say Widnes Vikings – my local hometown rugby team – they look confused, expecting me to say one of the three teams they prefer from the premier league; those being Arsenal, Chelsea, or Manchester United. Almost always one of those three and rarely another.

So it’s with some joy in my heart to find a song that actually mentions rugby in it at all. Are there any others? Do you know of any others because I don’t and haven’t Googled it yet.

I shall leave you today with this wonderful and hilarious recitation by Patrik, from the title track to The Paranoid Ward.

Until such time, my friends.

 

 

The Paranoid Ward.

The room was quiet, the brains buzzed in all directions, but more quietly.

The old man and his friend watched TV, it was a rugby match.

The men gathered in for the scrummage, heads down.

The old man shook his friends arm urgently and whispered, nodding toward the rugby players;

Here………

They’re talking about me.

In the Nursery

crate digging, In the Nursery, John Peel, lost classics, music, record stores, records, single records, Vinyl Exchange, vinyl records, , , , , , ,

In the Nursery 1

Sesudient // Archaic Torso / Blade / Incidental Guilt (Third Mind Records 12″, 1990)

My favourite record shop of my life so far is called Vinyl Exchange on Oldham Street in the centre of Manchester, in England.

I can’t recall exactly when I first discovered it but I know that it was sometime in the 1980s. It’s still going strong to this day, but for me – since the advent of compact disc taking away an entire floor of its retail space – it just hasn’t been quite the same as it used to be.

Vinyl Exchange early on carried exclusively used records and occasionally cassette tapes and videos from back in the days before small digital discs changed everything. It was stocked by offerings from the public but more excitingly through a syndicate of record reviewers and writers from Manchester who contributed to glossy magazines via features and music reviews. They would regularly trade promotional copies of free records to the shop for beer money.

In this way the records that you found in the shop were unlike anywhere else that I knew of, and often included press kits and further information about the artist to pitch the product to the writer, and these were offered gratis inside the sleeve at point of purchase, and usually referred to on the small green stickers affixed to the top right corner of the sleeve, as with this one.

You could lose hours in tireless pursuit in that place and I very often did.

I’d typically get the train on a Saturday from my hometown of Widnes in the North of England, roughly ten station stops, thirty-five minutes, and twenty-seven miles from Oxford Road in Manchester. I didn’t have a great deal of money in those days and would budget throughout the week for my Saturday visit into town. I would stop in to various record shops in the city as I wound my way inward but would always end up in Vinyl Exchange as my last port of call.

It’s on a street corner surrounded by bars and restaurants in a popular student area of town. In my day it was opposite Eastern Bloc Records on the other corner of a busy intersection; an almost exclusively-dance-music shop that had a box of 50p (75c) sale 12″ singles on its counter that were in no way representative of its typical store stock. I found some great stuff in that box.

I’m thinking that sales reps would come to the store and offer free records if the shop would invest in their latest hopeful offerings. If you could get your latest record played in Eastern Bloc on a Saturday afternoon it was a very big deal. Kids would congregate in the store before heading out to the legendary Hacienda nightclub later that night. Eastern Bloc was Manchester’s hip record shop to be seen in if that was your bag. Vinyl Exchange wasn’t quite the same kind of place.

Firstly it was much older and more earthy, dustier and I’d say even grimy compared to the sleek and polished interior of Eastern Bloc. It had racks around the walls stuffed with record covers in plastic sleeves by names I’d never heard of, and large cardboard boxes beneath those racks full of reduced stock. Vinyl Exchange had a very proactive stocking policy to cope with the volume of records it would receive on a daily basis. Every three weeks the entire stock would be reduced until the item had sold. The supply effortlessly equalled the demand at its peak.

I recall I went for a job interview in Vinyl Exchange once. I had no illusions that they would hire me but wanted to try anyway just in case. I recall I was taken downstairs into the basement and sat on a chair surrounded by more records than I’d then ever seen, and I probably spent my entire allocated time just wondering what was in those boxes all around me. The cooler young chap sat opposite me and very much going through the motions on that day said that he was looking for someone who could specialize in raising their dance music reputation in the area. I was clearly way out of my league but enjoyed the experience nevertheless.

If I could have only been left alone in that basement for an hour or so…

That was exactly my thing when shopping for records and to a certain extent very much still is. I’d always be keen to find something unusual or esoteric without being too weird or hard to grasp. I’m fascinated by the underdog I guess and try to find stuff I’ve never heard before and which intrigues me.

Consider this entry’s featured offering for a moment and let us indulge in a fairly typical mental checklist from a Saturday afternoon spent crawling around on the floor with boxes of reduced vinyl stock all around me. It was an attractive proposition for me to pick up seven or eight records for the price of one across the street, and I exhibited endless patience and tenacity for the journey;

Does the band have a stupid name? No it does not. It’s kind of intriguing. I have not heard of this band before. Does it have an appealing tinted image on the cover? Yes it does. She looks like a chanteuse in a foreign language film I would like to see, and she is holding a flower in a quietly seductive fashion.

Does it have slick art-department-style squiggly lettering for the main song that you would in no way be able to decipher where it not for the same song title repeated in clearer type on the back of the sleeve? Check. What’s a ‘sesudient’ anyway? How about featuring its year of release in Roman numerals? Check again. Very classy is that. Carry it under your arm to college and the girls will just swoon all around you.

Do you get any free stuff with it? Oh boy, do you ever! Three photocopied sheets are inside; including the intro sheet written by a representative from the record company who would happily sell you his fingernails if you’d just listen to the bloody thing. He’s talking on here about “the Bardot-like voice of Dolores Marguerite C.” as well as “atmospheric melody” and “orchestral textures.” I think I’m in…

Is it cheap? It’s 10p. Oh, sorry… It’s TEN PENCE!

In the Nursery 2 

This 12″ single was my first introduction to In the Nursery, who are two almost identical twin brothers from Sheffield in England playing militaristic and often moody orchestral music. Sesudient is taken from the album L’esprit that I probably bought the very next week from the same shop in mint condition for one-pound-99 says the sticker on the sleeve that I still have. From that record I’d recommend Azure Wings. It’s captivating stuff.

All songs spoken of you can hear on You Tube, and while we’re at it when legendary UK DJ John Peel’s impressive record collection was recently introduced to the internet and one act per month was featured from it in alphabetical order, In the Nursery was the letter I. Each letter of the alphabet accompanied a short film that highlights their relationship with John when he was giving airtime to their earlier more post-punk type stuff. I prefer the later stuff, to use a time-worn cliche.

There was a time when I would utilize strenuous efforts to remove price stickers and pen markings from records I bought, but when scanning the sleeve for this I removed the two stickers from the inner sleeve I’d affixed them to and returned them to the front cover. The older I get the more I forget and this now helps me to remember. You can see that the record had been reduced many times before someone took it home and on that day that someone was me, digging in the dirt for the never famous.

I miss those days like I cannot adequately tell you.