Saturday, October 29, 2011

M25: 25



Apparently the M25 is 25 today.


A good excuse to play this, which probably played on many a car cassette player driving round the said motorway back in the day. I can't believe I haven't got this on vinyl:







But then, I thought, I have got this, which, weirdly, is equally appropriate!




Atlantic Starr - Circles 1982   

Thursday, October 27, 2011

I nearly missed a month!


Right, let’s try and get this show back on the road.

The holiday on the Cote D’Azur seems a long time ago now. The sun shone all day every day. Our new favourite place. 

That was swiftly followed by another weekend away in North Devon, where 12 of us sampled the delights(?) of indoor camping!  Interesting, but sleeping in a sleeping bag on a mattress in an unheated, and damp, loft is no match for the real thing under canvas. Still, during the day the sun shone again and a good time was had by all.

The car boot season has just about finished now. I’m rather anal so once again I have listed everything I have bought this year at boots and chazzas. 2010’s haul has been surpassed already and  I’m a little bit shocked to see that I have accumulated 226 (and counting) black round things so far this year at boots and the like. Of course, being resident in the UK means that nowhere near enough of these records have been of the soul or funk variety (reggae also continues to be elusive unless it's so beat up as to be virtually unplayable). My intention alI year has been to start up another blog to feature some of my non soul/funk/reggae purchases but I’m finding it difficult enough to keep this one going at the moment. Still, those long winter nights are just around the corner so maybe I will get ‘round to it soon.   

The record featured today was one of only a few soul 45s I picked up this year at boot sales. It was the last sale of the season at one my favoured venues. In the end it wasn’t exactly a surprise that I found it as the seller is a known soul dealer on the Internet. But in a whole box of soul 45s this was just about the only one that tempted me. Glad I bought it though.   

Roscoe Shelton was born in Tennessee in 1931 and passed away in the same State in 2002. His singing career started in the early 50s with gospel groups. His   first solo 45 was released way back in 1958 on Excello. From then on he would release numerous 45s all the way up to the late 60s moving from Blues styles through R&B and into Soul mainly on the Excello, Sims and Sound Stage 7 labels . He left the music business in 1970, eventually to return in the 90s. In the early 70s, John Richbourg reissued a number of his earlier releases on the Sound Plus label. This Sound Plus 45 dates to 1972 and was a reissue of a 45 that first appeared on the Sims label in 1964. I really like this.

(There are a few pops evident on this rip, I haven’t had a chance to clean this record properly but looking at it I’m sure those pops will disappear with a good rub of the magic liquid).