Just You, Just Me

So I’ve had the Sonos since Christmas and I continue to be impressed by the sound quality; even more so, in fact, than the functionality, which is a surprise. One of the reasons I invested in it was to allow my vinyl collection to be unleashed to roam free in the rest of the house. Of course it isn’t that simple. The gubbins required to put a line-in into the Sonos is too expensive so I have had to resort to recording the vinyl into high quality mp3. This is time consuming, but I am finally getting my act together. The spur has been, as I’ve already said, the sound quality of this little box, and also the recent addition by Sonos of access to Google Play, which, you may know, allows you to place 20,000(!) tracks into the cloud for free.    

   

So the digitizing of the vinyl collection can be said to have finally begun in earnest. I am pulling albums from their designated filing space (premium spot in the vinyl room, little pile behind the speaker, overflow in the spare room, 12” pile A in the bedroom, the original DJing carry cases in the  wardrobe, etc etc) in a purely random manner, which is as it should be I think. I play what I fancy at the time, or think “I haven’t played that in ages let’s give it a spin”, copy it as I do and upload it to Google Play. From there, in truth, it is much more accessible and I fully expect to become better acquainted with many of the records in my collection which have sat there untouched for too long.

So it is with this album by The Counts. Love Sign was their second album, released in 1973 on Aware (I have some singles on Aware, but this is the only album and I love seeing the label in the middle of an LP). I probably bought it around 1977 from a cheapie bin (it could have been in a supermarket – remember when you could find stacks of cheap vinyl imports in supermarkets? Those were the days!),  and I’m guessing since then I have only played it five or six times, and probably not at all in the last thirty years. It’s crazy really, I’m constantly searching for more vinyl to buy in charity shops, car boots, on line. The result is I’m getting so much of it now I no longer really know, and certainly have now failed to appreciate, what I already have.

This album had been filed deep in my memory in a little recess labelled  “interesting”. It was as such because, I think, the album was not exactly as I expected – I had a couple of Counts 45s which were more in the funk vein but, back in my DJing days, this album had nothing that I could really use to burn up a dancefloor. But it was full of tracks that were not quite like anything else I had.

So, even though I was vaguely… er … aware I had this album, it was so deep filed in both my memory and my collection I think I can reasonably... er …  count it as my latest find!

          

Playing it again after all these years, to my ears, it has aged very well. It has been taken out from its little recess in my memory to a space labelled “very interesting”, and it is now also residing in (on?) my personal cloud where I will no doubt be giving it some more plays – to some friends too, possibly - through my Sonos.   

The Counts – Just You, Just Me 1973

From the album Love Sign. Not currently available on CD as far as I can see, it has had a vinyl reissue on Scorpio. I think I have read that the quality of some Scorpio releases is questionable, you may be better looking for a second hand original which has a gatefold sleeve with a nice  die cut detail on the back as I hope my terrible picture shows (the light was fading fast when I was taking the shot).