Saturday, September 21, 2019

I'm reminded



I notice it is a month since my last “comeback” post. How can that be possible?! Retirement has clearly caused me to enter some sort of time warp!

Recently I have felt more pangs of nostalgia for the days when trawling for Soul 45s on the interweb seemed to be easier and more pleasurable. Because my collection was much smaller then it was easy to find things to buy and it was more pleasurable because I was discovering so many artists that were new to me. It was a good deal cheaper too. Those days of $2 to the pound and reasonable postage costs seem a long time ago now. In fact I just looked it up and the exchange rate hit $2.10 to the pound late in 2007. That was a little longer ago than I thought, actually. But just five years ago it was still at $1.65 to the pound. I would be happy with that now.

In the early Noughties I had been bitten (all over again) by the Soul bug big time, and in 2007 I would have been buying a fair amount of 45s from the States on ebay. Of course with hindsight I should have bought more.

I remember I had become aware of Otis Clay's output and I was seeing his One-derful 45s on ebay fairly regularly. They are fairly common and I thought I had bought some at the time. When two popped up from UK sellers recently within the space of a few weeks (I don't recall seeing any copies for some time on ebay, at least on the sellers lists that I have been trawling through) I checked the collection and was a bit surprised to find I had neither. They were reasonably priced so now copies of both of Otis Clay's 1966 released 45s have finally taken a long overdue place in the collection. (Incidentally, when these 45s were released in 1966 the exchange rate was $2.79 to the pound).



No comments: