The Super Guitar Of Lightnin' Red: Lightnin' Red - Stereo Gold Award 1972

Well that's a bold claim; when you make a statement like 'the world's greatest guitar' then there's a lot to live up to. The back cover doesn't shy away from the bold claims either - 'Folks down around Texarkana way say "Give ole Lightnin' red anything with strings on it an' he'll sure as hell play it. His full artistry comes from the incredible speed of his fingering'. After trumpeting that little lot you've got to put up or shut up when you strap that guitar on or else choke on your own hubris, but after ploughing through all this it'll probably come as a surprise to no one that, on the evidence on display here, Mr Red isn't the greatest guitar player around. Or the fastest. Not even close. 

To be honest, I wasn't expecting some Steve Vai-alike shredding off the man, but the playing on this doesn't even try to be fast. Or even quick really. The best you can say is that it's competent, but there's nothing here that a seasoned player from any well gigged pub covers band wouldn't be able to pull off. The tracklist is a bit of a curates egg too, a mix of country standards ('Orange Blossom Special', 'Wreck Of The Old '97') and random 50's rock and roll instrumentals ('Tequila', 'Guitar Boogie'). But then '12th Street Rag' and 'Yakety Yak' could have been chosen solely as plum vehicles for Mr Red to show off his chops with some crazy flipper finger fretwork, but every single tune shows a man content to plod through the main melody in a good ol' boy country fingerpicking style that never gets out of first gear. Sometimes he uses a wah wah pedal, sometimes he doesn't, but anything approaching 'artistry' is in short supply.

 

 Almost as if realising the sheer ordinariness of what's inside it, the cover shot goes straight for the lowest common denominator; a woman with an expression I can't read who's either wearing an incredibly flimsy, incredibly high thong or else is flaunting the fact she's completely pant free and aiming a guitar neck straight up her crotch. Personally, after being badly let down by his bragging, I'd prefer it if it were shoved straight up ole Lightnin's arse.

The Sounds Of Star Wars: The Sonic All-Stars Conducted By Bruce Baxter - Pickwick 1977

I was the right age for the first Star Wars film (or 'part four for anyone under 30). I was nine years old when it came out with a hardcore love for all things horror and sci-fi that had been hardwired by late night weekend double bills of Universal horrors, 50's sci-fi movies midweek week, horror comics, fantasy magazines and Dennis Gifford books. All these and more flashed my hard drive from when I was old enough to read, and with the Star Wars hype machine grinding it's way through 1977 like the Iron Mole that took Peter Cushing and Doug McClure to the earth's core the year before (see? I loved my sci-fi), it was kind of inevitable I'd be caught up in its wake.  

Posters, models, figurines, plastic lightsabres, comics, games, bubblegum cards, stickers and any number of other tie-in products with a 'Star Wars' logo slapped on it - I think I had the lot. Everything but the film itself in fact; what's generally forgotten is that even though it came out in America over the summer of 1977, UK fans had to wait until after Christmas to see it, and then it was a London only release. The rest of us hicks in the sticks had to wait until the following year for our provincial cinemas to screen it, and six months is a very long time when you're nine years old. But wait we had to - in 1977 there was no internet, no illegal downloads, no blu ray, no DVD and no videos; it was the cinema or nothing, and if you missed it there for whatever reason, well that was just tough. A long time ago in a world far, far away indeed.

So until then us fans had to just make do in the meantime with all that merchandise and our imaginations. And what better way to fire those imaginations while playing with all that stuff than by humming John Williams' now iconic main theme over the top of our games? This was available too on the official soundtrack which came as a double album and was not cheap. And so no doubt buoyed by those ubiquitous seventies compilations that promised any number of popular chart hits (as performed by faceless session players) for half the price of a normal album, certain clued up individuals with an eye for a quick buck cashed in on the craze with releases of their own for fans on a budget Like this one, hotter out of the traps in 1977 than the film (or even that official soundtrack) itself.

With 'Rogue One' still doing good business as I type, what immediately springs to mind when holding this is the question 'how the hell did they get away with it'? If an entrepreneur tried to put out something similar as a cash in on 'Rogue One' now then Lucasfilm and/or Disney would shut that shit down faster than you could say 'copyright infringement'. I don't know if squaring off the Star Wars logo on the cover was enough to put the lawyers off the scent in 1977 (though I doubt it was), but I'm guessing the team behind this probably felt that small concession to intellectual property pushed their luck as far as they dared, and from the garish pizza planet cover in to the non-specific close up of an eye and some bared teeth on the back cover, there's no other reference to the source material it plagiarises at all apart from the track titles.

"This lethal weapon is said to affect the cerebral system, or to put it in earthly jargon, to blow your mind. You will embark on a spectacular, music filled journey into space, to a galaxy millions of light years from your own planet, Earth. Your senses will be stretched to the outermost realms of the imagination as the music pounds through your brains. You will become totally involved in the Star Wars and you will be powerless to stop it" - so runs the carefully non George Lucas world referencing back cover blurb and  for sheer bloody cheek this deserves full marks. 'Star Wars Main Theme', 'Ben's Death', 'Princess Leia's Theme', 'Cantina Band', 'Tie Fighter Attack' - all titles are exactly replicated from the official release and cherry picked to boil them down to a single disc, though in place of John Williams and the London Symphony Orchestra we have Bruce Baxter conducting The Sonic All Stars.

That sounds futuristic enough on paper, but in actuality the 'All Stars' sound remarkably like one man in a garden shed trying to make the present sound like the future by squeezing every last drop out of technology out of a Botempi home organ. As a case in point, where the main theme should be heroic and sweeping, an empire defeating blast of pomp and grandeur, Bruce's take is as thin and tinny as C3PO's leg. Whining and droning in equal measure like an angry wasp, this version could have been lifted straight off the soundtrack of an 8 bit Nintendo Entertainment System game, or else a universe where the Millennium Falcon has all the power of a Hillman Imp. There's nothing heroic sounding about any of it really and it sets the tone of the whole album to come.

Throughout, the main motifs and riffs of William's original score are recognisable, but they're prone to breaking down without warning into an empty whoosh of galactic winds and squawky 'laser gun' effects whilst Baxter takes time out to input a new 'Disco Beat #3' setting as a click track to play the next section over. The end product has the feel of a one man band, one take live recording with very little overdubs or post production work. Cheap and cheerful, if you will, with its only aim being to get something 'Star Wars' onto the market pronto to hoover up some of that cash that was going begging.  There's no doubt there's something quite charming about the whole ramshackle affair, and there's a certain novelty value in harking back to a time when you could get away with something like this. But like most novelties, it wears thin fairly quickly and this isn't something that's going to bear too many repeated listens. Not by me anyway.

Road Music: Various Artists - Gusto Records 1978

I'm afraid I'm going to have to start off this entry with a confession; I didn't realise until after I got it home that this was actually a double album in a non gatefold sleeve (boo!), and even though I sat down to listen to it, I didn't have the legs to make it all the way to side 4. If 'Road Songs' had come on a CD then I would probably have been happy enough to sit down and let the whole thing wash over me in one sitting, but the physical effort involved in getting up, turning the disc over and cueing up the tonearm four times is only not a chore when you're listening to something you're actually enjoying. And whilst that may be a sneak preview of where I'm going with this, truth be told I wasn't enjoying myself. Not really. But assuming that side 4 doesn't turn into 'Trout Mask Replica', I'm confident that I'm heard enough of 'Road Music' to get and then give you the gist of what it's all about.

Sarcasm aside though, I think my comments above raise a valid point in context. Albums devoted to driving music are nothing new; a search on those terms on Amazon throws up a truck full of multi-disc box sets. "Driving Songs - The Ultimate Collection", "Now That's What I Call Drive", 'Greatest Ever Driving Songs', 'Driving Rock', '40 World's Greatest Driving Anthems' - these are the tip of a fairly hefty iceberg and all are stuffed to the gills with soft rock, 80's power ballads, anthemic indie, 70's AOR standards and you can pretty much guarantee 'You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet' and something by Aerosmith will be on every single of them. Blasting these out at max volume in the car can transform the dreariest Monday commute into an open topped drive down the Pacific Coast Highway with the ideal partner of choice in the passenger seat, and there's nothing quite like belting out "Cause I'm as free as a bird now, and this bird you'll never change, oh, oh, oh, oh" as you pull into your dedicated parking space at the office. Such harmless fantasies are the social Vaseline that makes life bearable. Almost.

My point is though that, as good as these songs sound in the car, they have a life of their own outside your vehicle too; these are songs to drive to, they are not songs about driving. 'Road Songs' is a different sort of beast. These are mainly songs about driving. And not driving just any old thing - these are songs about driving trucks. Huge, eighteen wheel trucks. And driving them long, long distances. Don't believe me? Just take a look at some of the song titles: 'Six Days On The Road', 'Truck Driving Son Of A Gun', 'Give Me Forty Acres To Turn This Rig Around', 'Endless Black Ribbon', 'Overloaded Diesel', 'Truck Drivin' Man' - there's no ambiguity here. And whilst this stuff may have purpose in the 'cab' of your 'rig' as you haul lumber across the Mason Dixon line, it would surely be a very dedicated trucker who'd want to listen to songs about their job in the comfort of their own home once they'd parked up for the night.

Which means that the ideal medium for this would surely have been cassette (or 8 track cassette)? Something you could listen to on the move anyway; who would want four sides of this stuff on cumbersome vinyl? Well my answer to that is 'I have no idea', and that's really kind of my main 'problem' with 'Road Songs' - ultimately, it offers a peek into a world that's totally alien to me. My only knowledge of the way of the trucker comes from Beck's 'Truck Driving Neighbours Downstairs' ("Whiskey-stained buck-toothed backwoods creep. Grizzly bear motherfucker never goes to sleep") and I'm not sure that's enough to count as a valid evidence base. In a world of long distance love, heavy loads, CB radios, saucy female hitchhikers, state lines and endless run-ins with 'the man', I'm an outsider looking in with no real desire to be on the other side of the window. Tant pis? Who can say?

I'll be here all day if I run through this lot track by track, but suffice it say that, musically, we're talking straight country cliché here. Fiddles, banjos, steel guitars and shave and a haircut rhythms - 'Road Songs' plays it strictly Saturday night bar band chicken wire old school. Nothing wrong with that but, again, the fact of having four sides of this in one place works against it far more than the actual content itself; songs about truck driving present a very narrow palette, and by corralling a bunch of samey sounding songs with the same samey theme and lumping them all together makes it difficult to distinguish between them with any clarity. Some are flat out humorous, some are wryly tongue in cheek, some are morality tales delivered with the same gravity as a cancer diagnosis while others are so OTT with mawkish sentimentality they need their own trucking equivalent of a sick bag (step forward Red Sovine's 'Teddy Bear' - "Dad had a wreck about a month ago, he was trying to get home in a blindin' snow. Mom has to work now, to make ends meet, and I'm not much help, with my two crippled feet")
 
In isolation each would probably have more of an impact, but when they follow on like a steady parade of trucks in a convoy they eventually blur into one, with each song indistinguishable from either the last or the next until the steady drip turns into a form of water torture that only served to grind me down. Which is why I found three sides quite enough thank you. Saying that, I'm going to give the talking blues of Coleman Wilson's 'Passing Zone Blues' from 1961 a special mention in dispatches. Wilson's wry, machine gun wordplay puts me in mind of Dylan's 'Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues' and it's quite wonderful in it's own way. It's the only song here that I'll return to anyway. For the rest, well some of it is 'shit', some of it isn't, but none of it is really for me. 

Hammond Organ Dance Party: Duke Grant and his Trio - Stereo Galaxy 1974

"When Duke Grant turns on his instrument he turns on all within swingshot of his mammoth speakers. It's party time with the flying fingers and pounding pedals of a peer of the Hammond - Duke Grant" - so runs the sleeve blurb for this and, I have to say, it sounds good to me; to these ears a Hammond with the lid off can sound as joyous as a church bell at Christmas. Sexy too - that other 'master' of the Hammond Billy Preston knew how to get his entendres in a line when he called his 1966 album 'Wildest Organ In Town', but alas and alack, cold water meets ardour within minutes of needle meeting this particular piece of vinyl.

Actually, it reminds me of the scene in Powell and Pressburger's wartime film 'A Canterbury Tale', when titular cathedral organist Dr. Kelsey offers British Sgt. Peter Gibbs the opportunity to play the instrument with the caution, "Play something - anything - only, don't swing it." Because even though the cover shot suggests there's two sides of wild freakbeat on offer to get down with here, Duke's Hammond party defiantly fails to swing. At all.

The tracklist offers up a curious mix of the popular ('Delilah', 'A Hard Day's Night', 'Downtown') and the traditional ('Greensleeves', 'Swing Low Sweet Chariot', 'Down By The Riverside'), but in truth it doesn't matter all that much - some of the above are barely recognisable in these arrangements. As a case in point 'Light My Fire' (bizarrely listed on the label as 'Baby Won't You Light My Fire') and 'Dock Of The Bay' contain only fleeting references to their familiar melodies with the rest filled with random major chords and a rhythm section chugging along behind along to fill in any gaps like council workmen filling in potholes.  And what's curious is that, even though this is billed as a 'Hammond Organ Dance Party', the Hammond isn't even the lead on some of the tracks; the unaccredited guitarist takes the lead melody on at least half while Duke's Hammond burbles away in the background on a very low flame. Duke must have left those 'mammoth speakers' at home on recording day. 

What this ultimately results in is a bit of a muddy mess that's akin to a field recording of an impromptu Sunday afternoon jam session where only one member of the trio actually knows the tune that's called out, leaving the others to gamely follow the chords and fill in wherever they can. Whether this is a fair and accurate description of the actual talent or ability of the performers I cannot say; I can find no other info on about Duke Grant or his trio other than they seem to have released two other Hammond organ albums that promise a similar splendid time for all. On the evidence displayed here though, I shan't be bothering to track them down.

Acting: Brian Averill - Nerophon 1984

Not ostensibly 'shit' on the face of it I grant you; I was attracted to 'Acting' on first blush for all the right reasons - I'd never heard of Brian Averill and, in the dim light of the charity shop, that cover was giving off a vague Scott Walker-ish vibe that suckered me enough to give it a punt. 

So what of it? Well, in the cold light of the street outside, I wasn't long realising that I'd been wearing the record buyer's equivalent of beer goggles to mistake that cover as something anything remotely Scott Walker-ish; with the scales removed it put me in mind of an album by an over earnest, semi acoustic, 'confessional' singer/songwriter with possible religious overtones. And religious overtones aside, I pretty much hit the bull's-eye with that one.   

The fact I've never heard of artist X is never a reliable barometer to gauge anybody's fame by, but a later search online has led me to believe that nobody has heard of him. In my experience, even the most obscure, niche and downright awful acts usually have a small but hardcore following willing to set up a fanclub or website, but apart from a brief catalogue reference on a German website, I can find no other independent verification that the record I have in my hands is anything other than a bad dream; no-one is covering Brian's back for posterity, he is literally dead to the internet. To rub salt into an already raw wound, the copy of his album I bought is minter than a Polo, meaning that any previous owner probably didn't get round to playing it either. So I guess that job falls to me. 

Though 'Acting' was released in 1984, on a blind taste test I'd have placed it roughly a decade earlier, sounding (as it does) like West Coast soft rockers Bread as fronted by a stressed out John Denver. And that's really the binary conclusion that neatly sums up the whole project - the playing is suitably competent and suitably laid back, but Averill's voice meanders all over his songs like a creek in flood, shifting pitch and tone at random as it solemnly intones lyrics that are opaque to the point of impenetrable. Some examples? Well how about "A moment passed in time, I saw eternity. Your glance was ordinary, like a window pane" or "Some may call it civilisation, concrete walls and steel rimmed windows. Dogs that you can carry in one hand. One hand" and my personal favourite "Hey Mr Sandman, hey Mr Hope, send me away man, help me to cope. Give me an hour to breathe, the birds have their cockles and I in my sleep. Send me one or two, three or four, more"

God they're awful. Awful. But as 'Acting' was recorded in Belgium, and even though Averill sings with no discernible foreign accent, I was willing  to give him a pass and see this as the work of a European artist working in an unfamiliar language (or even that he'd unwittingly been handed a bad translation from the original Flemish (or whatever)). Alas, my goodwill can only extend so far, and even with a blind eye turned to the lyrical failings, there's no escaping the painful observation that Averill's songs hang around those words like brittle, Jerry built constructs with no sense of craft or structure, no right angles or foundations and no real evidence that he has much of a clue about what he's doing or what makes a good song in the first place.

Even with those strikes against it I was going to cut 'Acting' a generous amount of slack and see it as the work of a keen amateur working with unfamiliar tools and ultimately too big a fish in too small a barrel for the critic in me to find any pleasure in taking pot shots at. But then fate intervened and I discovered 'Acting' had its own inbuilt Rosetta stone in the form of a typewritten publicity notice cum resume that's as pristine as the vinyl around it. It has clearly lain undisturbed inside the sleeve since 1983 like treasure in an unrobbed Pharaoh's tomb. And whereas I previously struggled to find any information on Averill whatsoever, I suddenly found myself with plenty of it. More than I ever needed in fact. 

And what I learned lead me to wind that slack in pronto until it was cheesewire tight. You can read the notice for yourself and make up your own mind in light of what I've written above, but for my part this fresh insight casts Averill and his album as less the output of a keen amateur to the pretentious vanity work of a deluded hack whose self belief is not matched by personal talent. David Brent eighteen years before Ricki Gervais dreamed him up in fact. My patience is at an end and I'm afraid it's back to the shop with you Mr Averill. And you can take your cockles with you.

Light My Fire: Helmut Zacharias and his Orchestra - Sounds Superb 1971

There are times when I genuinely don't know if I'm showing off the breadth of my knowledge or the confines of my ignorance - I'd kinda, sorta thought I'd heard of Helmut Zacharias when I came across this, and I kinda sorta knew he played the violin. That was about the sum of my knowledge of Mr Z, but now a quick look online reveals the man had depth and breath far beyond the meagre information that I'd somehow osmosisised (over 14 million albums sold apparently). But then again, it wasn't his name that caught my eye and made me pick this up anyway, it was two other things. 

Firstly, that cover. I'm assuming the woman cast in soft focus glow was meant to be giving off a 'come hither and dither' vibe of love and longing to the viewer, but to these eyes that's a face full of the exasperated pissed off-ness of someone disturbed from her book by a husband calling from the kitchen to ask where she keeps the tin opener. Secondly, the track listing on the reverse; 'Light My Fire' was released in 1971 and the music it contains represents a broad brush sweep of all that was recently popular (and often cutting edge) in the contemporary world of rock music.

'Light My Fire', 'Satisfaction', 'Baby Love' - the originals of these are now set in the stone of popular twentieth century music's Mount Rushmore. There's no need to namecheck the original artists because we already know. Ah, but where this scores brownie points for aiming left of centre and not going for the too predictable for its source material (there's a version of The Avante Garde's 1968 semi-hit 'Naturally Stoned' on here which I can't believe anyone would have seen coming), it then loses them for the whole having the aura of a tracklist compiled by a committee of the clueless with a definite market in mind who had brainstormed what 'the kids' were getting down with at a Monday morning marketing meeting.

How else can you explain versions of 'Little Green Apples', Ob-la-di ob-la-da' and 'Brown Eyed Woman' amongst the above? How else too to explain the misguided (and musically ignorant) sleeve note that refers to "Otis Redding's 'Respect' and Aretha's beautiful 'I Say A Little Prayer'" when Franklin wrote neither but effectively 'owns' both? Whatever the truth though (and it's probably something lost in time by now), I think we can all agree it's a mixed bag.

Despite such eclecticism though, the presentation itself adopts a blanket approach of reducing every piece to the same common denominator. Tonally, we're in a familiar easy listening mode that's as early seventies as geometric wallpaper and Watneys party seven. Largely instrumental, the arrangements are, to a note, firmly in the camp marked 'predictable' with perhaps just a little bit too much weight behind it to class it as true muzak, but not enough ooomph to frighten the horses. Layers of overly lit female "ba ba da ba" backing vocals swoon over string arrangements that follow the chord progression of the tracks with Zacharias himself picking out the main vocal line and melody on his fiddle; as long as you're familiar with the original song then at no point is there any doubt as to what you're listening to

And yet if I'm being honest, I quite enjoyed listening to the undemanding familiarity of the first two or three tracks. But then just like eating a family size box of biscuits at one sitting, what starts off as an indulgent treat soon turns into a thick and cloying stodge that starts to weigh heavily somewhere deep inside and I found myself counting down the tracks until the end before I'd even turned the disc over - surely the audio equivalent of looking at your watch at the cinema and never a sign of total immersion. And once sat through, I can't see me ever listening to 'Light My Fire' again. To be honest, I wouldn't know where to - although the cover is suggestive of a female wanting her fire lit, this isn't something I'd automatically reach for to soundtrack a quiet night of romance and I think I'd be quite disappointed with any female who'd actually want me to. Sorry Helmut

Sounds Astounding: London Audio Workshop - Stereo Gold Award 1974

Well this is eye-catching enough; these days even those top shelf magazines dedicated to the appreciation/exploitation of the naked female form wouldn't get away with having uncensored nipples on their covers, and yet here we have, bold as brass, two sets without a bye or leave. Or, rather, one set mirrored in a possible visual pun on the 'Breathtaking Stereo' promise of the sleeve. 

All good clean fun in the mid seventies from whence this came I guess - 1974 to be exact - and I'm not here to tut tut over casual sexism from supposedly less enlightened times; sex has always sold. It's what's in the grooves beneath that cover that interests me, but I suppose when it seems necessary to use such blatant female nudity (complete with incredibly phallic 'cans') in order to pique the interest of the casual browser (which, let's be honest, worked well enough on me over forty years later), then I immediately smell a rat.

Ostensibly presented as a platform to demonstrate the capabilities of those new fangled synthesiser things, 'Sounds Astounding' is basically a straight performance of some popular standards from the classical repertoire (as played by the London Symphony Orchestra no less) with added electronic accompaniment from the 'London Audio Workshop'. Sounds a worthy enough project on paper I guess, but in practice there's more sand than oil between these gears.

Let's start with the classical pieces themselves, conducted here by Douglas Gamley (best known to me for scoring seventies horror movies like 'The Beast Must Die', 'Asylum' and 'From Beyond The Grave'). I don't hold myself up as a connoisseur of the genre, but to these ears the orchestration and performances are perfunctory at best; at worst they're just plain flat, lifeless and struggle to pull themselves clear of the grooves. True, that needn't be a major headshot - after all, the orchestra here is not the focal point and is meant to be playing second fiddle to instruments that plug in. That's fair enough. But then the second problem arises in that, instead of integrating seamlessly in and around the past masters via clever arrangements, the synthesised parts crudely fart, buzz and burble like bees in a biscuit tin, either independent of the main score (at the start and end such as on the otherwise die straight take on 'Also Sprach Zarathustra') or else slobber straight over the top of them like square pegs trying vainly to fit into round holes that they never quite manage to find.

The blurb on the back proudly boasts of 'Speaker to speaker interplay of specially scored orchestral works with scintillating sounds augmented by synthesisers. The full range of audio frequencies beyond the range of human hearing' which sets a high bar for expectations, but by the mid seventies mixing the old with the new in this way was hardly breaking any new ground. It had already been done before and done better. Walter Carlos had released an album of classical music played on Moog synthesisers a full six years earlier ('Switched on Bach') and had gone on to provide electronic treatments of Beethoven and Rossini on 1971's 'A Clockwork Orange' soundtrack. And as a convenient point of comparison, Carlos' take on the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on that soundtrack remains a sparky gurgle of dread that still sounds like a creepy tomorrow. By contrast, 'Sounds Astounding' version of the same is a harsh charge of cheap stereo effects that have all the grace of something knocked up via wires and batteries from the Thomas Salter Electrical Lab playkit.

All of which adds up to the conclusion that, rather than something unique or 'astounding', 'Sounds Astounding' would have sounded crude in 1974 and sounds even cruder now. About as crude as that cover to be honest - truth be told, if you wanted something that sounded astounding that showed off your swanky new record player in 1974 then you were already spoiled for choice. In the previous year, Pink Floyd had released the hi-fi enthusiast's wet dream of 'Dark Side Of The Moon', and if you wanted to hear synthesisers working at the cutting edge in 1974, then Tangerine Dream's 'Phaedra' was available, along with releases from other genre big hitters like Jarre and Vangelis. If you wanted to hear how they sounded playing classical, then Tomita's 'Snowflakes Are Dancing' was made up entirely of arrangements of Claude Debussy's "tone paintings" and already in the shops. These are random (and rather obvious) examples. Others abound and they all served to make 'Sounds Astounding' almost obsolete before its time. No wonder they felt the need to sex it up a bit.

Come Aboard! QE2 - Sceptre 1969

An interesting first entry that brings into question my own brief; a 'documentary' album dedicated to the good ship Queen Elizabeth 2 narrated by a moonlighting BBC newsreader (Richard Baker) on an extra curricula payday outing would on the face of it appear to tick all the boxes that would make up a piece of 'shit vinyl'.

Why then did my heart flutter like a trapped bird when I chanced upon it in my local Barnardos? Well mainly because mint copies of this have been known to change hands for three figure sums. Which would have been a nice windfall. Shame then that a previous owner seemingly saw fit to sharpen his chisels all over side two, rendering it less the description of 'mint' according to the Record Collector grading guide and more like 'unplayable'. 

Which is a shame, but it does mean that what's left is the artefact itself rather than any rarity value that it flukely managed to accrue.

Released in 1969 to coincide with the launch of the titular ship, 'Come Aboard' was, in classic ad parlance, not available in the shops; the 'Cunard approved' Sceptre Records label it appears on shouldn't be confused with Florence Greenburg's American label of the same name (that at one time or another was home to The Isley Brothers and Dionne Warwick). No, to get your hands on a copy of this you had to be a passenger on one of its early voyages where it was available either on board or at various ports of call on the voyage.

Opening with a trumpet fanfare and a recording of Queen Elizabeth herself actually launching the tub, the album then slides into the proto-auidiobook of a holiday brochure cum random extracts from the ship's manual with Baker delivering his lines with the indifferent disinterest of the professional newsreader he was. Perhaps recognising that even the keenest of nautical fans might find all this rather heavy sledging, both sides of the disc's narrative are broken up with some appropriately seafaring sound effects and music from various artists that might supposedly provide the entertainment on a typical voyage.

Tonia Bern-Campbell (formerly spouse of Bluebird speedster Donald and currently spouse of Selwyn Froggitt star Bill Maynard) provides some Marlene Dietrich-alike crooning while the Colin Beaton Trio provide some jazzy dance relief, but the main interest here (for me anyway and probably the reason why this now goes for inflated sums of money) lies on side two and an appearance from Black Cat Bones, an English rock band now chiefly remembered for featuring guitar wizard Paul Kossoff and Simon Kirke (both soon to be members of Free) in their line-up who provide a psychedelic wah wah freakout that would surely have raised eyebrows on board if they'd taken to the stage with it after the evening meal.

Ultimately though, 'Come Aboard' leaves me with a shrug of confusion as to exactly who bought this and what they did with it once they got it home. As an impulse buy souvenir of a once in a lifetime holiday then it probably passes muster, but once listened to I can't imagine anyone getting it out for a second spin and I'm betting most copies lay (and lie) gathering dust in the racks as an artefact lost in time, like those funny shaped bottles of sickly alcohol that visitors to the Continent used to bring home but never actually drink. Saying that, it did teach me never to refer to a 'whistle' as a 'horn' to a sailor, so it hasn't been a complete waste of my time.

Welcome.

Let me say upfront that I've been a vinyl addict ever since I bought my first album back in 1979. Many more have followed since. I'll also say upfront that I'm not going to delve into the usual hoary clichés that make up the reasons why I think vinyl is the best format to deliver music; the full cover art, the warm sound, the sheer sense of physical occasion that's involved in putting the needle into the groove (etc. etc.); it's all been said before by better writers than me and I'm afraid I've got nothing new to bring to that particular party (except to say that I agree with every word). 

In any case, that isn't what this blog is going to be all about, not directly anyway. Suffice it to say that, as that self confessed vinyl addict, a stack of them lined up like soldiers in a box can turn my head quicker than any pretty girl and I can never walk past a pile of albums without stopping to browse through them, wherever they may be. And with the increasing absence of dedicated record shops, this tends to occur on my regular forays into charity shops to see what goodies folk have given away for a good cause. 

Browsing these environments though is a lot like panning for gold, with me as the keen prospector. There's more heartache than joy, but the odd sparkly nugget of a Beatles mono album or a Big Star single on Stax will more than make up for the mountains of silt and (often literal) dirt that has to be sifted to find them. But now instead of flipping past and junking the junk, I'm going to see if there really is heaven in a grain of dirt (sic) by taking some of these previously flippantly discarded discs home and actually giving them a bit of a listen. 

I'm aware that there's going to have to be a degree of subjectivity in choosing what I put up on these pages - after all, one man's shit is another man's cherished Mantovani box set - but in order to ensure it's not entirely whim based or a pander to my inner prejudices, the broad criteria I'll be following in selection are:

• It must be something that catches my eye as I browse,
• It must be something I've never come across before, 
• It must be something I can't imagine ever has ever been re-released on CD, and 
• It must be something I can't imagine anyone else in the world would want to take home. 

And once listened to, I'll sum up my thoughts via these pages. If it turns out to be gold (or even fool's gold; I don't set that high a bar), then it will take it's place alongside the other discs in my collection. If it doesn't, then I'll simply return it to whence it came (don't worry, I'm not going to be so cheap as to ask for a refund) and let it end its days naturally, wherever shit charity shop albums go to die.