Unusual Places You Found Imported 45s

[Stevecee]

Reading through the drill holes topic I suddenly remembered how back in the 70s all the Fairgrounds in my area always had stacks of import 45s as consolation prizes on their stalls hung up on a line or in boxes and how as a Soul fan I was always torn between trying to win and losing to get a 45 which may be decent.

 I once asked a stall owner if I could look through the box of 45s and I'd pay him for any I liked, but he just laughed and said, they're all crap son, just play the game.

The thing is there were never any British labels, just imports, and years later someone told me the major fairgrounds tend to group up to buy their items in bulk, so did they get deleted US stock in bulk from somewhere?

Steve

[Codfromderby]

that's brought back memories, I can remember one stall having loads of king/james brown related records all different titles, however I can also remember that the ones I either won or bought all sounded the same at the time, would make a nice collection these days though.

can also remember most second hand shops I went to had copies of Donny Gerard, hes always somewhere around

[Liamgp]

I found a whole bunch of US soul 45s in a Turkish antique shop five years ago - all about 10p and, sadly, only chart stuff like Stax and Motown. What were they doing there? Apparently they came from a big airbase near the town that the Yanks had used.

But...he also had a pristine M51 parka which I got for £5, so not a total loss.

[Soul-slider]

At our local hospital, they put on a sale of items no longer needed by them i.e old toys, wheelchairs etc. I found a batch of Canadian Soul 45's!! Nothing rare but a couple of Canadian Ric-Tics (Flaming Embers), Tamla Motown (can't remember titles as I sold them on) and The Platters on Columbia (Shing-A-Ling-A-Loo).

[Jerry Hipkiss]

Mate of mine found a Joe Hicks issue with a few crap pop things underneath a parrot's cage in a flea market in Tenerife! ("I wanna be free" on the flip BTW...)

[Codfromderby]

flipping the head on its head so to speak, I've seen a boot of do the pearl girl for sale on eBay ,seller in the US, record booted in notts

[Davenpete]

Found a spanking mint issue of The Valentines at Merton Abbey Mills market - it was the only US record there.

Also found a sealed original copy of an Irma Thomas album on IR in a charity shop in Kirkby Stephen - again the only US record in there.

Dx

[dean jj]

My old boss missed a room full by a day [two Japanese chaps beat him to it] in the back of a Texas saddle shop! Ye-Ha!

dean

[Alamo]

Back in Norwich in the 70s, the travelling fair that used to come at Easter & Crimbo. 

'Stick 3 Darts' and if you lost you got a copy of Spyder Turner 'can't take it anymore'

Ive still got the copy I 'lost' but won 😂

[Gilly]

Just to back up the original post, I remember there being imports at fair grounds, one that springs to mind is Carlena Weaver Jealousy. I remember getting one of those and when you tell people today about that I get the feeling they don't believe you, but its a fact

[El Corol]

There used to be a joke/theatrical supply shop in a suberb of Birmingham around 1980 which had a rack of records in for some reason? A couple I remember getting out of there amongst others were Chris Calloway -Something Else & Augusto Pablo - King Tubby Meets the Rockers Uptown, I only went in for some stink bombs!

[Roburt]

I bought a new car from D C Cookes in Wath in the early 1980's,. I needed to return it 7 days later for some minor items to be sorted, so need to kill a couple of hours. Took a slow stroll towards Mexboro & while walking along Wath Rd (A6023) came across a 2nd hand shop. He had a few import 45's in a box out front. I checked thru these & found a box of Superiors, so went inside the shop. He told me he had bought them over 5 yrs earlier when he was running a market stall at the coast on weekends. Needless to say I cleared him out of the decent stuff.

Back in the 60's there were always great UK 45's to be found in 2nd hand shops on Beverly Rd in Hull. This was the area the uni students had digs in & when broke, they's sell stuff to the local shops. Got a near mint UK Chubby Checker "You JUst Don't Know" there. ALSO, with it being a port, you could also pick up Euro 45's. Also got a German copy of a Dee dee Sharpe Cameo track in the same place. UK shops like Woolworths were always great for discounted UK stuff, they had piles of UK Motown, Stax, Stateside LPs for just a quid around the early 70's. Around the same time Tandys stores (UK arm of Radio Shack) had loads of import LPs in their stores cheap. The Donny & Hull stores had dozens of copies of Darrell Bank's UK LP 'D B is Here' at about a quid each. Boyes Dept Stores in Hull had loads of those US import 45's (Verve, MGM, etc) in each store in the early to mid 70's, not a shop most soulies would have frequented.

Oldies Unlimited was also a decent place to get cheap (& sometimes obscure) soul 45's right up to the late 80's. They put the remnants of old stock in a disused chapel in the Telford area when a new shipment arrived. Got access to the chapel in the mid 80's and found loads of 60's / 70's soul 45's that we scooped up.

[Davenpete]

2 hours ago, Roburt said:

I bought a new car from D C Cookes in Wath in the early 1980's,. I needed to return it 7 days later for some minor items to be sorted, so need to kill a couple of hours. Took a slow stroll towards Mexboro & while walking along Wath Rd (A6023) came across a 2nd hand shop. He had a few import 45's in a box out front. I checked thru these & found a box of Superiors, so went inside the shop. He told me he had bought them over 5 yrs earlier when he was running a market stall at the coast on weekends. Needless to say I cleared him out of the decent stuff.

Back in the 60's there were always great UK 45's to be found in 2nd hand shops on Beverly Rd in Hull. This was the area the uni students had digs in & when broke, they's sell stuff to the local shops. Got a near mint UK Chubby Checker "You JUst Don't Know" there. ALSO, with it being a port, you could also pick up Euro 45's. Also got a German copy of a Dee dee Sharpe Cameo track in the same place. UK shops like Woolworths were always great for discounted UK stuff, they had piles of UK Motown, Stax, Stateside LPs for just a quid around the early 70's. Around the same time Tandys stores (UK arm of Radio Shack) had loads of import LPs in their stores cheap. The Donny & Hull stores had dozens of copies of Darrell Bank's UK LP 'D B is Here' at about a quid each. Boyes Dept Stores in Hull had loads of those US import 45's (Verve, MGM, etc) in each store in the early to mid 70's, not a shop most soulies would have frequented.

Oldies Unlimited was also a decent place to get cheap (& sometimes obscure) soul 45's right up to the late 80's. They put the remnants of old stock in a disused chapel in the Telford area when a new shipment arrived. Got access to the chapel in the mid 80's and found loads of 60's / 70's soul 45's that we scooped up.

The Beverley Road shops were still there in the early 80s (next door to Issy Lipman's Tailor's - father of Maureen) when I was at Art College in Anlaby Road had a lot of Invictus as I remember, there was a good one opposite the Art College that sold Voices from the Shadows, Spring Bank had a couple that had a fair bit in too, plus Sid Scarborough's, but that was mainly boots - there was a lot of stuff in Hull, the cut out store in the market yielded a fair bit too even though it was gone through regularly (specially as Paul Maden had a stall in the covered market 50 yards away back then). There was a shop round the corner from Scarborough that had six white demos of Bricks Broken Bottle and Sticks for £6 each - hated it so didn't buy one. Dx

Edited April 12, 2017 by DaveNPete

[Soul-slider]

A box full of USA 45's in the Council yard (ready for the skip) when I used to work there, all Soul/R&B, all in so-so condition, not a sleeve in sight! Best one was Embers 'Watch Out Girl' on blue/gold MGM issue! In decent nick too!

[Rick Scott]

Remember back in the day Pier/Winter Gardens Cleethorpes during one of the All Dayers we went out for fish "n"chips and some pop 'n' sweets in one of the local shops where we spotted a  swivel rack with 5 or 10 USA 45"s per pack of records in sealed see through plastic bags for next to nowt so most of us took a punt,  on opening my pack found a copy of one of the records i played in my sets i.e. Christopher Cerf - Sweet Music, (AMY) which was covered up at the time as Turn Off The Music by Len Barry one or two of the other lads  got copies too, when we went back to the Gardens i played Christopher serf in my set.

I announced what we had found in the shop, and how to get there, it was so funny watching so many people making a mad dash for the doors, the packs were mostly country, pop, and a few Stax and Atlantic singles but depending how tight the records were packed in each bag you could see what was in most of them, the lady in the shop must have been wondering what the heck was going on when that lot decended on her shop,A lot of people turned up back at the Gardens with a copy of Sweet Music with beaming smiles on their faces, Happy Days.

Edited April 12, 2017 by RICK SCOTT
miss spelling due to predicted text

[Samplat]

3 hours ago, Roburt said:

I bought a new car from D C Cookes in Wath in the early 1980's,. I needed to return it 7 days later for some minor items to be sorted, so need to kill a couple of hours. Took a slow stroll towards Mexboro & while walking along Wath Rd (A6023) came across a 2nd hand shop. He had a few import 45's in a box out front. I checked thru these & found a box of Superiors, so went inside the shop. He told me he had bought them over 5 yrs earlier when he was running a market stall at the coast on weekends. Needless to say I cleared him out of the decent stuff.

Back in the 60's there were always great UK 45's to be found in 2nd hand shops on Beverly Rd in Hull. This was the area the uni students had digs in & when broke, they's sell stuff to the local shops. Got a near mint UK Chubby Checker "You JUst Don't Know" there. ALSO, with it being a port, you could also pick up Euro 45's. Also got a German copy of a Dee dee Sharpe Cameo track in the same place. UK shops like Woolworths were always great for discounted UK stuff, they had piles of UK Motown, Stax, Stateside LPs for just a quid around the early 70's. Around the same time Tandys stores (UK arm of Radio Shack) had loads of import LPs in their stores cheap. The Donny & Hull stores had dozens of copies of Darrell Bank's UK LP 'D B is Here' at about a quid each. Boyes Dept Stores in Hull had loads of those US import 45's (Verve, MGM, etc) in each store in the early to mid 70's, not a shop most soulies would have frequented.

Oldies Unlimited was also a decent place to get cheap (& sometimes obscure) soul 45's right up to the late 80's. They put the remnants of old stock in a disused chapel in the Telford area when a new shipment arrived. Got access to the chapel in the mid 80's and found loads of 60's / 70's soul 45's that we scooped up.

When I was repping in the seventies I used to do all them in hull every week.  Also Grimsby and there used to be a tv shop in witherensea which had racks of old sixties stuff 

[Billy Jo Jim Bob]

Back in the mid / late 70's I was around 14. My grandparents insisted on me going with them on a visit to see some of their relatives...you know the kind they visit every 10 years. So we arrived at the house to be greeted by an old fella. As we sat in the living room they were all chatting away and I was thinking about when we could leave, when the old guy asked me if I liked music. My grandmother chimed in and said "yes - he likes that Northern Soul". The old fella got up and left the room and came back with one of those old battered leather look suitcases from the 40's and 50's and plonked it on the table telling me to have a look. Open it up and thought what the f..... it was full of mint US Gordy, Tamla, Motown etc 45's in company sleeves. My knowledge wasn't great at the time so I recognised some of the chart hits but there was hundreds more I didn't recognise. How did this guy who must have been 70 plus get these 45's and why ? Never did find out how he got them, but a totally surreal experience.

[Colouredman]

I popped in to a 2nd hand shop whilst on holiday in Paphos in Cyprus and spied a whole bunch of 45s on an old bookcase. The records had apparently come from some ex dj, but I got loads of UK Motown, stax, northern low level originals for next to nothing; about 30 records.

As for USA; too many to mention, but the ones which come to mind are.....

Many years ago I stayed for a few days with the legendary record hound John Hilliard in LA. Day after day he took me out to different places he knew had records. One day he took me to a launderette which had boxes of 45's, including quantity of Del Val and Kris 45s in boxes on top of the washing machines. But the best was the day he took me to a 2nd hand furniture shop in LA. The only record in there was lying alone and forgotten on the seat of an old chair..... The Oracles I ain't got time on OM!! Well pleased!

Butch and I, on a trip to Chicago spent time in Old Bill Wells record shop. He was related to those who ran the M PAC records set up. He had boxes of records on the floor and his little white dog used to go around pissing on them all....nice!

Anyway one day we ventured further behind the scenes to find records untainted by his dogs scent and found 2 copies of the Ultimations when it was still a relatively hard and sought after Stafford record, and an Alice Clark....in his dried up SINK!!!!

Those were the days!!!

[Modernsoulsucks]

Old Bill Wells record shop.

Did you notice the sex toys ?

More than 7"s in that place.

[Davenpete]

Talking of strange places to buy records - over the years I've bought lots of 45s at all night discos in backstreet working mens clubs and third rate nightclubs in places like Barnsley and Bolton.

Dx

[dean jj]

Always thought buying records in the middle of the night in a dark, loud, room having consumed half of mild shandy is perhaps not terribly wise.

[Soul-slider]

7 hours ago, Andy Mac said:

Back in the mid / late 70's I was around 14. My grandparents insisted on me going with them on a visit to see some of their relatives...you know the kind they visit every 10 years. So we arrived at the house to be greeted by an old fella. As we sat in the living room they were all chatting away and I was thinking about when we could leave, when the old guy asked me if I liked music. My grandmother chimed in and said "yes - he likes that Northern Soul". The old fella got up and left the room and came back with one of those old battered leather look suitcases from the 40's and 50's and plonked it on the table telling me to have a look. Open it up and thought what the f..... it was full of mint US Gordy, Tamla, Motown etc 45's in company sleeves. My knowledge wasn't great at the time so I recognised some of the chart hits but there was hundreds more I didn't recognise. How did this guy who must have been 70 plus get these 45's and why ? Never did find out how he got them, but a totally surreal experience.

Kind of reminds me of when I visited my Nan & Grandad in Walthamstow back in 1980, I was into Ska/Reggae as well as Northern back then and got a shock when Grandad shoved about 20 mint UK Reggae 45's into my lap, all on Trojan and their subsidiary labels!!!

(Yes I know the thread is 'Imported 45s' but had to mention this to Andy). 

[Chris L]

Some of the small junk shops that used to be around the London South Circular, got a Spellbinders - Help me, Bobby Reed - I'll find a way, Darrell Banks - I got that feeling on Atco, Ila Van on Volt (?) all for about 20p each. They mostly sold 2nd hand furniture but there'd always be a record box.

[Julianb]

Seem to recall a furniture shop in Cross Gates Leeds have thousands of keymen and chess label stuff

[Mike]

I found this 45 below in a flohmarkt in the middle of rural germany last century

 

good to find of course but also a pain as it meant I felt I then had to then check every stall there and of course there was nothing else there...

[Wicked]

On 12/04/2017 at 09:04, Gilly said:

Just to back up the original post, I remember there being imports at fair grounds, one that springs to mind is Carlena Weaver Jealousy. I remember getting one of those and when you tell people today about that I get the feeling they don't believe you, but its a fact

Bit off topic but I got my Carlena Weaver in a soul pack, 10p.

[Stevecee]

2 hours ago, mike said:

I found this 45 below in a flohmarkt in the middle of rural germany last century

 

good to find of course but also a pain as it meant I felt I then had to then check every stall there and of course there was nothing else there...

hehe, I think we've all done that Mike or gone back to a place only to find the stock hasn't changed.

One of the other unusual places I got records out of was a Fishing shop near the Quay where I live, musta been 75/76 maybe and me and my mates all used to fish off the Quay. Anyway went to get some bait and there was a plastic box with 45s on floor outsisde the shop next to a stand of postcards all 5P each or 5 for 20p but as I was still young I didn't have much cash and even less knowledge about Soul so I just took pot luck and 10 records and most were terrible, but I did get Legends "Fear Not", Visitors "I'm In Danger and Educators Band "Everybodies Doing Their Thing"

 

[Jim Elliott]

About 30 odd US imports in a Brisbane record shop in 97, some crackers! 50c each.

A run of Hotlanta 45s in a junk shop in Hobart that same year!

 

ATB

Jim.

 

[Ibiza Steve]

Johnny King and Fatback Band  -  Keep On Brother Keep On, BC Project 11 Label, found at Car Boot in San Jordi, Ibiza a few years ago for 50 cents.

[Sutty]

Started work in a 2nd hand/junk shop, first morning went through about 50-100 lp's under the window, all Val Doonican, Jim Reeves, top of the pops, usual charity shop stuff and in the middle, J.R. Bailey LP on MAM. Worked there for about 2 years, never had another decent soul record walk through the door or in any house clearance.

[Liamgp]

8 hours ago, Sutty said:

Started work in a 2nd hand/junk shop, first morning went through about 50-100 lp's under the window, all Val Doonican, Jim Reeves, top of the pops, usual charity shop stuff and in the middle, J.R. Bailey LP on MAM. Worked there for about 2 years, never had another decent soul record walk through the door or in any house clearance.

A friend of mine found a copy of 'Footsie' by Wigan's Chosen Few in a house clearance. He was thrilled as you can imagine, although how it fitted in with all the Jim Reeves and Mrs Mills LPs that were also there was a mystery. 

[Woodbutcher]

12 minutes ago, LiamGP said:

 He was thrilled as you can imagine, although how it fitted in with all the Jim Reeves and Mrs Mills LPs that were also there was a mystery. 

Quite well I'd say ...