Garethx

J, I think you flogged the wrong records. Admittedly the ones you sold are a bit "flavour of the month" (or were) and the ones you kept are proven, long term rarities, but I have always personally loathed both Target and Emmanuel Taylor (just a completely personal opinion, I know many out there love these tunes). Didn't Ged Parker pick up a MIxed Feelings lately? A great record, nearly a phenomenal one, which is slightly let down by glib backing vocals. The lead on it is brilliant though, whoever he is...

The Tangeers had a really strongly identifiable sound. All their records have it and it's kind of unlike any other soul group.

The Brooks Brothers in London is in Threadneedle Street. Is it any good? I'd have to say not really, on balance. In the last decade the brand as a whole has become less enticing as business attire gets standardised on both sides of the pond. Now the clothes in the main are virtually indistinguishable from those you could find in Austin Reed. However, the button-down shirts are to my mind still the best you can buy if you want the traditional 'pre-groovy' styles of the late 50s and early 60s (in fact they were made like this from the late 20s); the cotton's still great and the details are beautiful. The fact is that BBs has changed because no-one under the age of 70 in the States wants to dress like this to go to work, let alone to hang out in sweaty night clubs in the stuffy attire of a Wall Street twat. All the traditional shirtmakers that John SImon used to stock like Troy (remember the flap pocket?) and Sero have long gone out of business. Pendleton Mills still hangs in there with its woollen garments, but I would imagine that the bulk of these on a worldwide level are bought by the Japanese rocking scene.

I was in Brooks Brothers only yesterday...

Bidding on the Ernie Johnson only went up to $90 or so... does that mean everyone who wants one now has a copy? Is it still for sale?

The other side of the Connie McGill on Triode, Peace of Mind, is one of the all-time great group ballads. If group harmony is your bag and you don't know this, you will be simply knocked out. Thirty quid is pretty cheap for it these days, because as a piece of soul history it's priceless...

Exus Trek is better than the vocal version in my opinion too. This very topic cropped up in the pub on Friday night.

Of course instrumentals can be soulful. Tell me John Coltrane's Alabama has no soul. Instrumentals like this, on the other hand, are the kind of 'music' that can make the scene look foolish in the eyes of ousiders: a basic, clearly unfinished rhythm track lacking anything in terms of musical interest such as modulation, harmonisation, changes in tempo etc. The practice of playing these things reached its nadir for me with the trotting out of the obviously unfinished backing tracks for such classics as She's Wanted In Three States and If You Can't Be True: who in their right mind would play these when they owned the finished vocal versions; the answer: a set of deejays who's interest is in showing the world what great connections they might have in order to obtain said tracks. I have no problem whatsoever with instrumentals that were fully conceived to be instrumentals, but I suspect that even the musicians who put down tracks like the one above would be faintly amused to think that people would be actively seeking and playing such items forty years later. They are mildly diverting historical curios, and are perhaps of academic interest to those who might be concerned with the studio processes of the great bands and producers, but to play them at dances is a bit desperate, if you ask me. But thanks, as ever, for posting it Pete.

Judnell. I think. Is this worth tons of money?

Strange. I tend to think of the Northern scene in its heyday as a youth culture. Presumably Sadie Frost is playing one of the principal characters dear old mum?

What a good record this is... have you got a spare, Stuart?

I agree that the Milton Bennett is an important discovery: a genuinely scintillating unreleased 60s soul record. Well done, Ady.

That's the cleanest copy of the Ernie Johnson I've ever seen. What a record, too.

What an excellent record this is, unfairly overshadowed by I Get My Groove From You (which is great in it own right). Sorry, don't have one for sale. A fair quantity of this record turned up about six or seven years ago, after years of being quite elusive. My guess is that most have disappeared into collections now. Still probably cheaper than it was ten years ago, though.

I remember buying a copy of Billy Miranda on Queens a number of years ago now. It still had RD's original notation (something like "mid to uptempo soul - could go big in the right hands") and price on the cardboard sleeve - eight quid if I remember correctly. I paid a bit more than that for it, though. Happy days.

Glen Campbell rules.

It's Cecil "Homeboy" Lyde. One of the 80s indie rarities that still sounds pretty good today. I'm afraid I don't have a copy for sale.

Is Richard Marks DYELS on a cheaper label? His 45 on Shout is great and a lot cheaper.

I think the Barrett Strong version of Mike Jemison is on the Love Is You album on Coup (I'll check when I get home...) The MJ 12" is really hard to get, I too was looking since the 80s. Agree with you on the Kim Tolliver 12" too, Jock; a record I've mentioned on here lots (usually in topics relating to coloured vinyl, strangely) Great as that is, I must state that I consider Kim Tolliver's version of Gwen McCrae's I'm Losing The Feeling on the Chess lp to be her defining moment on tape. A simply amazing performance that I readily put up there as one of the best three soul records I've ever heard. It's strong stuff.

Come Through Me is a big favourite of mine. Incredible to think that Spring Records saw fit not to release it at the time, when some of the GG sides they did release were decidedly average (and that's being kind to a lot of them). Have you heard Phillip Mitchell's original demo of this as released by Grapevine a couple of years back, Colin? Also superb.

Snowflakes - JJ Barnes: a fantastic example of all that was good about the Stax/Detroit connection. I Wish It Would Rain - maybe one of the best soul songs ever written, with Johnny Adams electrifying version on Atlantic just pipping the mighty Temptations original. In The Rain - The Dramatics. When I first heard this in my early teens it made up my mind about a future life of devotion to soul music. Suddenly Dexys, The Jam, The Undertones etc. just sounded trivial and talentless. Love Stormy Weather - Melvin Brown, James Matthews & Topaz: a spellbinding tour-de-force of atmosphere, tension and pure soul. Perhaps the best 'obscurity' ever made... (always try to end on a highly contentious note).

I must admit to always having had a preference for The Stemmons Express over The Precisions: the former has a mystique about it which the latter lacks, despite being a cracking record in its own right. The Stemmons Express 45 has a shimmery flower-power haze about it that I find strangely compelling.

Some really good records mentioned so far... Jeff Perry, Troy Dodds, Etta James, Lynn Vernado etc. Has anyone seen the footage of JP doing LDCNS on Soul Train? absolutely brilliant!

The Five Keys on Landmark came out in seemingly endless colour combinations. I bought a few of these off Garry Cape some years ago and all were on completely different coloured vinyl, from almost black with the merest tint of red to a mind-bogglingly psychedelic multi-coloured red, yellow, green and purple effort with the remains of a local newspaper (!) pressed into the plastic. I think the one I've still got is half red/half green. The case of the record pressing plant worker who produced his own custom sets was highlighted when a mottled grey DJ copy of the Delfonics "Ready Or Not" on Philly Groove sold for a couple of hundred dollars on ebay. The great Kim Tolliver 12" on Tayster appeared in a couple of variations of sickly purple, pretty low quality plastic. I think this may have happened with many budget pressings of soul (and other) records in the early 80s as stocks of what we commonly refer to as vinyl (of the high quality black variety)were starting to be phased out as the major record corporations tried to force through the introduction of CD.

A lot of very good points made by everybody who's contributed to this thread. I appreciate Peter Richer for coming on here and presenting his rationale as a regular John Manship auction bidder. The best advice is surely to simply buy what you want, at a price you think is reasonable. Those who express consternation at some of the auction prices would probably pay over the odds (whatever that means in the current climate) for a particular 45 that hasn't shown up in the desired condition via other avenues. There have been numerous recent examples of 45s that were once thought of as 'collection fillers' such as The Delegates of Soul, Gene Woodbury, Larry Atkins on Highland, The Ringleaders and so on fetching prices far in advance of what they once sold for. We must remember that in the past importers such as Soul Bowl held pretty much the entire remaining stocks of records like these. They were treated in the same way any vendor would treat a commodity that was in reasonably plentiful stock in their inventory and were priced to sell: I can remember all the 45s mentioned above being on certain lists for what seemed like years at a time for under ten quid (along with things like Steve Mancha on Wheelsville), but once they were all gone from that particular source, what then? The common denominator of all these 45s is that they are good records, and a good record will always be worth buying even if there are seemingly loads about, because in the final analysis the stocks of all these items are essentially finite. A good record will eventually have a re-sale value, even if, as in the case of Gene Woodbury, that market appears to have taken some twenty five years to form. Sounds which have lost their value over time have done so because they aren't in the main 'good' records. Collectors who have concentrated on flavour-of-the-month rarities of questionable musical merit will inevitably sit back and scratch their heads at a £300 price tag for Gene Woodbury while a copy of something like Artus Satterfield sits perenially unsold in their box for half that figure.