Stevesilktulip

I thought Womack was terrible at Glastonbury. You want to remember them in better times, which for me was twice in the early/mid eighties, though I'd have loved to seem him in the seventies. I always said I'd have been happy for Lamont to just turn up and take the applause (and no doubt tears).

I had tickets to see Sonny Rollins a few years back; more than likely the greatest living jazz artist, but he cancelled and will never come over now. I don't think he even plays in America any more. I recall my disbelief, sat in Mickey Powney's café in Durham, and my wife nonchalantly telling me Lamont Dozier was doing the Sage, and me immediately commandeering her phone to spend money we didn't have. At the time the Sage didn't even know about it. Shameless plug: I'll still be paying tribute to the great man at my Soul Night in Durham on 21st.

Your honour, he was begging for it. How can a discussion on record shop day be off topic? No further questions.

And it does matter.

Absolutely right and I couldn't believe that. But the pecking order for prices is still 180gm, CDs, OVs, so they've become 'reassuringly expensive' and rendered your beaten up old vinyls albums unattractive. I would find it less off-putting if it were less about vinyl records, which make typewriters, steam trains and bedpans look hi-tech, and more about CD records (short for recordings). I spent the seventies and eighties looking for vinyls I never found and, even when I did, I couldn't afford. CDs are rocketing in price as they disappear, but I can still have anything I want. I don't have to follow Djs around cos that's the only way I can hear certain records. That's a good thing, not a bad thing. The great leveller which, unlike downloads etc, maintains the integrity of the album format.

You accused me of not writing in a coherent way. The item in question was a succession of responses to a succession of points raised in the previous item. I would have expected you to have read the previous item. Oh I'm sorry, you wrote it. You have no theory as to why large numbers of people - actually a small number of people - went back to vinyls records at the same time, after years of virtually no interest. You have no theory as to why this gets far more media attention than it merits. No theory as to why the media claims CDs never caught on, when they patently did. No theory as to why the media gives out the message that CDs are in serious decline because of vinyls, when the declines is far less than they claim and patently due predominantly to downloads/ streaming. Perhaps you can explain why Piers Morgan once said we went from vinyls to downloads. I expect people who get their music from the mass media to think everything is about choice and taste and opinion, but I expect people who construct their own world, including Soul Fans, to have some semblance of how and why things happen. Does the media worship the beatles because huge numbers of people worship them? Or do huge numbers of people worship them because people in the media worship them? What came first? I thought the 'taste' public, including Soul Fans got this; we did in the seventies. Not my opinion, but accepted cultural theory. Santana - music is important. We shouldn't let the media dictate things, because they will tell us that beatles worship, punkrock and vinyls revivals will save music, but they don't, they destroy it.

I always expect people to bring some prior knowledge to the subject.

The Carstairs was one of the last northern soul records I bought as a northern soul fan so I didn't sell it with the rest, which proved fortuitous when it became such a big deal on the early weekender scene. I finally sold it when I sold the rest (Ronsoul if I remember correctly (and I often don't)). I've had it several times on CD but I buy and sell and, when I decided to play it a few months back, realised I didn't have it. Then I found it; then I found it again, and again. Last time I DJd, a couple of people asked me for records I didn't have, but have since found out I have them both, one of them twice. These big CD box sets you bought for a few tracks have allsorts of hidden...

Back off topic. Dealers who sell all sorts of music, not just (northern) soul. All of the music mags (Songlines, Jazzwise, Jazz Journal, Prog, Wired etc). On this site compared to 4 or 5 years ago. The BBC admitting over 40% of vinyls albums aren't even unsealed. The 180g market has all but killed off the OVs market. The telly keeps telling us there's s big vinyls revival. It was led (sadly) by my generation with Bowie, Zep and Sabs. As usual the fabs followed - they never miss an opportunity to make money and music isn't enough for them. The punkrockers came next and music is never enough for them. Finally the Britpop people re(re)replacing their worn-out CDs for the first time on vinyls. Music should be enough fro Soul Fans. Vinyls is the term used by young people and is one of the mechanisms that make it 'cool'; myths are constructed in language, not music. On her radio show a few weeks back Zoe Ball kept shouting 'vinyls, vinyls'. I'm English and I'm 56. I've been a Soul Fan for 44 years but I also listen to everything else apart from (what Zappa called) radio music, though I prefer media music nowadays and, like Zappa, I don't exclude the sixties, though I think his observations on Soul were ill-informed, hopefully due to him listening to the wrong stuff. I gave up a career in the Health Service to study culture when I saw the huge Beatles domination of C20th century music being unleashed in the mid-nineties. I write for a Jazz website and have letters printed in all of the above mags (sans the naughty pop led Wired) and my son is one of the rising stars on the British Jazz scene. With respect, this is one of the most informed posts you've ever read.

I think the record industry and media have brought back vinyls to close down CDs, cos CDs offer vastly greater choice and availability and it's easier for them to promote and make lots and lots of money eternally recycling the beatles etc. on vinyls. Vinyls won't survive for the same reasons it didn't survive the arrival of CDs, just like steam trains and typewriters didn't survive. There's also a growing backlash against vinyls, as there always is when the powers that be start telling us something is natural, normal, universal, inevitable, obvious and common sense. For me, when the punkrock, Bowie, beatles etc. people start doing something, it's time for Soul Fans to stop. I've had this discussion with other dealers, who think CDs will survive because, despite what the media tell us often, with binges after xmas and on record shop day, they vastly outsell the growing, but still tiny vinyls market. I don't share their optimism. While the industry has always supported two formats, these were on solid copies and young people may view streaming and downloading as different means of consumption. When northern soul people go on (and on and on) about vinyls, right under their noses, something extraordinary happened. The floodgates opened and the vast majority of Soul Fans (not me I'm afraid) filled their boots and now have the greatest collections of Soul Music on solid copies the world will ever see. It was the same for jazz, blues, reggae, rock, country, folk and the rest - much classical music, preceding the emergence of records, never suited the time constraints of vinyls anyway. But with the arrival of bluray, will people have the means to play them?

Kept it to one record per artist, which actually makes it even more impossible. OJAYS: Impossible. LOVING YOU, which got me to London in 87 for one of the best gigs I've ever seen. HAROLD MELVIN: Impossible. WAKE UP EVERYBODY. INTRUDERS: I'LL ALWAYS LOVE MY MAMA. ARCHIE BELL: DON'T LET LOVE GET YOU DOWN. SILK: CAN'T STOP TURNING YOU ON. PHILADELPHIA ALL-STARS: LET'S CLEAN UP THE GHETTO. ANTHONY WHITE: STOP AND THINK IT OVER. A nostril ahead of the non-album single. TEDDY: Impossible. EASY, EASY, GOT TO TAKE IT EASY. BILLY PAUL: LET EM IN. Never thought I'd put a song written by a Beatle in any list other than most over-rated. Billy, MFSB and some inspirational oratory from MLK make this a masterpiece. JEAN CARN: Tricky. MY LOVE DON'T COME EASY incl. intro.

I recall 2 years ago, it collided with the Gateshead International Jazz Festival at the Sage. My son was playing at the festival so I dropped him off early for rehearsals and spent the day in Newcastle. I remember the queues at the record shop; people looking for something to buy: punkrock, Bowie and the beatles; Britpop for the first time; Physical Graffiti for a ton; Sgt Pepper for £110. People walking around brandishing their yellow bags like religious placards, cos that's what they were. Inviting us to 'look at me, I've bought a record from the record shop on record shop day, like the TV told me, cos I'm a free-thinking, independent mind'. I also remembering buying a Jazz CD from the merch stall at the festival and paying rather over the odds. From the very people who tell us CDs never caught on (which they clearly did), they're defunct (which they aren't) or never existed (which Piers Morgan once claimed).

People always go on about Toots. Saw Adam Glasser do a tribute set at Scarborough Jazz Festival shortly after he died. In my review for Bebop Spoken Here I observed it wasn't a good time to admit you can't get exited by a harmonica in Jazz but, if I had to, it would be Glasser. The blues now, but they're ranked, not by how good they were on the harmonica, but how great the music they made is. Muddy is the obvious example with Wolf, Little and Big Walters, James Cotton and Charlie (work til your) Musselthwaite.

Hasn't everyone!

I'm not sure there's any such thing as virtuoso harmonica

Don't think he was ever really into northern, and modern was really a separate scene at that time. Jazz-funk was just a pathway for him to get from prog rock to Rare Soul.

I can totally live without Stevie Wonder. For me, like Prince, he's more MJ than MG. Living in the City is his best by several lightyears.

Mel Britt one of the greatest of all NS discoveries for me. I still like Send Him Back too but not to the same degree. I try not to drop Frankie Beverleys name since I shook his hand on the video for Too Many Games. I'm the one with the white shirt and silly grin, but I was 33 years younger.

Much obliged. People keep asking me for Butlers if that's what you wanted, anybody?

A bit naughty, the 'Mecca' of British Soul. I wonder how many RS would be embarrased by now! Never managed to find Tamiko Jones on CD, anybody? Probably haven't heard it since 1975 so don't know what I'll make of it.

Radio 2 Blues Show featured forthcoming version of Reach Out duetting with Joe Harman. I thought the album that's being promoted was just going to be a rissue of Reflections, the rather unsatisfactory album of his own versions of some of his Motown Hits, but clearly not. Sounds in good voice actually but, as I said, I'll be happy just to be in the presence of true greatness, (and not just the cartoon characters the media ram down our throats) to show our appreciation and let him know how much he's meant to us.

Hendrix, like Cream Zappa, Beefheart and Santana, were at the intersection of blues and jazz which created rock (if you believe Cream were the first great British rock group. If you reckon the Stones, Who, Kinks and Yardbirds (and even the Beatles) were rock, then the above all took it up a bunch of gears). Cream are a really good example cos it was the coming together of Claptons blues fanaticism and the jazz of Bruce and Baker. Hendrix loved Albert and Freddie but also Roland Kirk; then took the whole thing into outer space.

Blues, jazz, soul and reggae couln't have existed the way things are now, with everybody sueing everybody. Many people came to Tainted Love and What through Soft Cell, but I don't think this is a good thing. Had they had more respect for NS they'd have picked better ones rather than bigger ones.

Yea, something we all agree on; we all hate Soft Cell. Do I spoil things by admitting I never liked either of the originals.?

Make up another expression if you prefer. You may not have noticed that language and ideas aren't a perfect match. People talk about blues in terms of chords and scales, but there's another quality whitey almost never gets - Soul. The same is true of Soul though there's Eddie Hinton, Bobby Caldwell and a few others; the northern people will also have some. It's more common in jazz, but the great great greats are all black and the whiteys tend to be examples of the ending of Mezz Mezzrow's 'Really the Blues'. Zappa, Anderson and Pop people knew they couldn't do it and did something else. Beefheart is a good example of whitey making blues but there's far more to his music than just blues. I don't say that as a criticism of blues which is far less technical than the jazz and classical Beefheart draws from. In 'the Rest is Noise' Ross defines him as 'twisted blues' and may have got away with it if he hadn't put Zappa in their too. The blues input to Frank was minimal for music with high rock and jazz content. The first Bob Dylan album is not a bad stab at white blues but he went in another direction. Canadian Watermelon Slim is the best I've come across, but he's hardly a giant of the genre.