Like you say, the effort involved in sourcing a record was built into its price.
These days, whilst these records are now more widely available, and wait times have reduced as a result, it literally comes down to discogs sales history, and sellers getting greedy with their pricing, because they know someone out there will be stupid enough to pay it. This then sets the precedent for the next sale. A NM copy sells for £100, the next VG goes up for the same price.
Don’t get me started on shipping and taxes.
Coupled with the ‘vinyl’ resurgence it’s becoming prohibitively expensive to even buy new releases.
I used to get well excited when the paper lists arrived. I still have the majority of them in a box somewhere. I remember getting them from quite a few places:
Resolution (Mark?)
DJ Friendly
Casbah
Hot Biscuit
Soul Brother
Crazy Beat
Pure Pleasure
Virgo Vibes (used to come with a cassette).
Hedonizm
There was another one that used to come. Can’t for the life of me remember the name of the company, but they had a treasure trove of records all listed out by genre, format etc. Insanely cheap.
Wish I could still buy some of the records listed at those prices.
Is Gary still there? I’ve not been to Crazy Beat for years. His repeated thunderous flatulence could be slightly off putting when crate digging mind you.
Being partly in Australia, partly UK (88-96) I used to get the lists posted out and then in the middle of the night phone up to see if anything that I wanted was still available. The answer was usually no as the list took about 2 weeks to get to me. Memories of tunes getting played down the phone, pulling the trigger on lots of wrong versions of tunes and generally making lots of poor choices and then hoping that the postie hasn’t bent it over because it said “do not Bend” on it. Ah, memories.
Anyone remember the bloke who used to sell Chicago House 12”s in Bromley? Possibly linked to Blue Bird records. I used to get paper lists from him in the early 90s. So many great early House records from him (most of them long since sold on). He only sold twelves from Chicago.
It’s a lock up type arrangement, probably a bit on the chilly side to finger through records. I will aim to visit when the temp goes up a bit. You will be first to be fowarded, it’s north of London, he tells me some ‘diggers’ look at it and say ‘no way’ and go.
Incidentally Steve who you met before Xmas has a lock up with (he says) one million records in it - the vast majority I suspect are crap 7”s nobody will ever want. Never been invited but might ask one day to go on a Sunday. I know one person who went years ago and says he cleaned it out but as we know what was not rare a decade or so ago sometimes now is…
FOund out this weekend that a guy who used to own a lot of record stores in the Boston are in the 70s and 80’s has all of his records in a barn near me. Not sure what is in there but apparently he was a big importer so who knows. I’ve also met him and can guarantee that he will say $20/record or something so it may be a non-starter.
