The 2nd Annual Berkeley Blues Festival Concert & Dance

This is, I think, the first time I have written a post for this blog sitting in BLUES NIGHT when it is actually open. All that build-up, over weeks and months, and then I open for very nearly five years (apart from the times when the wise heads in Downing Street were saying that such things were simply not on) with very little to say about it. No wonder some people still don't seem to know What It Is.

So, just to recap - BLUES NIGHT isn't actually a 'Blues Night'. It's a shed in an attractive Georgian market town in North Yorkshire, where my records are for sale. I have been making beer in the kitchen since August 2018, and I'm starting to get quite good at it. You can come and try some if you like, but you don't have to. Also, you don't have to 'Like The Blues' to come here.

M told me six years ago not to call it BLUES NIGHT, because it would put a lot of people off coming. I knew at the time that she was right as usual, and (as is very often the case) that made me even more determined to prove her right by ignoring her advice completely. This was BLUES NIGHT’s anti-capitalist none-of-your-business model in embryonic form. 

Elsewhere, in far-too-kind articles (that I won’t even link to here, because if you haven’t read them already you’re clearly not very interested) I have spent a lot of time yabbing about how all good music comes from the blues and therefore all good music is the blues yada yada yada, but I have rarely spoken about the time a frustrated blues enthusiast got annoyed with me for saying I wouldn’t just be playing Blues all night (back when BLUES NIGHT was a Blues Night a thousand years ago in South London) because that would be boring. There it is now, though. Hope you liked it.

Sadly, there can never actually be a good live Blues Night ever again, because all of the good blues singers are dead, and probably have beers named after them. The way the music industry has fucked musicians (apart from Adele and Ed Sheeran) over all of this century has led to us over-valuing live music and we really should get back to spending lots of money on old records. These are all just opinions of course. This record is an excellent example of a Good Live Blues Night, but priced at nineteen pounds it is a hell of a lot cheaper than a ticket to go and see Joe Bonamassa. Probably. 

The second side is all Lightnin' Hopkins and it is just as fabulous as you might expect, but as Russ Wilson said before England won the World Cup, he was "one of the last of the great blues singers" even then. The first side is part Mance Lipscomb and part Clifton Chenier, and if there's ever been an example to be heard of just how varied and diverse blues music can be, it's this record. Or maybe they're not even Playing The Blues at all. I don't really know. What I do know is that I have started a pattern of always mentioning the sleeve in these posts, so two things - this cover looks right in a row of three on Instagram alongside the promotion of some excellent events (including Live Blues!) as part of BLUES NIGHT's Quinquennial in a fortnight's time, and also it is worth nineteen quid just for Ralph Gleason calling Lightnin's drunken shite-talking 'pretentious' and Strachwitz clearly getting pretty annoyed about it.

Again, as with the other posts, I'm not actually arsed if you buy this or not. There are no copies on Discogs for sale in this country, and only one on eBay, and that's £65. And it's unlikely that you will like this record more than I do.

KLF - Chill Out

 

There's a lot you can say about the musical content of this album, the way it was recorded in one take and the devil-may-care lack of sample clearance for whacking great chunks of music by some of the most famous (and famously litigious) musical artistes in history. But it has all been said somewhere else. If you're reading this, you've probably read at least some of it already and if you have any sense at all you won't be arsed about my take on any of it. I am not even going to use the phrase "Tuvan throat singing."

The sample clearance business is, of course, why this record tends to be so preposterously expensive these days (indeed, it was pretty damn pricey when I got this copy in the nineties) and I must make a deliberate effort to choose a disc priced at under twenty quid for 'Records I Can't Believe Nobody Has Bought From Me Yet Part 3'. This one, like last week's opener, has plenty of signs of having enjoyed itself around the turn of the millennium and, priced accordingly, would have been snapped up on Discogs within weeks, but as we know, BLUES NIGHT isn't here for the quick sales or the optimistic gradings.

Background noise is negligible however, and this is important with a record that has passages where the music IS background noise. Play this record at a regular volume while bottling a beer or reading somebody's blog and it might pass you by almost unnoticed. But crank it up LOUD when you're as smashed as we were in the shed during scientific testing last weekend, and it crawls in through your ears, fills up your skull and expands your mind in seventy-five altered dimensions... which are costing you one pound each.

Actually, you needn't spend that at all. Just swing by some time and we will all listen to it. It kind of belongs here anyway, especially as the first elpee we've posted twice on Insta, appropriately enough for a record in a sleeve that looks like it could have been photographed about half a mile up Hurgill Road from here. 

Update: this record is now sold. 

Darker Than Blue: Soul From Jamdown 1973 - 1980

I love doing this BLUES NIGHT thing. It's not actually a Blues Night, of course, it's just a name for a secret record shop. You know, like how a Lion Bar isn't actually made out of lions? Actually, it's not even a secret record shop, it's just that my own personal records are all for sale. Which is the pretext on which I invite people who might be interested in that sort of thing into my shed to hang out and drink beer and listen to music. It's a social thing. It's a hobby.

So I can't advertise or anything, apart from to offer information up to a potential audience of billions on here, of course. I only do it at the weekends, so the actual occasions upon which somebody buys a record off me are rare compared with a real record shop. I still get new stuff in, but only stuff I want to get in, and only at about the same rate as other stuff goes out. As a result, there are thousands of great records here that have been here for five years now. I often find it a little frustrating when I'm asked, "Have you got any new stuff in?" Because anybody who asks me that is missing the point. 

Instead of telling them that, though, I thought I'd use this underused channel to talk about some of the records I can't believe nobody has bought from me yet. If you find something you'd be interested in here, I'd even be prepared to post it to you, if you're never anywhere near North Yorks.

This is a superb compilation of soul and funk tunes performed as roots and rocksteady, lovers and dancehall, by some of Jamaica's finest singers and musicians of the 1970s. It's in a beautiful thick hard sleeve bearing no information on the front, just this engaging photo of the crowd at a reggae festival in Brockwell Park in 1974. I spent quite a lot of time in that park in the years following my purchase of this record, but the closest that this copy ever got was probably a wedding reception at the Cambria. 

I almost started this paragraph with the adverb 'sadly' for a moment there, and I'm so glad I didn't. There is nothing sad about the fact that I have played this record out in pubs and bars on dozens and dozens of occasions. Yes, on many of those occasions I would have been too pissed or otherwise distracted to get it back in the right inner sleeve after taking it off, but I would hardly ever have dumped it somewhere it could get scraped. It plays with very little extraneous noise - the countless superficial marks on both sides of both discs are a plethora of badges of honour, a patina to be cherished as well as a good solid reason for this record to be valued sensibly. The only compilation albums for sale in BLUES NIGHT with a price tag north of a ton are on Belzona Records, and that is the way that we like it. 

Frankly, it seems fundamentally wrong for a 21st Century artefact - a comp of singles that can be found fairly easily for the larger part - to be fetching daft prices like £180 on Discogs. The idea that (with some of these copies for people with more money than sense) the previous owner doesn't seem to have bothered to listen to it makes it seem even worse, if you ask me. I would like to say I'd describe its condition as VG- but to be quite honest I get so little pleasure out of grading records for brevity that I was prepared to uproot my whole family in order that the discs might be fully playtested by anybody who is interested in buying them. The paper insert of this copy has one gloriously tattered edge where I might have even written a phone number and then torn it off for somebody. I told you I was pissed. 

So let's cut to the chase. This copy is for sale for sixty quid. I don't really care if anybody buys it or not as I still love to play it, but when I do, no matter how drunk I am, I shall try to remember where I put the inner sleeve from now on.

And When I Think About The Hole In The Sky...

Father’s Day often makes me think of John Lennon. He was a shitty father to Julian and he knew it, so he made a special effort to be the best father he could be for Sean. This probably didn't make Julian feel any better, but after his father’s murder his music would go on to have a significant influence upon the development of BLUES NIGHT, which must give him some comfort.

This was my first opportunity to understand that teachers are, generally speaking, terrible with music. I shudder to remember the hundreds of occasions upon which a piece of calming classical music (or inspirational M People / Lighthouse Family) was unceremoniously killed with the stop button instead of with a gentle fade so that assembly could start.

Music used in lessons is (nine times out of ten) chosen for its lyrical content rather than the consideration of whether it is any good. And so it was when, as a student teacher, I sat in the hall of a great big Victorian primary school in East Ham, to observe a dance lesson on the first day of my first placement. The teacher sat her class down in a rough circle around the wedge-shaped Coomber CD player (no, I have no idea why schools have to use these) and bade them 'just listen to the words' of this song. 

Immediately I recognised the sub-Strawberry-Fields organ intro of Julian Lennon's 'Saltwater' and I was struck by the horrified realisation that these poor kids were going to have to Dance About The Environment. About four minutes later, the music stopped, and the teacher announced, “This song is called Saltwater and it is going to be the theme of your new dance. Does anybody know who this song is by?” 

Naturally, I did not put my hand up. I was 27, and a student teacher, not a child in the class. Also naturally, none of the children did either. It had reached Number 6 on the UK charts around the time that they were born. The teacher was undaunted, however. As an observer, I was impressed by her expectations of this group of predominantly Bangladeshi 8-year-olds. “Okay, but after hearing it, can anybody guess who it was by?”

How on earth do you expect them to do that? I wondered. And then I began to worry. Oh no, you don't think…

“Well, I'm pretty sure a lot of you will have heard of him…”

Oh no I think you do think…

“He was very, very famous!”

Oh no. No. Please, no. At this point my hand would normally have been on its way to my forehead, but I was new here, it was my first day and I was eager to impress. In fact, my new ‘Mentor’, the single person it was most important for me to impress in the world at that moment, was just about to say something to which it would take all of my effort to stifle a visible reaction.

“Well, his name was Julian Lennon and he was the singer in a band called The Beatles.” At this point, the invisible latch holding my arm in place suddenly dematerialised and my fleshy, concave palm slammed against my already-sizeable, end-of-the-century forehead. In this hall it sounded like a gunshot, and every single child in the class turned around to look.

The teacher was already facing in my direction. “Oh I'm sorry, Mr Barnes, is that not correct?” 

"Um, no, I think that was his dad.” I murmured.

Destination: Richmond

I know what you're thinking.

You're thinking Isn't it strange that he has so much less to say about his weird, spoddy little music-shed project than he does about getting told off by various Yorkshirewomen?

Or you might be thinking I've read that Hi-Fi mag article already. Is that the best he can do? But lots of people won't have, there's a newer issue out now (so hopefully they won't mind) and I have actually taken the time to get the copy in a readable form. And also, everything else I have to say about my spoddy little music-shed project will need to make reference to this lovely article from time-to-time, in a post to follow soon. (Yes, I know you've heard that one before. Shut up and read it.)

Neil Young’s On the Beach is off the wall and on the turntable and HFC is on the sofa with a mug of Yorkshire tea, leafing through a vintage NME, sitting across from friendly and engaging host Tim Barnes. 

Tim’s a longstanding record collector, blogger, craft brewer, motorhome veteran and entrepreneur, and we’re catching up inside BLUES NIGHT, just before its opening in mid-November. Not only a project years in the making, it’s a strong contender for the most pleasant shop HFC has visited in this series so far. Approximately 25 square-metres of cool, the converted barn is compact, but its lines are clean and it has the aesthetics of an independent US or Scandi record store. 

Refreshingly, all of the LPs, 12”s, 45s, 78s, CDs and cassettes are for sale at realistic prices, and none of that uncluttered space is taken up by racks – the record sleeves are in lovely old seventies Suffolk County Library crates, on a chunky shelving unit. “I didn’t want sections or dividers,” Tim explains. “I wanted people to grab a whole crate, sit down with it, and peruse its contents slowly and enjoyably. Seats and tables are there because I want people to take their time, have a drink, maybe even talk to me!”

One reason for the lack of categorisation is that it’s all the blues – or at least Tim’s inventive interpretation of it as a broad church. “I came to the blues as many others did, via the Stones, Led Zeppelin, Hendrix and the rest. I’d say they were all blues bands. I’d say Bob Marley was a blues singer and Underground Resistance records are bluesy. And a lot of people would assume that I am bonkers. Look at the blues section in your average record shop and you’ll see that this inclusive philosophy of the blues is not a popular one.” Tim’s belief is that it’s the cornerstone of all good music, yet it’s a niche interest that is misrepresented for the people who prefer to stay outside of it.

Blues Night’s kit list makes for covetable reading. “I’ve always been more into hi-fi than DJ kit, but for the shop, I never thought about anything other than a pair of Technics 1210s,” Tim explains. These came via eBay, along with the Allen & Heath mixer. There’s also an ancient Goldring Lenco GL75 to play 78s on. The Nakamichi 600 tape deck is the most recent arrival: “I enjoy making a mixtape even more in my forties than I did in my teens,” he adds. “Sometimes it’s useful to record onto CD – the closest I get to digitising – on a Sony RCD-W100. A series of British amplifiers came to an end when the Marantz PM6003 was all I could afford and it seems it will last forever.” The speakers are bi-wired Musical Fidelity Reference 4s. “I’ve had them since I was a teenager and I love them like brothers.”

For now, all the stock on sale is from Tim’s own collection: “This is music I’ve been playing out in pubs, sharing it since I was a kid. Which is why the shop is called BLUES NIGHT. It’s not just a shop, it’s a musical project. It’s an attempt to share some excellent music, a lot of which doesn’t get heard very often.” Setting up the shop has led to moments of musical rediscovery, too: “It’s been exciting seeing the front covers of records that have been hidden away, apart from maybe a few square centimetres of spine, for decades,” he adds. “Records I’ve forgotten I had. Records I’ve thought were incredible, but only played once or twice. If I sell them all quickly, then I suppose I’ll be reinvesting as much of that as possible in more records that I can enjoy while they’re on sale. Or if I hardly sell any at all, I’ve still got lots of great records! It seems like a win-win situation to me.”

BLUES NIGHT aims to blur the lines between business venture and public service. “If I can get this project to make enough money to justify me spending most of my waking hours on it, it will be worth doing,” says Tim. “I really don’t know what to expect from it, long-term. I hope there will be live music, opportunities to sell the beer I’ve been making to occasional decent-sized crowds, and that it’ll be a venture that my boys can enjoy enough not to want to hide its existence and their connection to it from their school friends. I hope that people will listen to and enjoy music that they would never have picked out for themselves.

Tim has previous, having worked in a second-hand London record shop 20 years ago. “It was the only job I’ve ever had that I enjoyed. But I was getting paid £60 a day, and I thought maybe I’d try teaching for a while. I have been planning my escape back into my own record shop ever since.”

The eventual push for the escape plan was bitter-sweet, however. “Living in the capital, I never had any money – and rarely actually had any time to just sit and listen to music either. And an old friend died two-and-a-half years ago. I realised that while he’d never had much money to spend either, he had always done what he wanted to do – seeing the world, playing records in clubs, managing DJs and having a good time. That was my eureka moment: I knew I had to do it now or accept that I never would.”

Tim and family sold their South London house and hit the road in a motorhome, driving round the UK in search of the perfect place to create the perfect record shop, dropping anchor in gorgeous Richmond, North Yorkshire. (Their adventures are documented in a thoroughly entertaining blog,bluesnightontour.blogspot.com) “I fell for the town and the premises instantly,” Tim adds. “It’s beautiful, in a glorious part of the country, and it seems, to me, to be a little bit of a secret. BLUES NIGHT will be a secret within a secret; a shop that’s not a shop, tucked away in a courtyard out the back of a Georgian terrace, the entrance hidden under a jungle of clematis.”

Tim’s commute certainly sounds enviable. “I decided it was going to have to be a premises inside my own home for a few different reasons,” he explains. “First, even if it was in a prime city-centre retail location, there would have been times when I’d be sitting there on my own drinking coffee in the morning thinking: ‘I might open up a couple of hours later tomorrow’. I got talking to a guy who’d started a shop stocked with his own collection several years back, who said he had essentially swapped thousands of brilliant records for a few years of rent payments to somebody he hated. The flip side of this is that I hope I might be getting phone calls from people saying they’ve come two hundred miles for a browse, so is there any chance I can get out of bed and let them in?”

It’s taken a few months to get BLUES NIGHT ready, not least because of the need to provide accommodation as well as a comfy sofa. One important aim is to be a community hub in his adopted home town. “Wherever we went, we were always looking for a place we could sit down, have a drink, have a chat with somebody who knew the place a bit, all of that stuff. Now I want to provide that place. The shop and the town should have a mutually beneficial relationship –the shop should be a good place for locals or visitors to go, but also be a reason for a few people to want to visit the town, and then while they’re here, they’ll discover what a nice place it is.

Looking around the beautiful space that he’s created, Tim reflects on what BLUES NIGHT means to him. “This is all about getting these great records I’ve been collecting for 30 years or so off the shelf, and into people’s hands. Out of the sleeves and onto the platter. Taste is subjective, of course, but this is certainly stock of a higher quality than you would usually find in a second-hand shop. Obviously, I need it to make a certain amount of money, so that I can pay the bills, but the need to make money has never been the driving force behind this project. I’ve always said I will have failed the moment I find myself looking at a visitor and thinking: ‘Are you going to buy anything, or not?’”

Shopping list

Tim picks eight greats from his substantial personal archive, all part of Blues Night’s stock. From fingerpicked guitar wizardry to hip-hop and back, via folk, blues and gospel. 

Bert Jansch 

Bert Jansch

“A young man and an acoustic guitar. A collection of pieces of music recorded in a kitchen that could very well be the best album ever.”

Prince

Dirty Mind


“Can I choose the tape? Succinct pop perfection. Bang, bang, bang, bang. Four great songs. Flip it over, and bang, bang, bang, bang. Four more.”

Rolling Stones


Beggars Banquet

“The Stones are my favourite band. My favourite Stones album cycles through Exile, Let it Bleed, Sticky Fingers and this. At the moment, it's this.”

Various Artists

I Have To Paint My Face

“I honestly consider Chirs Strachwitz's recordings for his Arhoolie label to be the single most important body of work in the history of human civilisation.”

Moodymann
 

Silent Introduction

“An album of house music that stands up to close scrutiny. Every track has a soulful musicality, an urban toughness, and a rhythmic intensity.”

Various Artists

Sorrow Come Pass Me Around

“A remarkable blues and spirituals recorded in the Sixties. It took me years to track down a copy. Then, predictably, it was reissued.”

The Champs

Tequila

“I suppose I feel the same about 78s as some younger people feel about vinyl. A good party tune, on shellac, is just automatically cooler.”

The Ganja Kru


Super Sharp Shooter

“My kids really couldn't give a monkey's about my records in general, but this is one track I have often blasted out and made them dance.”

I Have a Dream

I sent this message to my friend over a week ago. He hasn’t replied yet, for some reason.

We were supposed to read Freud on dreams as part of Cultural Studies, but if I remember correctly I didn’t bother. To be quite honest, I doubt this blog will suffer from the lack of support from his theoretical framework as it’s bound to be all about sex, and it’s very unlikely that there’s anything in my dream as a result of any crumbs of sexuality that haven’t yet been hoovered up. Dream Me was even reluctant to rub the diaphanous mini-skirts against my shitty arsehole.

The only analytical machinery I’m able to employ is that espoused by Philip Schofield as Joseph out of the Bible. Basically, he theorized that everything in a dream is a metaphor – seven skinny cows for seven years of famine, for example (although I’d be interested to hear from anybody who believes that they can count in a dream - I can’t count, or read, or do anything that requires looking closely and processing information. Probably because there’s nothing to see there.)

So, yes, metaphors. For a start, I’d guess the seventies-style supercomputer represents the records I have picked up over the last thirty years or so, which I haven’t yet sold or traded. All of these are now for sale in a barn on Frenchgate in Richmond, and although only about half of them date from the Seventies or earlier, I’d guess they could easily be represented in my subconscious by a single huge, underused object that is being carefully broken up into little pieces. It makes sense that my reply-shy friend was there in a supervisory capacity, as he worked in the same record shop as I did decades ago. And he trained as an electrician, so he is probably overqualified for his role in my dream.

The gondola I saw in close-up was, of course, our van. The idea of the pieces of the supercomputer being taken to an unspecified place far away for a new purpose is exactly where this blog started, which would suggest that the arrival and the hatching is the point in the whole chronology at which we find ourselves now. The tortoise-people can’t possibly represent my customers, though. I don’t yet know them well enough to be that rude about them. They have arrived in ones and twos, and one or two larger groups, and enough of them have wanted to buy something that I would have to consider my first three weekends to constitute an encouraging start. I am talking about customers here, not tortoise-people.

And the whole scenario might be seen to spring from the idea that by finally getting BLUES NIGHT open, I haven't finished, I've only just started on something. It really is just me selling off my records in an every-weekendly yard sale at the moment (Friday, Saturday and Sunday 12-7, come on in, you know you wanna.) The fact that it looks a bit like a shop, or a bar, or that it is in fact the only place in Richmond where you can buy records and drink microbrews, shouldn’t be of any interest to whoever calculates the rateable values of previously disused slaughter barns in North Yorkshire, as I’m not producing any waste or encouraging people to park on our street. But everything that has been achieved so far is only really relevant if it leads to something else. I’ve talked to custies about live music in the courtyard, temporary events notices making it possible for me to actually make some money out of the five beers I’ve been brewing (which have been very well received so far, and of which I am rather proud, actually), about a little niche music film night, and a bunch of other things that I’d probably do better to keep under my hat.

This would suit me very well as I’ve spent more than is healthy of the last few months contemplating my own inevitable doom. A friend's death precipitated my decision to go through with all this, and once I had arrived at what I've always thought I wanted, it became clear that if I don’t know what's next, there’s not a lot of squares left on the board. Naturally, I figured out that I have to make plans for what's next before the devil starts making plans for me, and that's where this dream slides smoothly into your typical anxiety-driven scenario.

You know how you get those dreams that you're still at school, or college or whatever, and you haven't done your homework / essay / getting dressed? Those don't happen for me nearly so much since I stopped spending most of my waking hours in an educational establishment. But for a while in the van I still got the standard teacher anxiety dream - a class of unmanageable children driving me to the point where I yell JUST SHUT THE FUCKING HELL UP and then they all look at each other and grin and chortle because they know that they’ve won. Now this, too, seems to have passed, and the DJ fail – something else I’ve stopped doing since leaving London – has come to take its place. Except that in the dream I don’t remember getting anywhere near the decks or having any records. Only the sitting on the toilet and the having done a poo, which is perhaps a metaphor in itself for some of my last few gigs.

Why didn’t my friend show up at the dream party? Is it because I’m a little lonely, having left so many familiar faces far away? What on earth was he doing, sending Indian servants to attend to me? Have I become a stupid racist in eight months of provincial living? I now realise that was never going to happen. I certainly wasn’t going to let them wipe my arse for me.

But this was just a dream. BLUES NIGHT was MY dream, and now it’s a reality. Come and have a look. I know you can’t see my legs behind the ‘shop’ counter, but I promise you, that’s a standard swivel chair I’m sitting on.

(Photo by Gullwing Photography)

Six Days On The Road

So, obviously, the builder turned up later that same day, when he was ready. He achieved more in one afternoon than I have in my life so far, I think. Other builders came and went, exactly when they wanted or were able to. It is remarkable how quickly they get things done once they actually get started. 

Whole walls disappear and new ones reappear in fractions of a day. Big ugly holes gape in the sides of buildings and are filled with something that looks so much better than what was there before that the whole structure seems to benefit. Builders take a long time to get started, get loads done with astonishing speed, then disappear for a matter of weeks until you think they might have forgotten you, before returning just in time to make you realise that just because they work quickly, it doesn’t mean that they won’t take even longer to get finished than they did to start.

And it should be finished very soon. And then I will realise that I have a hundred things to do that I could have been doing while wondering where the builders are. Meanwhile I’ve been off on a mission in my beloved Vanny, picking up about a thousand 78s that were once the playground of the shortlived Ivy House Gramophone Appreciation Society, meeting up with family and friends in Thanet, the home of Thanos, and exploring some very good record shops. In Camden Town there was a get-together of my former MVE colleagues after the funeral of a genuinely lovely bloke whom I would really like to have seen more in the twenty years since I left. These are the milestones that punctuate the journey all of us are making, I suppose, and serve as reminders that if there was anything we were meaning to do, we had better get on with it.

I returned home to a family that appeared to be pleased to see me. I’d been gone the best part of a week, at the far end of the country, and they had been plugging away at the day-to-day business of work and school. It was time, therefore, for me to start pricing some records. This is a much slower process than it was in the Twentieth Century, as the Internet is always nagging at one not to just use that combination of a little knowledge, a chunk of guesswork and an occasional phone call to the Soul Basement. In my determination not to value style over substance, I’ve had to think very hard about my pricing policy because I don’t want even one record to make me look like a chancer, or worse, a mug. But presentation is important too, and although I never liked plastic sleeves when my records lived on a shelf, they are essential now they’re moving into crates. There were surprisingly few records bearing the infamous unpeelable grid stickers of yore, but I’ve still gone through a tin of Ronson lighter fluid in the course of their careful removal. And I thought, Why didn’t I do this before? God – they look so much nicer.

It’s those same two interchangeable quantities again – time and money. The plastic sleeves for the starting stock in the shop cost me something over two hundred quid. And the removal of every MVE sticker takes at least a few minutes. On a nice old matt-finished papery seventies sleeve, it can be much, much longer. Record and Tape Exchange stickers and their descendants were designed to be unpeelable, to prevent dodgy punters from trying to swap them to get their records at a better price (which would only actually result in the record being lost in the file.) Leave them in place for the gum to ossify for, say, twenty to thirty years, and they can become very tricky to shift indeed. Attempt to peel them off without adequate resources and technique and you get a torn sleeve. As a result, there are millions of records out there sporting an ingenious grid for price reductions that is uniquely ugly and devoid of any rosy nostalgia. But you won’t find them for sale in BLUES NIGHT.

And it occurs to me that if this blog can achieve something useful for once in its life, maybe it could help, or at least motivate, you to remove these stickers from your records, exposing their natural beauty and liberating them from their memories of incarceration in dusty racks and repeated fingerings by daily regulars patiently waiting for the next round of reductions.

1. Soak the sticker in lighter fluid – the sort you once used in your Zippo. Really give it a proper dowsing, think Hendrix at Monterey. It will all evaporate eventually.

2. But you don’t want it to evaporate yet! It needs time to have its solvent way with the ancient adhesive. Cover the sticker with something firm and smooth made of plastic. A CD slipcase is perfect.

3. Leave it to soak for as long as you can bear. For me, this is about five minutes. I like to listen to the record and reflect on how seven quid was quite a lot of money in them days, or appreciate the evocative petrochemical aroma and think about how cool smoking used to be. Do not listen to anything with a drum solo, as this creates the illusion that a great deal more time has elapsed than what has in reality.

4. Peel the sticker slowly and carefully, hoping it doesn’t just give up its top layer (in which case go back to the start) or rip the sleeve anyway (in which case contact my lawyers.) If you have only stopped smoking in the new millennium, ask somebody with fingernails to do this for you. If the record in question is an eighties or nineties reissue as pictured, the sticker might all just come off in one go. But it’s more likely to leave bits and pieces behind that need to be soaked and scraped at all over again.

5. Even if it does all come off in one go, it’s fairly certain to leave behind an unpleasant greyish gummy residue that will still look really shit. I like to use even more solvent on this, rubbing it in with my abrasive fingertips, calloused to a perfect level of friction from decades of playing the guitar and never getting any better at it. Then, the spermy gloop of petrol and glue can all be removed with a few firm rubs of a softish cloth. Or if you don’t have one to hand, try the cuff of the hoodie you wore every day while living in a van, dreaming of a day when you can achieve something very worthwhile, just as you are making it look like you wipe your nose on your sleeve.