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.