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.