#record fairs

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The guy running this stall at a record fair should pay more attention to his customers... he’ll never know who was browsing!

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Record Store Day 2013

I'm an inveterate collector of records, but a very lapsed one. Over the last couple of years I've been getting back into the record-shop game, very gradually - not helped by living in a city with no record shops left, but whenever I visit anywhere that does have them, I try and make a point of visiting. A couple of weeks ago I finally managed to get to the second-hand place in the next town over, as well as the independent new-records shop there, and came away with seven Bruce Springsteen CDs for less than £50 - birthday money well spent! While in the second-hand place I overheard the owner mention an upcoming record fair, and a bit of online research once I got home told me it was the same one that was always organised by the woman who used to run the record stall at my university's student union back in the early 90s - and always used to be attended by my friend who owned a record stall (see this post for more about the influence they had on my record collection). Just a coincidence that it happened to be on Record Store Day, but after thirteen years of living down here and not going to those record fairs, it was definitely time I got myself over there. A bit more research told me that my old friend is no longer doing the record-stall thing, so my hopes of running into him again were dashed, but still - record fair that I knew about in advance, in a place I knew I could get to, at a time I knew I could manage - I had to go. So that's what I did today, and it felt rather uncannily like coming home. I didn't find what I was looking for (for some unaccountable reason I don't have Hanoi Rocks' first album on vinyl), but I did find an awful lot of other brilliant stuff - lots of late 80s and early 90s hard rock and glam, most of it at pretty sensible prices. None of which I bought, mostly because I still haven't catalogued my collection so I still don't know what I've got already, but now I have even more of a reason to get cataloguing, so that next time the fair comes around, I'll know exactly what I need. 

Happy Record Store Day to my fellow collectors out there. I hope you found what you were after!