If you're new to collecting Crap Records, you may need to experiment with various types until you find a particular style (or styles) that you are happy with. There is plenty of scope within the genre. Do not go out and buy a whole heap of the same kind of stuff, unless you're sure you'll like that stuff; rather, take your time, spend a dollar or two on various things and then gradually eliminate the ones you don't care for. If you can get into more than one particular type then you'll obviously find more records that suit you. My own interests lie in 'novelty' discs from the 78 era, anything 'unusual', and the demented or genuinely bad.
Naff Groups of Yesteryear: Just about everything that was issued after 1973 and sold by the cart-load will still be easy to turn up while junking. The most common LP of all in this category is probably the Osmonds' The Plan, although from more recent years Bros and New Kids LPs have started making inroads into the jumble sale charts. About five years ago, no junk pile was complete without a copy of Rollin' by the Bay City Rollers or Mud Rock by Mud, but curiously the supply of these is drying up.
On the other hand, most pop records made in the Sixties or earlier, whether good, bad or indifferent, have an often inexplicably high collector value, simply because they appeared when they did. You won't find many records by the Beatles (or, indeed, by the Ultimate Spinach) in the junk piles, because people are now too aware of their 'value'.
Newcomers would do well to hunt out some of the compilation albums from the Seventies. These often came in gaudy glitter or tack-psychedelic sleeves and were called things like '20 Dynamite Hits'. K-Tel is THE label to watch for here. Note that these compilations do actually feature the original recordings as opposed to the Hallmark TOTP ones mentioned above; and, as such, they are an ideal introduction, if you want to be introduced, to long (and justifiably) forgotten acts such as Paper Lace, The First Class and Stephenson's Rocket.
Progressive Rock and Insomnia Cures By the time the Beatles split at the end of the Sixties, and pop music would never be the same again, etc., etc., the British music scene had already begun to divide itself into distinct styles of 'pop' and 'rock'. By 1972, the Glam brigade was ruling the pop roost, and the rock side had gone 'progressive', thus replacing the Sixties' one good type of music with two bad ones.
Progressive music is easy to recognise but difficult to define. In brief, if it's long, dull, contains pretentious lyrics and rocked-up bits of classical music, and was issued between 1969 and 1976, it's progressive. You won't find much progressive music on 7-inch 45s: besides being a format dismissed by progsters as infra dig (for heavens' sake, Slade released stuff on 45s), the fact that you can only get 8 minutes or so - and that's pushing it - on each side of a 45 meant that it was useless for the 23-minute joys of the prog rock groups.
Inexplicably, a great deal of prog rock is highly collectable - but there are still plenty of worthwhile items to be had cheaply, now that most fans are replacing their old LPs with CDs. Check out Relayer by Yes (actually a fine album) and the two mid-70s albums by Druid, Toward The Sun and Fluid. Also, in the absence of a record deal, many groups issued their own material. Although these are harder to find due to the smaller quantities pressed, they can sometimes be rewarding. The garishly-packaged 1974 LP by the Flat Orange is one of the better examples.
Easy Listening This is an area of entertainment that has actually undergone something of a revival. Several major record companies have issued compilation CDs of light music by orchestras such as those of James Last and Bert Kaempfert. The question has to be asked, though: why bother with these CDs when you can acquire the exact same recordings on a fistful of LPs from a clear-out sale, and pay just a few cents for the privilege?
The resurgence in popularity of light orchestral music reached its zenith with the release of a CD of Test Card music, previously unavailable for sale anywhere. Most tracks dated from the tail-end of the Sixties, and believe it or not, the music stands up remarkably well after so long. If your town has its own TV station, comb the junkshops every so often for vinyl 78s of this kind of material. Labels to hunt down include Chappell Music and Southern. They can be difficult to find, but they're still cheap, and worth the effort. Conversely, musical and soundtrack records are always to be found cluttering up rummage sales. I'm probably not the only one who will scream out loud if I encounter just one more copy of the Sound of Music - by far the most common soundtrack record. I often have the suspicion that there is some sinister organization somewhere still churning these out.
'Party' records, such as those produced tirelessly during the Fifties and Sixties by such luminaries of the pianoforte as Winifred Atwell, Russ Conway and Mrs Mills, are easy to find. Winnie's singles, on Decca, were mainly chart-topping medleys and had such diverse titles as Let's Have a Party, Let's Have Another Party, and Let's Have Yet Another Bloody Party. Every junk stall has at least one of these. If you're about to have a do, why not invest in a couple? At least if someone spills a pint on one it isn't the end of the world. Put that new Oasis CD in the bin where it belongs and get the Dansette going!
'Novelty' records and the Just Plain Bad This is probably the widest category to fall under the general rubric of Crap, and with good reason. Bear in mind that of the 150 or so new records released in the UK each week, only a very small amount make it into the Hit Parade. The rest, pressed in their thousands, with glossy pics of young hopefuls emblazoned across their sleeves, are fated to spend the rest of their existences being ignored in junk shops. The only time that they're noticed is when an impatient browser, rifling through in search of bargains, slices his finger on the glossy sharp edge of one of the sleeves.
Constantly coming across multiple copies of last month's flops is one of the more tiresome aspects of junking. A few weeks or months after release, they are joined by the stuff that did make it, but which has exhausted its novelty value and plummeted out of the charts. January and February are the peak months for this, once the industry has finished thrashing itself into hyperactivity vying for that all-important Christmas Number One. It is dispiriting, having got the festivities over for another year, and shaken off the hangover, to turn up piles of Christmas carol medley 45s, sung in false Cockney accents for some reason, with their robin-and-snow adorned sleeves all bent and torn.
But do not be downcast! Many novelty discs are worth investigating, if only for their badness. One of my all-time favourites is the Grease song, You're The One That I Want, sung by Hylda Baker and Arthur Mullard, which did actually make the singles chart. Other curios include Jonathan King's send-up of Father Abraham and the Smurfs; Paul Jones' schmaltzy easy-listening rendition of Pretty Vacant; the lamentable riposte to Jilted John, Gordon's Not a Moron, by Julie and Gordon; and a song called Black Denim Trousers And Motorcycle Boots, sung by a classically-trained mezzo-soprano called Joan Morris. Oddly enough, all these appeared in the same year.
High Speed Spin Cycle Anyone fortunate enough to own a machine that plays 78s has a head start when it comes to collecting novelty records. There were simply staggering amounts of oddities issued in this country in the first half of the century. Chirping canaries, saw players, humorous recitations and singing dogs are all part and parcel of the wacky world of 78 collecting.
Surprisingly, most 78s aren't worth much in cash terms. They are too heavy and break too easily to be readily collectable - it is almost impossible to get one through the post unscathed. The exceptions are of course the jazz and rock 'n' roll fields: some of these can change hands (carefully!) for hundreds of dollars. But the vast majority of 78s cost less than a dollar each, even from specialist dealers.
Many music-hall artists of the 1910s and 1920s issued records. Sadly, a lot of Twenties comedy falls very flat nowadays, sounding more and more dated as time passes, but there are always exceptions. Sam Mayo's 1915 Trumpet Song, with its off-hand use of that instrument and deadpan delivery, still sounds as fresh and funny now as it did over 80 years ago, and Billy Bennett's 1926 parody The Green Tie on the Little Yellow Dog has also weathered better than many. Aside from the singers and reciters, you'll find a huge wealth of oddball material, such as Stanelli and his Hornchestra, who played music on car horns, and Dawson's Choir of Canaries, who warbled their way through a selection of popular melodies of the day.
Perhaps the Holy Grail of weird 78 collecting would be to turn up an original disc by Florence Foster Jenkins, possessor of a most distinctive soprano voice and familiar to anyone who has read Stephen Pile's excellent Book of Heroic Failures. No-one was ever quite sure whether she really thought she could sing. Her recordings, on privately-pressed 78s (no commercial company would go near her), were given a belated release on an LP and EP at the end of the Fifties by RCA. In a similar vein, but intentionally, singing team Jo Stafford and Paul Weston made several cringingly off-key renditions, calling themselves Jonathan and Darlene Edwards in an attempt to avoid professional suicide.
The Uncategorizable This catch-all area includes records such as the Johnny Morris Winalot EP It's a Dog's Life; Music from Mathematics, a 1962 LP of computerized bleeping noises; and a single called Paralysed by the Legendary Stardust Cowboy. This extraordinary last record comprises several minutes of incomprehensible wailing and shrieking, backed by furious rhythm-free drumming and punctuated every so often by what appear to be military bugle calls. As such its Crap credentials are of the first order.
Kevin Mike writes about practical technology and online shopping. Read more about his work at www.azframes.com, a blog for digital photo reviews, such as Sony digital frames.
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