Seano

Mine arrived this afternoon - looks really good. It looks like the focus is strongly on the Wigan years but even just skimming through you can see that he does cover a wider era, mentioning Va-Va's and other clubs. Maybe there'll be a 2nd book to come - "Cueing up the B-side!" I like that he's taken the theme of working through specific records as a sort of chapter sequence, and then spinning a story about the record and artist and wider aspects of the scene. And also that just like my filing of my singles, he lists the artists in alphabetical order by first name (e.g. Johnny Honeycutt and Johnny Williams are next to each other). I'm sure there will be many out there who think that's ridiculous, but it works for me!

Wonderful. I suspect that a route like this would be a great option for many other exceptional collections if the collector had never wanted to split and sell the individual items.

Still waiting for mine - anyone else still waiting?

Just spotted that BBC4 are running a programme at 8pm tonight called "Blues & beyond with Cerys Matthews and Val Wilmer." Val Wilmer was apparently widely known as a photographer who covered many blues artists. Might be worth a look.

Mine too, late afternoon, excellent thanks Kent / Ace / Ady.

I think it was some chancer coming by the school I worked in who may have jumped in via an open window and just struck lucky and probably jumped straight out again and legged it. I scoured the grounds but no luck, thought the person might have grabbed the £10 and chucked everything else. The wallet itself was a Mulberry sample that my wife had got in a sale and it was worth a couple of hundred pounds so I made a claim - after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing with me proving ownership of the wallet they did pay out on that but attached no value at all to the soul club cards. A sad statement on how we value things.

Hope it wasn't my card - stolen in my wallet on a rare occasion when I took the wallet to work about 25 years ago! My 6Ts membership card went at the same time. Probably meant nothing whatsoever to the git who took it.

As is clear from threads like this it's almost impossible to separate music from 'politics' in a social sense. Adventurous collectors and DJs bring a track to your attention, it might be bang on the most typical type of music that is broadly accepted as Northern, or it might be quite an extreme tangent but just kind of still seems 'ok' to you when you hear it - the crucial thing is you hear it in a context that encourages you to give it some space and to listen and put your normal preferences on hold for a bit. It can be anything from the old tape-swopping to hearing a track you don't know at a venue where you're enjoying the atmosphere through to just finding a 45 you've not heard of while out record-hunting and getting it home and thinking "it's got something, it could sort of get played out". But for all of these you might hear the exact same record at a moment when you're just not ready for it, and you shut down and ignore it. Personally I love the feeling that I can tell what I consider to be 'Northern' (and for me that doesn't just mean oldies / '60s) and yet haven't got a clue how to express that here or to people I know who are interested in "So what is this Northern Soul stuff?"

Got mine via Amazon earlier this week - great value for the triple CD set so I can't complain about the lack of sleeve notes. It must have been quite a task filtering everything down to these 66 tracks, it's a nice balance and I like the fact that a few of the Motown 7's have been included amongst them. Showing my ignorance - what's the story re including Al Kent 'The Way You've Been Acting Lately'?

It arrived late afternoon. I've quickly read the foreword and am looking forward to getting stuck into it. Really like the fact that it's hardback like the Memphis one; it's a trilogy that I'm sure most of us will dip back into well into the future.

Email from Amazon this morning to say the book is to be delivered today - and at the new price of £13.88 instead of the pre-order price at £16.99, what's not to like?!

I picked up an issue copy of this at Leamington record fair a couple of months ago:

Fantastic B side. My first copy of the UK issue on green must have had this on the flip, but the it was stolen from our flat in Deptford in the early '80's when I stupidly left it on the 'music-centre' (along with a cassette tape of a night at Wigan that was in the tape player). Bastards nicked our duvet as well, which we think they used to lower the prized goods down from our first floor flat and had it away with them. At the time I don't think I'd even played this side, even though I was getting more and more interested in B-sides. Luckily I now have another basic UK green copy but even better, found a lovely US DJ copy of it (There You Are) where the plug side is 'Bad Risk'. In case you're interested; the insurers were happy to pay out on the state of the art music-centre (those days when spreading all the features like radio, tape and record player sideways was the way to go, none of this stacking concept), and even on the record itself which I think I managed to persuade them was worth around £12 in early '80's money. But I was devastated to lose my very poor quality copy of what I think was a C120 tape live from Wigan with me chopping tracks all over the place to try and record the stuff I liked at the time. I couldn't persuade them it was worth anything at all. I've kept the case all this time as a memento.

I wasn't comfortable just giving an up vote, but wanted to say what a great track and how sad to hear this news.

What's with this loneliness for me too. I remember buying a copy on Stardust from Rob's in Hurt's Yard in Nottingham out of a tatty old suitcase on a pile of dusty and mostly sleeveless records.

Sad to hear. I'm glad that he was still alive to see The Funk Brothers at least get belated acclaim via 'Standing in the Shadows' etc, though those who worked with him like Dennis Coffey quoted in the article clearly didn't need that to know his qualities.

I've just had a look on the Ace website but can't see a way through to Kent Select - can you pre-order?

Same as Chalky - the handles click into place to hold the lids very nicely and so you lift the box as a whole rather than just by the handles - works fine. As noted re large versions full of 12" and LPs, the limit seems to be more about your ability to lift the weight than whether the box can take it!

I agree. Very good product, make sure to specify that you're needing the extra height lids (3L, as shown on Chalky's link) - you can find the boxes in stores like Staples but I've never seen them with the necessary height for the lid other than by ordering direct online. They do sizes to fit 12" / LPs too. I made the mistake of ordering large ones and if you fill them they're too heavy to realistically move comfortably, so we use them for bedding now and I got some of the 19L size which are fine. One thing to watch when ordering though - they don't stack inside themselves (due to being designed so that it's possible to stack them on top of each other). Delivery costs make it worth ordering whatever you need all in one go, but you'll potentially get some very big parcels on the doorstep when they arrive!

You might like to go to this thread too, all the issues of Shades of Soul (Derek Pearson's magazine):

Agree - both sides are great and certainly keen to see what's next. 'Two paces' had a small jump on the first play but thankfully fine on subsequent plays, think I must have had some fluff on the needle.

I get my white card sleeves from Covers 33 here in the UK: https://www.covers33.co.uk/shop/for-your-vinyl/7-vinyl/7-card/7-white-card-sleeve-pack-of-100/ The outside is a sort of matt / gloss, and the inner is white, but not as much of a finished gloss surface. £15 for 100. Sorry if I've misinterpreted your message and you already know of stuff like this and are trying to find something of higher quality.

Sounds great, got my order in (at last I think so, jumped into Paypal and it went through).

Another monster but surely this should feature in this thread too?