Credit crunch record shopping

A few years ago the Sunday supplements carried a few hastily written articles about a phenomenon called ‘fifty quid man’. Fifty quid man was a product of the mid-decade, a Mondeo driving accountant or city worker with a high disposable income who would march into HMV every Thursday and smugly splash out a crisp fifty on a few DVDs and the latest Snow Patrol release. Oh, he was a record company’s wet dream, was fifty quid man. He kept Keane and Coldplay straddled atop the charts like a pair of hookers on a Man United player, and the EMI execs smiling. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) fifty quid man’s days are over. As, sadly, are those of his sounder cousin, twenty quid man. Recent apocalyptic happenings in the global financial system have rendered these poorly drawn demographic stereotypes redundant, so now is as good a time as any for Analogue to introduce a new one, fifty cent man.

If you thought that the thrill of rifling through a shelf of records and being on social welfare didn’t go hand in hand, think again. There is a veritable Aladdin’s cave of musical treats lying in wait in our country’s charity shops. Dublin’s North inner city, from Dorset Street to Capel Street, and around the Rathmines area on the Southside, are particularly rich hunting grounds for the dedicated record collector. All you need is a bit of patience. It’s a bit like shopping in TK Maxx, where you have to hoof your way through twenty pairs of luminous yellow, size 26 men’s jeans in order to find a pair that are blue and reach your shoes. Only in Oxfam, you have to flick through twenty copies of a CD called Finglas by a Dublin rapper called Spiral who once appeared on Big Brother (I kid you not, it’s everywhere) in order to strike gold and romp home with a two euro copy of The Who’s Live at Leeds. With all this in mind, I decide to set myself a challenge to venture forth and see what’s out there on a given day. I give myself a budget of twenty quid, (the rounded up average price of a CD album) and I set out into town with the cash in my pocket, an afternoon to spare, and an open mind. The plan is to see how many CDs, cassettes and records I can buy without breaking the budget, take them home for a good goin’ over, and write about the whole thing.

My first port of call is Gorta on Liffey Street. Gorta is not as upmarket as some of the other shops I visit, it’s Aldi to Oxfam’s Marks and Spencer. The shop smells and looks like it’s made out of mothballs, missing jig-saw pieces and amputated plastic doll’s limbs. Like most of the other shops I visit, the music section is located in a few big crates near the cash register. Stickers tell me that all CDs are either one euro or fifty cents and all cassettes and LPs are one or two euros. Welcome to bargainville. I dive into the crates like a pig in search of truffles. There is a lot of dross in the boxes. Aside from the CD cases that are simply empty, there are buckets of promotional CDs for dreary has-been dance outfits, and obscene amounts of Sunday newspaper promo CDs being sold back for 50 cent a pop. But hey, it’s all for charity, and if you plough through it, the gems start appearing. Ten minutes later I’m heading toward the next shop with three cassettes, two CDs and a vinyl. The price? A princely €6.50. After rooting around the next couple of shops on Capel street I make an observation. It would appear that one man’s treasure chest is another’s coffin. These cardboard crates of doom prove to be musty monuments to a plethora of failed British and Irish indie also-rans. Shed Seven, The Four of Us, Menswear, Babybird, Gene, they are all here, looking grim with cracked plastic casings falling from their hinges. Worryingly, The Flaws’ last album Achieving Vagueness is in Barnados for €2.90. I don’t buy it.

One fun thing about buying music on the cheap is the sheer recklessness that soon develops. Everything is so inexpensive that a goofy impulsiveness sets in. A novelty single by sinisterly shaped ITV children’s TV presenter Timmy Mallett for 50 cent? Why not? Vampire Weekend fan? Go straight to the source and grab a copy of King Sunny Adé and His African Beats on cassette for the price of a cornetto. Surely others are sucked into this world of foraging and reward?

What sort of person typically buys music in charity shops? I bravely attempt to quiz the only other dedicated shopper I meet today. A youngish Spanish dude is eagerly rifling through a box of musical detritus in Mrs Quinn’s charity shop. He starts to act defensively as I approach. He looks at me with a glaring intensity that seems to ask what the hell would I want with these shitty tapes, even though he’s all over them like a rash. I wait for him to finish so I can ask him if he, ahem, comes to this sort of place to look for music often? His name is Flavio and he tells me that no, he doesn’t. What sort of music does he like?
“R & B and rap, I like most. But there is very little here. This one is okay” he says, picking up a D12 rap album, “but it’s expensive”.
I look at the price. It’s €2.90. I agree that it’s probably about €2.90 too expensive for a D12 album. Seeing a quick opening to big up the Irish, I whip Spiral’s ubiquitous Finglas single out of a nearby CD box and tell Flavio it’s Irish rap and worth checking out. He eyes it suspiciously and shakes his head. By now he is looking at me as if I have three heads, so I slink out of the shop and homeward.

Arriving home I spread my haul across the floor to photograph it for Analogue. It looks pretty impressive, provided it all plays well (I remember getting ape-shit excited after buying a second hand cassette of The Beatles Revolver at the age of fourteen, only to be traumitised by John and Paul’s voices briefly warbling like Donald Duck every two seconds). There are fourteen items in total, meaning that I paid an average of €1.40 per item. Sweet. At prices like this, it’s no wonder I went a bit crazy, splashing out on MC Mallett. It’s time to pour a glass of red wine, haul out three different types of music player and get listening.

I play it safe first, sticking with what I know. I cycle through the tracks on The Mamas and The Papas live album, Glenn Campbell’s Greatest Hits CD, then through Steve Winwood’s Roll with it and Paul Simon’s Graceland on cassette. All is in order on the CDs. ‘Wichita Lineman’ makes a little countrified corner of my heart swoon as usual and ‘Creque Alley’ makes a little psychedelic corner of my mind yearn to be out of my bin on acid in ‘60s San Francisco. The cassettes are in fine fettle too. The Steve Winwood Roll With It album appears almost untouched. After one listen, I think I know why. Steve Winwood is pants. It’s music for jacket and jeans CEO types to drive down the California coastline in open-top cars while pondering if their recent divorce has unshackled their inner ‘soul’. There was a recent hair-brained attempt to rehabilitate Winwood’s music in a particularly far-fetched essay in The Wire magazine. Pure tosh. This is soulless music that is best plundered in order to provide two second samples for Italo-trance tracks. However, it was worth buying to validate the above rant. Paul Simon sounds fabulous. Maybe this man was built for cassette? Graceland’s natural home seems to be on magnetically charged audio tape. In the same way, Chevy Chase, Paul’s comedic partner in the video to ‘You can call me Al’ is most at home on VHS. Listening to my cheapskate copy of Graceland reminds me that the cassette is not an entirely useless medium. If your natural proclivities tend toward laziness, you are more or less forced to hear each side from start to finish. The familiar stuff out of the way, I delve into the rest of my charity haul. The oddities. The impulse buys. Stuff I wouldn’t normally think twice about.

Timmy Mallett’s single, unsurprisingly, is cobblers of the highest order, albeit with a strange B Side called ‘Mr Mallett, Mr Mallett’ that is a surprisingly explicit and cynical pastiche of pilled up early nineties ‘ardkore techno. It’s a bit druggy and not what I expected of the paragon of kiddies TV. Shame on you Mallett. A vinyl of John Williams space movie themes played live by the Boston Pops is a snip at two euro, as is a seminal ‘60s record by the New York psychedelic jazz outfit Blood Sweat and Tears. It’s called The Child is Father to the Man and its insane cover is a tableau of all the band members with tiny versions of themselves sitting on their laps like children. In today’s age of photoshop this record cover is still disturbing, and even if the music wasn’t good (which it is), it’s worth it for the cover alone. I also listen to a Shed Seven single, an album by a failed indie band called Cosmic Rough Riders, a superb compendium of Soviet folk music and a cassette of house remixes of early Pet Shop Boys tracks. All this for twenty quid.

So, if you are stuck for cash and still craving the root and reward dynamics of a good day shopping for records, you could do a lot worse than the charity shops. Drop your prejudices at the door, and who knows you could discover a whole new genre of music. It’s better than the internet. Why? Because, I know that a million monkeys with a million broadband connections would never, ever, come up with a copy of ‘The Bump’ by Timmy Mallett, but somehow I did.