i-want-more

Wired for sound

Rewinding a bit…

Sister #3’s 50th meal was fun and we spent a pleasant weekend with my mum.

We recently went to visit Shaz at her enormous new bungalow near the river for her 40th birthday BBQ (it was great to see some of the old faces again, as well as eating some delicious food).

I have also managed to catch up with some folk I haven’t seen for a while, which was great.

I saw The Boy last week for an evening of delicious Turkish food. It’s been months since we last met, but it felt like minutes. He told me tales about hiking up a mountain through eight feet of snow outside of Seattle while dressed in unsuitable Soho-type attire, being flown over the Grand Canyon by a diminutive Japanese helicopter pilot, and going to see Russian singers with his grandmother in a concert hall in Haifa, the only man under 50 among a bejewelled and coiffed clientele of middle-aged and elderly women, clouds of perfume thick in the air. I have to say that I have missed the gentleman's special brand of story-telling. We have resolved to meet for a night of camp dancing next month. Fabulous!

I had a pint or two with Afraid of Ducks at a riverside boozer, which was very pleasant. Again, it was just like we had last seen each other yesterday. We talked quite a bit about our experiences at work recently (given that we are both still relatively new in our roles, this isn’t surprising) and gave each other updates about mutual friends. All in all, a lovely evening out.

Recently, I have been thinking about songs I love and that has prompted me to track some of them down. Avoiding the i-Tunes route, which would be far cheaper, of course, I did what I have traditionally always done, that is, go into a record shop to buy what I am after. I recall once going to a user meeting of Mojo.com (before you scoff, they paid me £50, it was the easiest money I ever earnt), and I was almost the only person there who talked about refusing to buy music online. My reasoning for this? There's virtually no element of chance online. You're looking through the racks in a shop and you think - oh, I've been wanting that record for ages, I might as well get as while I'm here.

There are two quality record shops in Kingston. And by record, I mean record - 12 and 7" discs of plastic. Both do CDs of course, but they are well-known for the vinyl. One is called Banquet Records (but shall forever be known as Beggars to me) and the other the Record Collectors Centre.

I popped into the latter this week, which is conveniently lcoated down the road from work and next to my favourite caff. My mental wish-list ran as follows:

The Sugarcubes - for the songs Hit and Deus.
Clor - an album that I used to have on my work PC hard drive that was sadly lost.
Salad - I was reminded recently what great pop songs they write when I heard this on 6 Music.

I left the shop not five minutes later with Clor and the Sugarcubes on CD, which was very pleasing. The only sour note is the English-language version of Birthday included on the Sugarcubes best of - I have never cared much for the English lyrics.

posted by deafdisco @ 8:31 am