A very Happy New Year from both 991.com and Record Collector Magazine. If you want to start the year as you mean to go on, sign up for the weekly edition of R.C. Weekly Newsletter by contacting [email protected] and mention 991.com
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Happy 2013. Yes, the newsletter is back, after a long break putting its feet up at a chic clinic a few exclusive kilometres outside Oslo, where highly-trained 6ft 2in blonde nurses made soothing noises and highly-trained 5ft 4in brunette waitresses tottered along on red high heels and delivered unspeakably awful food in the interests of health. What was the highlight of the newsletter’s Christmas break? An unlikely one: the posthumous discovery that its father was correct when it banned it from watching Magical Mystery Tour when it was eight years old. Finally got to see it after all these years and the newsletter thought it was terrible; nigh-on unwatchable. Still think Flying is a great instrumental, like a psychedelic MGs, and still reckon Ringo is a great drummer despite all the arguments to the contrary fuelled by a random Lennon quip, but the movie is lousy, which is clearly why the BBC screened the documentary about it first: if you’d seen the film first, you’d never watch the doc.
When we are not being pampered unnecessarily or peering at the telly, RC’s staff are to be found with their faces in books, tryin’ ter look interllechual and like we can read and everyfink. Normally it would be 5,000 Shades Of Black, our Vinyl Fetish novel, in which a young student falls in love with an older man who locks her in a basement and gently coaxes her to womanly fulfillment by getting her to catalogue his record collection. But from time to time we do actually read something worthwhile and we’re currently enamoured of an academic publication about our favourite objects called Vinyl: A History Of The Analogue Record, by Richard Osbourne. It basically pulls apart what we know about the vinyl record and rebuilds it from the ground up: the groove, the disc shape, the various formats, why we love them so, the record’s cultural impact, why vinyl has survived. As an academic hardback, it’s not cheap, but it made me think afresh about this obsession with plastic circles.
What else is new… ish? Bowie is back! Really. And yes, he sounds like him, oddly enough; I like it, although it’s a little funereal: (it may well have been taken down by the time you see this). At least he’s retained his dignity, unlike so many other legends; not necessarily the outcome you’d have predicted for the man who duetted with both Bing and Iggy. And there’s an official Dylan collection of out-takes released in a limited edition of, blimey, 100 copies, designed to beat the copyright laws. You can forget about getting one, though: I’ve got 49 of them propping up one corner of my desk after one of its legs fell off during RC’s drunken New Year rave.
Judging by the number of emails we’ve had about it already, our January edition with Queen on the cover is selling like half-price fried chicken. That follows a top-selling ELO/Jeff Lynne cover, and we’re working on some more massive classic rock acts for future editions. The next one, meanwhile, apart from revealing the reality about an oft-misunderstood aspect of The Beatles, looks into the first moments of Madonna’s fame, uncovers some vintage filth from Trunk records, and goes all 60s electronica with Silver Apples. There is more, but the stuff is being put together as I speak so I shan’t say owt else. But I promise you this is going to be a great year for Record Collector, and I hope the same applies for you.
Thank you for reading
Best wishes
Ian McCann
Record Collector Editor
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