Always nice for the ardent Sproutologist to come back from a little time away to find a few packages, and this is the haul for this week.
The “Time Out” is from January 1984 and contains a little feature article which I’ll scan and post properly once the jetlag has worn off. This was the period where Prefab Sprout were just coming into prominence, and I always find these transitions fascinating as some of the clichés had yet to ossify into accepted fact. The usual “what’s the name about” stuff there too. Note to interviewers: PLEASE, never ask that question again.
Cars and Girls is a completeist irritation. Quite often people list variants of items as being produced in a particular country which I haven’t had a variant from. In this case it was Italy. You write and check, and they confirm it’s definitely from that country. And then it arrives and it isn’t. So it was with this: it turned out to be a standard European Dutch pressing. I usually don’t bother complaining, it ends up being more trouble than it’s worth. At some point I’ll dump these duplicates onto Ebay at bargain prices, so keep an eye out.
And then a couple of CDs: Canadian Jordan and US Swoon, which I figured out I didn’t have when rehousing the CD collection. This is pure completism of course, nothing remotely magical about the items. This CD rehousing turned up a number of gaps, and also a discovery: I had no idea I had a signed “Gunman”, but found it when shifting from the groaning shelf the CDs were crammed onto into a now dangerously crammed but rather nice chest of drawers style unit.