I’ve been neglecting the postbag roundups recently, due to a lot of travel and other things happening. And it doesn’t half build up when you let it.
Some excellent material in this stash however, which I’ll attempt to enumerate. The first picture shows the basic totality, spread onto the sofa.
In this pile we have a metric shit-ton of magazines, too many to list, including Turkish, Greek, US, Italian and others. Plus a couple of picture spreads and posters from magazines as individual cuttings. There’s a Rollmo fanzine and Hong Kong Video CD bootleg of “Life of Surprises” courtesy of David S. Couple of singles, one purporting rather unconvincingly to be a translucent “Irish Pressing” (hmmm), the other a “Lions” I got on spec as it might have been something I hadn’t seen, but which isn’t anything very interesting. Cassette-wise, a promo version of “Steve McQueen” (again, uninteresting). Plus the very interesting indeed hens-teeth edition of “Langley” from South Africa.
We have a German press-kit for “The Gunman”. To the left of that is an invitation from the Tube to an aborted (due to TV strike) “Summer Tube” concert. And in the middle of the pile is a BBC 6music CD of the Reading Concert from a Canadian Radio Station. Theoretically this might have been better than the recent digital broadcasts in 320Kbps, but it turns out not to be all that great sonically. But anyway a nice thing to have.
And then we move on to the signed stuff.
The centrepiece is the signed storecard application form I referenced a while ago. Then a few (!) albums including 2 copies of “Swoon”, a “Langley”, “Jordan” and “Protest Songs”. The latter is pretty difficult to find signed, and the last four came with an impeccable provenance from a fan who had them signed in Sheffield having followed the band back to the hotel after the 1990 gig, also helping Wendy find an earring. There was also a “Steve McQueen” in the same group which someone in the US nabbed before I got there (not the same as the recent Ebay copy).
The funny thing is I feel I’ve been collecting less and less, but there is an accretion effect so that a few purchases here and there do start making a daunting pile. Tomorrow is dedicated to putting them all safely away into their allotted storage places.