Shopping for Steve McQueen Vinyl

I did a post some time ago about finding Steve McQueen on the cheap. At the time I was surprised how the prices had jumped, having been used to picking things up for virtually nothing. And particularly this was the case for vinyl.

So having posted yesterday about the new vinyl release, which you can get for about fifteen quid, I thought I’d do a quick scan of LPs on Ebay to see what’s around and how the prices were going.

Ebay is an interesting place to buy, as the sellers are often inexperienced. The good part of that is that sometimes things get underpriced, but the bad thing is the condition reports can be less than reliable so you do have to proceed with a bit of caution. I did wheel over to Discogs and Musicstack for a look at what they have, but although there are cheapish copies around, the dealers know what they’re about and the “Near Mint” ones, which is what you would probably want, are pretty expensive. “Very Good” isn’t what it appears, it means a lot of surface noise.

But anyway, we do have this Nice Price pressing with a very tempting low bid of 99p and not extortionate postage and packing, so difficult to go wrong on that if the bidding doesn’t go much higher. Click on the picture to have a look.

sm1

$_57Proceeding carefully through the list of LPs sorted lowest price to highest, I found a mug. OK, it’s not vinyl, and you could probably have the above vinyl for less than the mug, but I like mugs.
 
Actually, on a tangent, might be fun to do one of those mugs with a heat activated design where Paddy takes his leather jacket off. Or Wendy her sweater. Or Neil’s knees go blue. Or Martin’s ears waggle.$_57

Passing by the £2.99 Kitchenware release (plus £4.50 UK P&P) on buy it now but which is a little risky on condition (graded only VG), we get to a Near Mint Vinyl Kitchenware release on £8.99 with free postage (click on the label graphic, left). Which is the one I’d probably go for if I wanted the album on vinyl and was running on a budget.

Prices head a bit rapidly north from there, to the point where you might as well have the new pressing. I chortled a bit at someone proudly listing an A2/B2 matrix as a “first pressing”; plenty of A1/B1 first pressings around but it doesn’t mean much anyway because the pressing plants had perfectly good quality control and variation was minimal. If you want a genuine early first pressing, by the way, the white label promos are the way to go, and they do come up surprisingly regularly if you keep your eyes open.

I also noted a “warehouse” find of a mint Nice Price pressing which would be great if it wasn’t massively overpriced.

But there is one prize on Ebay currently, and if you want a no holds bar de luxe vinyl version it’d be the delectable factory sealed Japanese pressing below, which I have to say isn’t at all expensive for what it is.

I’ve spoken about the Japanese pressings before, they are gloriously high quality. Looking at the pictures, this one seems to have a few minor war wounds, lower part of the sleeve looks a little squashed from the photo, but it’s going to be mint vinyl. You get a lyric sheet in Japanese and I think English, which as I recall misses out the bit about Pearl Harbor. You MUST get the Obi strip with anything Japanese – it’s the blue strip down the left of the sleeve – they’re not worth much without it.

If money is no object, that’s the one to go for I reckon. Ultimate McQueen. For all else the average price for a decent copy looks like something around £10. But then again, it is car boot season…

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