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Budget brilliance bought when you were broke

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The sad news that Gary Brooker has passed led me to recall that my first proper exposure to Procol Harum as an album band – having obviously heard the mighty ‘Whiter Shade’ and ‘Homburg’ etc. on Wunnerful Radio Wun over the breakfast table – was via this lovely little LP from the cheapo label ‘Music For Pleasure’ (mfp).

I’ve still got the LP, along with several other fine mfp releases (Animals, Monkees at al) and I’ve also got some Starline cheapies and various others from budget labels.

Do you have any, and which are your favourites?

Let’s exclude any of the cheap compilations – ‘Nice Enough’, ‘Picnic’ and so on, we’ve done those quite recently – what about the single artist ones you picked up for 50p or a quid on some dodgy looking budget label, but which led you on to greater and more expensive joys when you subsequently acquired the ‘proper’ albums by the same artist, having had your appetite whetted?

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  1. Remember getting

    Pink Floyd Relics

    Buffalo springfield Expecting to Fly

    Bonzos. Gorilla

    All were 99p and bought from Boots in Coventry Precinct in 1971 or 72.

    Building on the success of Relics, Floyd did Nice Pair, a double album repackage of piper and saucerful.

    Also rememer those cheesy Decca ‘World of’ collections (including one by a certain David Bowie) and two-for-one deals on the Cube label, all of which seemingly involved acts from the Regal Zononphone (coolest label name ever!) label – Procol Harum and Joe Cockerbeing two that spring to mind

    Of the above, still have the Bonzos and Cocker

  2. Like @jaygee, I remember Decca’s ‘The world of..’ series. I bought ‘The World of Them’ in the early 70s. It was the first Van record I owned and I played it to death. Some fantastic stuff on it – Gloria, and Here Comes the Night, of course, but great things like their Its All Over Now Baby Blue, and Turn on Your Lamplight..

    • Re: “Classics for Pleasure was full of great stuff too”

      mikethep speaks the truth here.

      When I was a teenager with no classical LPs at all, I picked up this CPF album for very little money. It was quite brilliant, and was my gateway to baroque concerti.

  4. I got into The Beatles in 1976, all their records were far too expensive at about 3 quid each. However there was a comp in Woolworths for 50p! Had to have that, oops not The Beatles just some “Top of the Pops” style compilation * with unknowns trying to sing their songs

    * The series of records, not the TV show

    • When my parents moved to the Far East due to work, they left their vinyl behind and invested in tapes due to the weight problem. Realising they had no Beatles, we saw a dodgy looking tape with the Fabs’ faces on the cover, and dad took a punt.

      When we got it home, it was a disco compilation, beginning with Stars on 45.

  5. Most of my music growing up was the cheaper versions of full price albums – recording songs off the radio, borrowing yer staple Leopard Cohen and Janis Joplin LPs from the library, taping records off of friends, listening to anything and everything from my parents’ record collection, picking up reduced items in Littlewoods. Browsing in record shops, looking at music I could never afford, thank goodness for Billy Bragg with Back to Basics, The Clash with Sandinista and Springsteen with The River for double or even triple discs at the same or even cheaper than normal retail price. Lots to treasure in all of those.

  7. “Hushed whisper” – The Blues World of Eric Clapton. (1975) A sterling compilation of pre Cream material. Not a dud amongst. Typical non contemporary cover photo to lure the punter.

  8. MFP was essential when you were 12 and had no money outside of a few pence pocket money each week.

    I’ve never forgotten my copy of The Move’s MFP album, Fire Brigade – started a life long love for them and Roy Wood.

    Remarkably still available on vinyl on The Dodgers – £21, mind you ! I think I paid 50p

  10. Virgin’s OVED re-issue catalogue – got Never Mind The Bollocks, Steve Hillage and Rip Rig and Panic (after they were on an episode of The Young Ones) for about 3 quid a pop.

    CBS Nice Price delivered most of The Clash catalogue and some Blue Oyster Cult for a similar ptice.

    EMI’s Fame label was a budget re-issue and got the first WASP album and a couple of New Model Army

    Polydor did for a little while a 2 for 1 album – I got The Jam’s In The City / The Modern World, and All Mod Cons / Setting Sons on double album issues.
    And also Jean Michel Jarre Oxygene / Equinox on tape.
    All 3 less than a fiver

  11. Island were incredibly generous with their mid-price reissues – from about 1984-5 they put the absolute cream of their catalogue in it (Marley, the Reggae Greats series, ; John Martyn, Grace Jones, Robert pPalmer, B52s…) and then it got even better with the Island Life campaign of 1987. they retailed at about two to three quid down on full-price, and during sale campaigns HMV and Virgin would typically bring them down to a delicious £2.99. Best of all, because they were on Island they actually sounded bloody good too. I can't say the same about CBS's Nice Price reissues.

    • I share your reserve about (some of) the ‘Nice Price’ series, but the worst offender as regards a tendency towards ‘never mind the quality, feel the width’ was the sometimes ghastly ‘Golden Hour of’ series. You needed to turn up to 11 to get a decent degree of loudness, and then you could hear the flaws in the very molecular structure of the vinyl.

  12. My early twenties in London – perpetually skint. Only LP’s I could afford were in the sales. Refused to buy compilations cos they were for Straights.
    Only trouble was that I ended with a rather large record collection (who needed food?) which mostly consisted of stuff bought simply because it was cheap. I perpetually persuaded myself that 99% of my purchases were “Really good, especially side 2” when in fact 92.37% of them were simply ok. The rest were crap.

  13. Animals, Beach Boys, Monkees, Floyd, sure, all of them, but you forgot the fella who actually invented music for pleasure, the mighty DONOVAN, with the Catch the Wind collection..

  15. Relics is the obvious one – a bizarre reissue on CD in 1995 without any bonus tracks.

    The only Beatles’ mid-price I got was Rarities, and it was the Beatles album that had the most influence on me and the one I most played.

    When I look on 45cat and the album version, it is the reissues – the cheaper the better- that most interest me even now.

  16. I remember Faust Tapes for 49p – there was about 5 minutes that had anything resembling a tune – the rest sounded like machinery breaking down.
    I seem to remember there was a Gong one too.

  17. I still have the ‘A Salty Dog’ LP, still in good nick even though it’s had many plays. I’ve always been a fan of Procol Harum but never had many of the albums. I’ve rectified that in the last 15 years picking up the album special edition releases.

    As far as those MFP LPs go I think I only have one more the Lovin’ Spoonful LP but that could be one of those ‘Golden Hour’ LPs which contained 30 minutes of non-audiophile music on either side. They sounded good enough to me on my stepdad’s coffin shaped music centre. I think I had other LPs on the‘MFP’ or ‘GH’ labels by Donovan, The Kinks and others I cannot remember.

    On a more somber note I’d like to pay tribute to Gary Brooker for his music legacy. R.I.P Man and thanks.

  18. I won’t reiterate the stuff from above, but what about the Backtrack series? Reissues of Hendrix albums and Who material, several with Hendrix on side and the Who on the other. 99p a pop. Pye’s Marble Arch enabled me to pick up the Kinks, DONOVAN and, oddly, Captain Beefheart at bargain price.

    • Pye had the UK rights at the time for the US Kama Sutra label, which released “Safe As Milk” originally.

      You beat me to it with the Backtrack series. The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown got a cheap re-release in that series too.
      Let us not forget The Beatles “Rock ‘N’ Roll Music”, volumes 1 and 2 came out on MFP in 1976.

  19. When I was a student in Edinburgh in the early 90s I picked up a cassette box set called “The Beatles Box” for a tenner from a second hand record ship just up from the Grassmarket. I think it was a Reader’s Digest issue from 1980 or so, when the Beatles were regarded as Golden Oldies in the same was as Elvis or Buddy Holly. It was on cassette and didn’t have the booklet, which were the reasons I think for the low price. Even though I was a poor student, I knew it was a bargain.

    https://www.discogs.com/release/2259974-The-Beatles-From-Liverpool

    It basically had the bulk of the Beatles catalogue spread across eight tapes, more or less one for each year. It was actually a good way of getting to know the band, as you approached the songs without the famous packaging of the albums getting in the way. Almost like a blind test, if you know what I mean.

    • That kind of packaging of the Beatles etc. was definitely a 1970s/dire 1980s thing and had all but died out by the 1990s and proper releases like Live at the BBC.

      I saw the cover of a 1978 paperback of an early James Bond novel recently, and it looks like a page 3 pin-up. I genuinely got why that was shite at the time and couldn’t understand why these things (very important things) weren’t taken more seriously.

      Ironically, they’re now taken TOO seriously!

      • It’s pretty easy to find actually, used to have a copy but sold it when I needed some dosh. Pretty strange actually, 8 album compilation that still managed to leave out essential stuff

        • I dunno, I think it was a very good compilation. You got stuff like Rain, the single version of Revolution and I’m Down.

          Did it really leave off anything essential? I’d argue that by the time you have got space for songs like Baby I’m a Rich Man, Lovely Rita and Piggies, you’ve well and truly reached the non-essential stuff.

  20. In the “surprised this hasn’t been mentioned before” category we have Strictly Personal on Liberty’s ominously-named Sunset label.

    EDIT: Safe As Milk was re-released on the prestigious Marble Arch label.

    • I’d forgotten that until I was recently going through my rekkids and putting them all on Discogs. The Bonzos first two went to Sunset quite quickly too.

  22. When I was skint and about 13 – I was in Woking Library. They had a vast bin of naked, case-free, ex-public library cassette tapes all for 25p each. Jim Reeves, Elvis and Harry Secombe, James Last…all bollocks. But one day I saw a newish looking one. It was the recently-released Jam LP, Setting Sons ! That was a really good day.

    • Golden Hours on vinyl sounded quite poor as they obviously crammed the grooves together (I’m sure someone technical can describe all this). Presumable the tape versions didn’t suffer in the same way.

      Pye also had the Golden Guinea series in the early 60s – these were 21/- (obviously) when full price albums were 32/6d or so. These were considered cheap at the time. From memory, a lot of Jazz appeared on these reissues…Chris Barber, Acker Bilk, Kenny Ball and so on.

      • I joined this thread to post about Golden Hour Of The Kinks which was still a joy. It’s not as if they were unlistenable and I played my copy many, many times.
        Having said that, not only were the grooves crammed to fit in 30 minutes per side, but a couple of tracks were, quelle horreur, Electronically reprocessed for stereo.

  24. Castle used to do some great compilations for pretty cheap prices.

    I had a Byrds cassette with a pink cover, one by The Kinks and another for The Small Faces. All pretty decent overviews of their best stuff, singles and key album tracks as well

    • I’m sure my first introduction to Hendrix was a Castle CD of some live recordings (with no info whatsoever about dates, venues, etc… so no idea if it was the Experience or one of his later ensembles). I loved it at the time and I’m sure it was £3.99 or something which in 1990 was unbelievably good value for a CD. For a long time I felt the studio versions of his songs didn’t live up to the live versions, as that’s what I was used to.

      • Ah, the mixed blessings of the great live album. It wins you fans but then they investigate the studio albums and find them a bit tame. Anyone who has been introduced to Deep Purple and Thin Lizzy by Made in Japan and Live and Dangerous knows this feeling.

  25. The Move, T.Rex & Procol Harum MFP albums were reissues of earlier versions on Fly Records (called ‘Best of’, they each had 4 multi coloured squares as a cover design). They are among my favourite albums of these artists.

    • I’ve got all three of them, and you’re right – they all have a Fly logo top left on the front cover. I wonder if there were any others in the mfp range that were similarly sourced from Fly releases, and indeed if there were other single artist mfps that were not like that? Anyone know?

      • Given the shared acts – Procol, Cocker and Tyrannasorus Rex – Fly (wrongly attributed as Cube in my earlier post as I think the fly was inside a cube) seems to have been an extension of/successor to the magnificently monickered Regal Zonophone label

        • Fly was formed by Essex Music circa 1971 as an outlet for material recorded by Straight Ahead Productions. Prior to this Straigh Ahead’s material was licensed to EMI and issued on their Regal Zonophone imprint.

          Fly was renamed Cube in 1972 – presumably there were rights issues somewhere over the use of the Fly name.

              • Trainspotter trumpathon continues: I’ve been down an interesting Discogs rabbit hole following up on all of the numerous ‘actual artists’ mfp issues.

                Despite having to negotiate the sometime erroneous listings of mfp releases on Discogs, I eventually found some pattern to the 3 mfp/Fly budget compilations we were talking about – T.Rex, The Move and Procol Harum. They all corresponded to issues under the Fly label series ‘Flyback’, with the coloured quartered sleeves that @garyt mentions above. Respectively they were originally ‘Flyback 2’ – (The best of) T. Rex, ‘Flyback 3’ – (The best of) The Move and ‘Flyback 4’ – (The best of) Procol Harum.

                So you might wonder what happened before and after numbers 2, 3, and 4 of this series. Well, ‘Flyback 1’ was a multi-artist feast and consisted of tracks from all of the single artist ones we’ve already mentioned, plus a smattering of extra tracks, and these can from Richard Henry, Tucker Zimmerman, Junior’s Eyes and Joe Cocker (destined to show up much later on a Castle Classics budget re-release of With A Little Help From My Friends). Titles put out after the ‘Flyback 4’ vinyl release were basically just repeated issues of the same artist compos with a different front cover design, but this time on either 8-track (yes!) or cassette.

                The non-Cocker extra tracks on the ‘Flyback 1’ release at first looked tempting – a decent vinyl copy can be had for about a tenner – but once I realised that I already had the Tucker Zimmerman and Junior’s Eyes tracks on relatively recent CD re-issues, the fervour to blow a tenner on half-a-century-old vinyl swiftly faded.

                Still, a fascinating burrow into the history of mfp, who seem to have put out another LP of ridiculously varied content across almost every week in 1972 alone!

  26. As I mentioned above, I am cataloguing the collection at the moment, and I have just found Ike & Tina’s River Deep Mountain High album on Hamlet, quote ‘The Prince of Record Collections’. Other issues on the back are a sampler, the Carpenters, Burt Bacharach, Herb Alpert and some easy listening titles. Totally forgotten this!

  27. The Warner Bros Show album at a price-busting 59p – released I recall to tie in with a mid-70s tour that included the fabled Doobie Bros/Little Feat Rainbow gig. The album/tour also included funkateers Graham Central Station and kick-started a lifelong love affair with the mighty Tower of Power – plus soft rockers Bonaroo who are surely ripe for a David Hepworth critical reassessment and inclusion on his next “forgotten gems” of the 70s.

    Here’s ToP – seers and prophets even then about fossil fuel longevity:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXlLIX0iBb4

  28. From my dad’s record collection I have the Music For Pleasure version of the Godspell musical. It’s banging! A lot better than the official cast recording. There is a weird slap back echo on the vocals (must have been a glam rock trend) which really sounds brilliant.

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