I know there are some Stephen Duffy fans on here – get yourselves over to SDE as Pete Paphides has launched a new label. One of his first releases is the Stephen Duffy I love my friends album from 1996 with a bonus cd of rarities/unreleased songs. You can get a signed version and support a noble cause which if successful might help get further Duffy rarities released.
Stephen Duffy news
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Thanks for this. ILMF* is difficult to get hold of so it’s about time.
SD is a genius. All of his stuff is worth having.
(*Anyone want to play Let’s Second-Guess Moose’s Predictive Text?)
seconded
Wasn`t once nick-named Stephen `Tin Head` Duffy?
No, you are confusing him with a character from Brookside.
See also Lloyd “Harry Cross” Cole.
Sinbad was so-named because his window cleaning technique would have been perfect for sea-faring vessels with portholes – but was found wanting in respect of the houses in Brookside Close.
Areh! It’s der busies!
Already ordered them both, although I already have 5 different versions of the album on CD! I’ve been a Duffy collector since Kiss Me hit the charts and my Duffy collection is one of only two that I kept (the other being The Dream Academy) that I kept when I flogged off all my vinyl in the early 90s to fund the new CD collection. I shudder to think what it’d all have been worth today, because I had some very good stuff, including some great Beatles rarities. In the days before eBay it was all sold to shops in Liverpool and Manchester, so I only got a fraction of what it was worth back then. If I flick through Record Collector I make sure I never look at any prices they put on things.
The Duffy collection took a lot of effort, scouring record fairs, second hand shops and the listings in Record Collector. It then got a bit of a boost when I moved to London, as I got loads of things in the Music and Video Exchange in Notting Hill. And then when the internet and eBay came into the house anything missing was snapped up quite quickly. I was over in Manchester on Saturday to watch Brother Ali and I was lamenting to the wife about my payday ritual of heading over to Manchester and scouring all the record shops for what I wanted. Liverpool was okay for record shops, but Manchester was so much better. Getting on to the internet and eBay was exciting, as I was able to pick up records I’d never even seen before, the best being the 12″ of Baby Impossible from a bloke in Mexico who sent it the cheap way (it took around 6 weeks to arrive!), but it took a lot of the fun out of it. But I ended up with a stupidly large Stephen Duffy collection, including some very nice items and, to my knowledge, I’m only missing one thing – the withdrawn 7″ of Baby Impossible. I’ve pretty much given up looking for it now, as it’s around 15 years since I’d got everything else.
But I would love to go back in time and experience one of my record shopping days again, as it was so much more fun than eBay and Discogs. I went into a few shops in Manchester, but none of the shops are likely to have the kind of CDs I’m looking for any more, as it’s all about (overpriced) vinyl these days. My wife would point out here that to comfort myself after the disappointing shopping experience on Saturday I then sat and ordered 17 CDs off eBay/Discogs/Amazon on Sunday night (all for the sum of £78 delivered I may add!). Scuba’s Triangulation and Ed Rush’s Wormhole arrived this morning, so 15 to go…
I know what you mean, Paul. A music-hunting trip to That London was an occasional treat.
My German pal used to come over for a gig once or twice a year and we’d spend a day up to the smoke on the train, traipse round the discount bins of Berwick Street (including one place in a basement with green mould up the walls), Cheapo-Cheapo in Rupert Street, lunch in Chinatown, have a beer, talk some nonsense, bus to Notting Hill, basment of M&VE. A backpack full of random CDs for less than a quid each.
Nowadays we just go online.
Always found record shopping in London to be something of a disappointment considering the size of the city. Certainly these days it doesn’t compare to large cities in North America (Toronto, Montreal, Chicago) that still offer lots of options.
Most of the Soho spit-and-sawdust places we went to are long gone.
We’re talking record shops, yeah?
I really miss record shopping. It doesn’t work now because I pretty much have everything I want and the few CDs that I do want are obscure underground hip hop CDs that I can only get by paying big bucks on Amazon marketplace. I couldn’t even find any shops in New York that had what I want, although to be fair I didn’t stray in the boroughs most likely to have shops that sold that kind of CD!
This reminds me of an old mate of mine back in the 80s, who had spent 20+ years trying to collect every Kinks record. I still recall him calling me a year or so after I had moved to Liverpool to tell me he’d finished, he’d collected everything there was. He really sounded quite down, as his main hobby had just ended. He didn’t know what to do next. But when I next saw him, a few weeks later everything was back on track, as he’d flogged the lot and started again!
Actually, I went on to work with a guy in Brighton who had been collecting everything the Beatles had issued. He’d finished that a couple of years before I met him and his collection was staggering. I had a decent Beatles collection, but nothing like that. What he did then, rather than flogging them, was box them up, shove them in his attic and start again. He was well on the way with the second collection by the time I met him.
Define “every record”. Every release? Every pressing? The Argentinian one-sided acetate?
CASSETTES??
It’s the road to madness I tells yer.
Yep, as far as I’m aware it was every single thing. I think I’m only one withdrawn 7” away from a complete Stephen Duffy collection, with umpteen versions of some releases, and that took ages and a lot of money (Duffy is someone whereby the value of most of the records fell with the advent of eBay, so a few rare obscurities aside it’s one of the only vinyl collections that’s lost money!), so God knows how much the Beatles collection cost. To be fair, he’d been collecting them pretty much from Love Me Do being released, so he’ll have had the bulk of them before the 60s were out.
Only one withdrawn 7″ away… isn’t that all of us?
⬆️
🎩🎩 off Moose, once more.
I understand how your friend felt.
I have quests for a particular album or book that isn’t easy to find. I know these things can be got on-line, but that isn’t the point. But once I have bought the thing and the search has ended there is a sense of deflation, until something else piques my interest.
Current quest is for the second and third Vinegar Joe albums (Rock ‘n Roll Gypsies and Six Star General), preferably on vinyl, but I would settle for CD. My desire was ignited by a VJ torrent I downloaded last year.
I’ve got really back into record shopping – My default setting when landing in a town or city I’ve not been to before is to find the record shop (which these days is starting to get easier) , and my default Saturday afternoon is to go record shopping. I’m not really a completist and definitely not interested in collecting different variations of the same record. I’ve got a ‘wants’ list that I could easily mop up online but where’s the fun in that? I’ve also still got that thing of stumbling over something interesting in a crate that I didn’t know I wanted and taking a chance – and trying to broaden my tastes into other areas so picking up particularly 70s and early 80s stuff that I’ve missed – lots of catching up to do.
Sorry…back to Stephen ‘Tin Tin’ Duffy….
I was in the Rough Trade shop in Shoreditch the other eveining (for a book signing event for Ashes To Ashes, the second Dame songbook from Chris O’Leary, if you must know).
I was amazed (I wasn’t) that in one of the world epicentres of hipsterism that a record store with a huge range of vinyl was doing so well.
I have 99.99% of the music I want but the downside is that I don’t get the enjoyment I used to get when I go record shopping, same as you Paul. In times past when I’d go record shopping I’d have a load of LPs in my hands after 30 minutes. Now I have to look out for recommendations of music I’ve not heard but have an interest in so I have something to look out for when shopping.
I still get a thrill out of record shopping but it is a much less frequent hobby now due to various factors. One of my aims is to visit record shops in each new country I visit. In recent years this has included Moscow and Stockholm and this year hope to go to record shops in Guadalajara Mexico and Porto.
UK shops still get a look in – I know it’s frowned upon but Record Store Day this year has some things of interest so a day in Leamington Spa beckons.
Ever been to that shop in Rugely, @steveT ? (Ever FOUND that shop in Rugely, having failed myself on a number of occasions?)
@retropath2 are you sure it even exists? Never found it.
http://www.thoseoldrecords.co.uk/About-Us
Only open thursday to saturday………
To resurrect this thread, I’ve just read an interview with Peter Paphides, where he says that Duffy contacted him to ask if he’s interested in an album’s worth of songs he has found from around the time of I Love My Friends. These are full recordings and brand new, never released songs, not b-sides or demos or anything. So us Duffy fans could be getting a treat along the lines of the Prefab Sprout album that got released a few years ago. Wouldn’t it be great if more artists had done this.
And, following in from the lamenting about the lost pastime of record shopping, I was down in London visiting a friend off the bottom end of Edgware Road and had a bit to time to kill afterwards, so I popped to Notting Hill and went to the Music and Video Exchange. I used to love my trips down there, when they had half a dozen different shops that seemed to cater for everything that I spent my money on. I wasn’t expecting it to feel the same, what with the bottom dropping out of the second hand CD market (other than eBay and Discogs of course) and with me having pretty much everything I want apart from a few obscure hip hop albums, but it was a sad experience. Very little stock compared to their heyday.
The Soul and Dance Exchange is no more and is represented by a section of what used to be the vinyl floor and the hip hop section was a couple of dozen CDs. I bought one of them (Nia by Blackalicious), however, but more to stop it being a wasted journey, as I have it in MP3, but it is a good album and was only £2. I did pick up Vs by Mission of Burma downstairs though, but again it’s something I have on download. Good album though. But I fear that it will be my last visit to a shop I spent a lot of time in during the 90s.
I have to say, however, that at least the guys behind the counter were pleasant, which they very rarely were 20 years ago. The lass who used to work on the vinyl floor used to scare the shit out me. Didn’t matter what I bought, it’d get a sneer.