Shrink - Valid or Void. Great song but sung by a fat bowie wannabe who painted his head silver. Have the 7 inch from 79ish.

Spacehopper - Silent Film. Just great. Have cd single - bought about 3 years ago.

Not strictly 'music' as such, rather a musical description of a surgical operation. My late aunt owned this record... I think it may have belonged to her father, who was a doctor. 'Obscure' hardly does this justice...

Front cover:

Inner sleeve left:

Inner sleeve right:

Back cover:

Probably sold about half a copy. I still love it though.

http://www.littlehits.com/songoftheday/Modesty%20Blaise.mp3

Robinson Soup EP. 1992.Came with 2 little stickers which are still in perfect condition.

I don't know anyone who parted cash for it.....maybe until now.

A great favourite of mine is the one and only album by Nut, called Fantanicity. Gorgeous voice, some very good songs, and one minor classic, Giant. She's so obscure that even a fan website I found a few years ago knew next to nothing about her.

Last I heard she was recording under her real name, Cat Goscovitch, though I don't know if anything's actually appeared. And I went to see her play a gig in Islington a few years ago. She didn't turn up.

Debut production job by one Owen Morris (later of Oasis knob-twiddling fame) which features Boo Hewerdine on a couple of tracks as well as a marvellous version of Pennies From Heaven. Bought and paid for.

This is one in a series of close to a hundred albums from North Korea's finest pop orchestra, the Pochonbo Electronic Ensemble.

It includes such stirring anthems as Mother Party Protecting Me, Song of the Anti-Japanese War, and the revolutionary classic The Leader Has Come To Our Outpost.

I picked it up in a stamp shop in Pyongyang.

They sound as every bit as good as you'd think. I have them on a split single with a song by Hugo Race's early band "Plays With Marionettes." Hugo is a name some people may know as he was in The Bad Seeds at one stage.

Its a bit of a toss-up as to which side of that single is worse.

...by The Wimps. This was released in 1979 and it's brilliant. Their one and only single I think.

"Lifepulse".

Sax playing by Mr Will Gregory, amongst others. Mr Gregory, on being informed by a mutual friend that I owned this LP, commented, "So it was him.".

A demo disc featuring Burt Weedon, and a cheesy American announcer "Burt will now play a few bars of boogie, with echo".

That's my best shot.

...I have various psych/prog rarities and oddities but they certainly aren't obscure compared to the stuff being mentioned here!!

I did once have a heavy/blues rock album by some guy called Creepy John Thomas which was worth around £75, and also a tribute to Deep Purple by a band called Funky Junction. This band were actually mainly members of Thin Lizzy under a pseudonym.

...an album by a band called The Oasis called What is the Story Morning Glory which is now worth more than 50 pence. They were active in the Manchester area in the 1990s I believe. Very strange album indeed.

I picked up the excellent Triage for £1 in an Oxford Street record shop many years ago after David Hepworth played him on his old GLR programme.
Not a name that stirs much excitement in the general population. I thought he might make a breakthrough when he got signed to Lost Highway and released Here Comes The New Folk Underground.

Premiata Forneria Marconi, or PFM as they were more readily known? Recorded on ELP's Manticore label, I have the albums "The World Became The World" and "Cook", their live offering.

As for Gee Mr Tracy - I've got the "Lava Man" single. Hasn't aged well.

...PFM's 'The World Became The World' and 'Photos Of Ghosts'.

As for Oasis, I'm really tired of seeing second hand copies of 'What's The Story Morning Glory' and 'Be Here Now'. It's as if a whole nation bought them then decided they didn't want/like them!

This is the forum to ask for help! - which German prog band produced an album called something like "Such is Life" with a Circus motif on the front cover? Came out in about 1974. My (first!) girlfriend bought it for me and I, ahem, lost it in the great Record Collection Reappraisal of 1977. This has been bugging me for YEARS.

"Come On In Here If You Want To" is a funny little LP I picked up yonks ago, with various REM members contributing to a shambolic din.

As a saturnine young anarcho-punk rocker, I bought the interminably glum album 'In Darkness, There is No Hope' by Anti-Sect. It's basically sped-up Black Sabbath with luyrics even a daily dose of Ritalin couln't cheer up. Y'know, all nuclear anxiety and smash-the-cistern (sic). Cost me about three quid as it was on one of the pay-no-more-than stylee Crasstarfarian labels. (Which I heartily applaud, but that's another topic for debate)

I suspect no one outside of a black-clad coterie of miserablists will ever have heard it. Naturally. I still sustain an immense fondness for it.

Even more obscuro was the Peter Paints His Fence EP by the Instant Autonoms. It was recorded in the tumbleweed-enshrouded village just outside Scunthorpe where I grew up and mooched incessenantly. It's a two-chord affair about Russian anarcho-type Peter Kropotkin and failed to graze the Fab Four Thousand, let alone 40. Can whoever half-inched my copy give it back please.

to the one I get reading 99% True. To each of the above I've thought 'Now that one is DEFINITELY made up'....apart of course from "Pochonbo Electronic Ensemble" which I saw in the Colston Hall in 1982 (I think)

some treasures under my iTunes collection's 'Ancient Greek' genre (e.g. 'Secular Music of Greek Antiquity Vol. 2' by Petros Tabouris). The ancient Greeks were apparently strangers to the concept of musical harmony. Listening to this, it seems that they may have had the occasional 'senior moment' regarding the concepts of rhythm and melody as well. Some tracks (e.g. 'Kolavrismos') rock, though. I think if you had a goat that needed sacrificing, nothing else would quite do justice to the occasion.

A while ago, 'The Independent' gave away a couple of CDs of 'British Birdsong' and I have these on my iTunes. I suppose you could debate whether this is music or not but it nicely supplements the efforts of our feathered chums in the garden of a weekend evening. Really quite relaxing, until the Corncrake comes on ...

Holidays are always good for finding something different. I have a particular fondness for my album of hurdy-gurdy music from the Auvergne ('Musique Pour Vielle A Roue' by Gilles Chabenat). I also have a very fine CD of 18th century Prussian military marches ('Preussens Gloria' by the Stabsmusikkorps Berlin) that I bought in a souvenir shop in Potsdam. Can't remember why exactly. The sort of stuff Frederick the Great would have sung in the bath. Just the thing for releasing your inner BMW-driver, should you require this. I play it occasionally to annoy the family.

I have a CD called On Fading Out by a band called Rooney - not the LA band signed to Geffen, oh no.

I've only played it once, the songs as I recall are doom-laden indeed and the production sounds as though the cd was recorded in my bathroom.

I bought it from Vinyl Exchange in Manchester, purely because my surname was Rooney.

It appears to date from about 1998/9. Inside the case is a slip that says:

"Common Culture Records are pleased to present this new collection of 15 songs of ordinary life, the follow up to the very well received debut album Time On Their Hands." (No, not heard of that one either)

If anyone else has a copy.....

"Records are Like Life" by Andy Pratt !
Does anyone else, apart from Andy's mum ?

WFMU has a page of info and 2 mp3 samples from this album at: http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2007/04/365_days_97_nor.html

I have a 12" single buried somewhere in the loft called Taking Ambridge which was a Coldcut/Avalanches style cut and paste dance record complete with sound clips of characters from The Archers, farmyard animals, etc. I loved it at the time (1989?) but I cannot find it anywhere on the net because I can't remember the "artist". Anyone care to help?

The best that I can come up with is an album by Transylvanian blackmetallers Negură Bunget, titled: 'N Crugu Bradului. It's a concept album with each of the tracks representing a different season (they all sound like winter to me). The digipack version comes with an authentic cutting from a Transylvanian forest.

"Should the World Fail to Fall Apart" by Peter Murphy in Gatefold Sleeve. Can't be many people who have that, or maybe I'm wrong......

. . . "The awful disclosures of Maria Monk" by Woody Kern
and "Different Breed" by Beltane Fire
The Woody Kern one is not desoerately good - I think Rik Kenton later of Roxy Music fame is on it
The Beltane Fire album is a corker but not available on CD more's the pity

"LUMINESCENT ORCHESTRII IS: Romanian gypsy melodies, punk frenzy, salty tangos, hard-rocking klezmer, haunting Balkan harmony, hip-hop beats and Appalachian fiddle, all eaten and spit out by two violins, resophonic guitar, bullhorn harmonica and bass." Saw them at a free lunch time show in Aberdeen and bought their "Too Hot to Sleep" album which is great for threatenng the kids with when they want some noisy crap on in the car. Worth checking out at lumii.com.

Does anyone slse have a copy of Pete Shelley's Sky Yen? A great lost masterpiece.

....but I have a couple of cds that *I* think are obscure, but you'll probably be telling me that they're almost mainstream.

Rockin' Sidney - I'm Your Man

Louisiana guitar and accordian player. Blues, Zydeco and a bucketful of soul.

Larry Johnson(with Brian Kramer and the Couch Lizards) - Two Gun Green

Blues singer/guitarist/harmonica player who sounds absoulely nothing like any other blues performer that I'm familiar with. Even though some of his songs are *down*, he's obviosly having fun....tells great stories. The backing band are a blues trio from Stockholm.

Can't remember how I got them, but almost certainly it would've been after listning to a Paul Jones blues programme on Radio 2. Is Radio 2 mainstream?

Every time I stick on the monthly Word CD on at work my colleagues bemoan the fact that I put on "obscure" or "unknown" artists on. Do me a favour here give you ears a clean out, there is music beyond the charts for goodness sake.

Their music comes free with a daily newspaper not a monthly quality music magazine.

"Who's that?" or "Never heard of him" arrogance that drives me up the wall. And some of these are Word magazine favourites too.

Any one for Matmos? I've threatened to play them to see their reaction.

Fields And Waves by .O.Rang on the sound grounds that it's by ex-Talk Talk members.

It's, er, a bit experimental and improvised.

Willing to accept offers below the £4.99 current eBay benchmark.

I have Herd of Instinct on CD and on my iPod. It doesn't appear to have been played on the latter. Ever. But my Russian rave-enthusiast friend Sergei seemed to like it.

My oddity / obscurity is "Hybrid Kids" from 1979, which is a series of famous songs done in a bizarre style. Like the Chipmunks in a parallel and quite sinister Universe. So there's "God Save the Queen" by Punky and Porky and "Wuthering Heights" by Jah Wurzel. The latter is sung in a West Country accent and played in a dub style.

The cover art uses a disturbing Francis Bacon triptych, just to make the whole thing even more offputting.

The perpetrator was Morgan Fisher, ex-Mott the Hoople.

Now I know she isn't obscure however I did buy an album called Tom's Diner which has 15 versions of her song Tom's Diner done in different styles and languages by a variety of artists including a group called 'Bingo Hand Job'. There is also a version by Beth Watson called Waiting at the Border set to the tune of Tom's Diner but the lyrics are about the first Gulf war with Geurge Bush speaking through it.

The Brothers Band with their 1976 eponymous album on the Humber Records label, featuring covers such as Rock'n'Me, Magneto & Titanium Man plus naturally Elton John's Grimsby .

About a year ago I found a copy of double CD of electronic doodles that even Itunes describes as 'unclassifiable' at my local Record exchange in Birmingham. The CD is called 'Infrasonic Waves' and it cost me £1. I bought it on the strength of a tune (I use the term loosly) by Avrocar which I 'd once heard Radiohead play on Radio 1 and had never been able to track down.

When I returned to the office to boast of my fantastic bargain I was met with so many blank faces. Please tell me i'm not the only person to have had this experience?

Anyway - I now play one of the tracks 'Pondcup' by Charles Atlas' at bedtime to get by youngest daughter to sleep. It seems to do the trick.

I have a single by the Roaring '60s called We love the pirate stations. I only heard it once on Radio Caroline in the 80s though I assume it was popular on Caroline in the 60s ! I tracked it down second hand somewhere and have hardly ever seen it for sale since, though it does get a mention in this month's Record Collector of music banned by the Beeb. Sample lyric: there's some swinging DJs playing top 40 records, they can really turn you on, now the government's trying to close down the stations,what'll happen when they're gone ?'

I also have Indians in Moscow's single 'Naughty Miranda' - they were from Hull and this was a throw away copy from the local Viking Radio station, also in the 80s.

Here's a one. Does anyone else have the Album 'Mainstream' by Quiet Sun. Featuring Phil Manzanera, Brian Eno & others. The album may actually be called Quiet Sun and the band Mainstream but there you go. Its riddled through with jazz rock meanderings but some of it is stunning. "Mummy was an asteroid, Daddy was a small non-stick kitchen utensil" must surely be the best/worst best song titles of all time.

Can't even be sure where or how I bought this but think it was a mail order only item

thanks

Can I claim an album is obscure if the band turn out to have a myspace page I wonder. Well I'll have a go.

"Be Seeing You" (aka BC in U) by the Maroondogs, Kent-based pub band of the 1980s. I thought I had a copy of their first album "Apart from the Physically Impossible", but that seems to have succumbed to the ravages of house moves.

"Daphne Dear" was always a favourite with its rousing chorus:

You don't even think of me as someone you can talk to
You don't think of Timbuktu as somewhere you can walk to
So change your mind, my Daphne Daphne dear
And please love me again

Sheer genius.

Ring any bells?

Picked up an album by a band called The Braille Drivers in a bargain bin in a record shop in America simply because I liked the cover and the song titles. The record wasn't much cop though. I think apart from stuff by friends' bands that's probably the most obscure record I own.

No, not THAT Iron Maiden. This was a rock trio who were Bolton's biggest band in the early 70's. They disbanded when guitarist Beak sadly died of cancer without releasing any records.

However, 30 years after his death studio and live CDs were brought out to raise money for cancer charities with the permission and support of the current Iron Maiden. Listen to tracks on this Myspace page and visit their site for a full history.

http://www.myspace.com/theboltonironmaiden