The worlds greatest record collection?
Posted by Paul Thompson on 20 February 2008 - 9:12am.
If you've got a few quid and a climate controlled warehouse it could be yours. 3 million Records and 300,000 CDs all computer catalogued. I wonder who judged it to be the greatest?.
Starting at $3m it's on sale via ebay but be quick there's not much time left to bid...
I'm glad to see the obligatory quote:
When his collection grew to 160,000 records, his wife gave him an ultimatum: Either he or the records had to go. Paul stayed; the records went. He rented a warehouse with some retail space, where he did more buying than selling.
The best of both worlds and the ultimate shed!
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Wonder how many Oasis cds he has?
I thought the BBC's collection was the largest in the world. Maybe his is the largest private one?
B-i-g
I think that The Smithsonian Institution have got quite a few, also. Maybe more.
The clue is.....
...."everything he could get his hands on": thus it will include the Q best 50 and, in all probability, Country Walks best 50 and Home and Gardens best 50. More is not necessarily, um, more.
For some reason...
This reminds me of a guy I met a few times who worked at a well-known record label in Italy. He proudly boasted that he had "15,000 vinyl albums" before going to proclaim that they were "all still in their original shrink-wrap". He may as well have been collecting stamps.
To be fair...
...in the days of shrink wrapped albums it was the custom to slit the wrap to gain access and then leave the rest of the plastic on. Ah, takes me back,
I used to do the same
And that's what I thought he meant at first. But no, he was keeping them in mint condition, unopened and unplayed.
'T ain't necessarily so
I speak as a lad whose first step on his (ultimately foiled) road towards rock-godhood was to man the mighty turbo-charged, patented, blood-spattered shrink-wrap machine at the Cough-Cough-Cough Shop on Cough-Cough Street.
Returned records - and there were lots ("I thought these Ramones chaps were going to sound like the Bachelors, not this God-awful racket") - were usually just bunged back through the system unless they were scratched beyond all hope. It was less of a hassle than sending them back to the distributors. (If anyone complained about any minor scratches we'd mutter something about "freak pressing faults - these things happen" and give them a money-back chit. And then bung it back through the system.)
Tip of the trade: Hold a vinyl album up to the light at an angle till you're looking at it almost edge on. If it's been played, you'll see the telltale skid marks that the stud in the middle of the turntable made on the label when the owner was fumbling to get the hole in position, as one invariably did. (A bit like sex, wasn't it?)
Telltale skidmarks?
I hope you weren't muddling your metaphors that far, Mr V.
Y-front affront
Me? Never, Mr 2. Never.
Hey, I've just twigged to a conspiracy of huge proportions. Its adepts all have monikers consisting of something meaning reversing plus a number: Retropath2, backwards7. . . See the pattern?
Paranoically yours,
invert34
Far simpler...
Can't speak for the Backwards, but our title is because there are 2 of us. Haven't you seen the picture? It is much more interesting being 2 small dogs than a pedantic pedal steel, prog and (fair)port loving chumbawamba fan.
When I worked in a record shop...
...just before Britain came off the Gold Standard, we had a name for them. "Spindle marks."
That's the word!
Spindle, not stud! How quickly we forget the old technologies we once swore by. In 20 years' time we're going to be saying, "Shuffle mode! Yeah, that's what it was called!"
By the way, Mr H, that shop didn't happen to be the Cough-Cough-Cough Shop on Coughcough Street too, did it? The lore among the longer-serving serfs there was that you had once been One Of Us, with your name being offered up as a beacon of hope for us all in moments of particular despair.
Re Wordstaffer contributions
I forget from the picture offered up, but do Fraser and Heppo sit alongside each other?
Yes, yes,I know, it is the worthiness of the sharing rather than the sentiment of the saying....
Never next to
But occasionally opposite
That's not a record collection...
Nobody can consciously choose 3.3 million records and CDs in a lifetime. And as for listening to them all, well unless his name was Methusalah... What a meaningless thing to do with records, collecting them like stamps. It's just an Ob-Com disorder, or someone with more money to invest than he knew what to do with. A guy I used to work with told me that his girlfriend's Dad, who was loaded, used to go into a local record shop once a month, and ask them to give him all that month's releases, which he would then buy, completely indiscriminately. Insane, and in no way related to being interested in music. Twats.
So how many is one allowed to have?
I have more records than I ever listen to. Do I have to give them up?
Nah
...of course not. I think most of present company would have to flog their collections, were that the case. I'm including myself. But I bet you listened to most of your purchases at least once, when you bought them, yes? Three million records - even if they were all 3-minute singles and the buyer only listened to the A-side - would take 20 years to listen to ONCE. That's without any sneaking off to sleep or work, either. 20 *continuous* years. And that's only the small secondary matter of *listening* to the buggers. The process of selecting them would take even longer. So obviously most of these were just bought as job-lots, sight unseen (and unheard). It's the only way that collection could possibly be amassed by one person. A bit different to the way me and thee have acquired our floorboard-bothering collections, I'll bet.
No, definitely not
A couple of weeks ago I was asked if I "needed" all the records I have. I said I didn't need them, but was very happy to have tem.
So Elton did have a child with Renata!
Well, doesn't he do that? Or am I thinking of Karl Lagerfelds 500 i-pods.
Either way
He's obviously not as loaded as Elton
wasn't the story that he would buy multiple copies, one for every house.
"You can't have everything. Where would you put it?"
At the time of his death, John Peel's record collection was estimated to include around 26,000 vinyl LPs, 40,000 singles and 40,000 CDs.
Elton John was said to have the second largest private collection in the UK. I think I'm right in saying Elton buys a copy of every top 40 record, though I don't know if that's still true.
Andy Kershaw wrote in Songlines magazine that when he moved to the Isle of Man his family's possessions weighed (I think) eleven tonnes in total, of which seven tonnes were records. Not sure if I've got the figures right, but it was a striking way to put it.
Elton's collection
I'm sure I read that Elton takes 5 copies of every record he buys so that he can have one in each of his houses.
Ah, so that explains. . .
. . .why "Nikita" was a hit.
Wasn't Nikita a hit
Because it was easy on the ear and didnt require the listener to make any effort? bit like most all other chart singles in recent years?
Know what you mean about record collections and how often you get to play the music therein.I frequently recall cd's I havent heard for a while and make a mental note to play them the next time i am having a music session. Another whizz idea is to close your eyes, randomly take 6 cd's from your collection and put them into your multichanger cd player in the car (assuming of course you have one). its a bit like playing the randomiser game but a bit of a bugger if you pick 6 you really dont want to hear and you are on a long journey!!!