Theme: Spend £5.00 in a charity shop

Present: Bob Mark Kul and Martin

As we hadn’t seen each other in a while, this was a catch up session as much as anything round at my house.

I used my £5.00 in various local charity shops. In the one on our estate I picked up the 1969 Elvis TV special ‘comeback’ LP and 2 tapes for £1.50. One of the tapes was ‘Wicked Games’ a Chris Isaak comp that has the instrumental version of the title track (as used in the film ‘Wild at Heart’, but doesn’t feature on the ‘Wild at Heart’ soundtrack album!). The other tape was the Frank Black LP ‘Frank Black’ from 93 containing a massive 15 tunes – An absolute bargain!

Next to the Cancer Research shop in Moortown - Got 2 CD singles - The Sultans of Ping FC novelty hit ‘Where’s me jumper’ for £0.75, The wonderful ‘I want you’ by Inspiral Carpets (with Mark E Smith helping on vocals-ah) for £1.00 and a tape of Elvis Costello’s ‘Armed Forces’ for £0.30 that has a live version of ‘Accidents will happen’ as an extra track.

With my last £1.45 I went along the parade to the Oxfam shop where I found another 2 CD singles – ‘Last stop this town’ by the Eels (featuring a Moog version of their hit ‘Novocaine for the soul’) and ‘All the small things’ by Blink 182, both for £0.49………47 pence change from a fiver – I was very proud of myself!

Mark used his £5.00 on an LP he heard being played in the Headingley Oxfam shop (it has a large, dedicated music section). “I loved the 1st track, then the 2nd was just as good and by the third I asked if I could buy it”. ‘Planet Funk – Funky 45’s’ features Aaron Collins and Lee Dorsey who I’d heard of, and 10 other artists I hadn’t (Freddy Scotts Orchestra, Wilbur Bascomb, The Dynamic Concepts…etc.). It instantly made us feel like we were in a Quentin Tarrantino film – I felt obliged to offer them drugs whilst waving a gun around and swearing profusely.

Kul hadn’t really grasped the concept and spent £5.00 at a charity shop……on a new baby chair (he was about to have twins).

Martin (fairly new to parenthood) just hadn’t had time to get to a charity shop so brought his vinyl collection round that he’d recently recovered from his mums attic – which he very kindly donated to my collection, as he hasn’t had a record player in years. There were 30+ LPs that I didn’t have including (for the 2nd time tonight) Inspiral Carpets ‘Life’ and a brace of Monochrome Set LPs. There was also 40+ singles including 2 x 45s I’d always wanted, ‘Kinky Boots’ by Patrick MacNee + Honor Blackman – and ‘Stakker Humanoid’ by Humanoid – What a result!

During the evening (I can’t quite remember how) Marks love of the London Underground map came up, which got me to dig out the map with bands replacing station names and the lines being different musical genres – a work of genius.

Mark and Kul are comic aficionados so I got out my latest purchase (The comics journal library, Volume 2: Frank Millar (2003) Fantagraphics Books, Seattle ) – a fabulous book of interviews with Frank Millar heavily illustrated with his work. It was one of those books I was flicking through whilst having a coffee in ‘Borders’ and just didn’t have the heart to put it back on the shelf. Millars wonderful illustrations for ‘Sin City’ lead onto a conversation about his film work. He gets a pencil in his head in the Daredevil movie, wrote Robocop2 – not bad – and Robocop3 – a bloody awful film! We all agreed that the original Robocop movie was one of our top 10 films so we rounded off the night watching it – “I’d buy that for a dollar!”