Week 9: Industrial Grab Bag

Some Coil and Throbbing Gristle seven inch singles and related fanzines. I never saw TG live, as I was 11 when they split up. They existed as this weird phantom overlooking many of the bands I got into in the mid 80s. This was before the Mute reissue programme, so the vinyl took a bit of effort tracking down. I eventually got hold of Heathen Earth at the Reading Festival, praying that the record wouldn’t get damaged in the heat or under the DMs of my tent-mate.

I’m keeping the albums, obviously. But the seven inches… original Industrial Records pressings? Camouflage outer bags? Not played in at least 8 years? A no-brainer… ditto an obscure Coil seven inch in blue vinyl and random zines including a Diamanda Galas programme from her awesome performance at the Royal Festival Hall circa 1988.

Result: The seven inches averaged out at about a tenner. The zines for less. Diamanda Galas trumped them all at £11.00.

Week 10: Terminus

I was reaching the end of my tether, really. The novelty had completely worn off by now and I was going through the motions with the listings, barely adding any interesting trivia about the items. Spending Sunday evenings on ebay, Monday evenings packing stuff up and most of my lunch break on Tuesdays in the post office was proving very wearing. I can see the attractions of doing this as a full time job, but I don’t think it’s for me – and anyway I already have a job, and something resembling a life outside it, so this wasn’t strictly necessary. I even lost interest in blogging about it all, so pardon me if I keep this brief!

I finished off with a couple of records I’d bought cheap with a view to flogging them at a later date. One was by “The Burmoe Brothers” – an early effort by Guy Chambers (of Robbie Williams fame) from the 80s featuring Marc Almond on vocals. I think it was a bit jazzy, but I actually couldn’t even be arsed to listen to it again.

The other was a more interesting effort by The Bongos – a NY post punk band on Fetish Records, featuring Cosey from TG on one track.

Also some rare-ish Psychic TV singles and CDs and related fanzines/books. Oh and some bonkers texts from the bloke out of goth group Christian Death about the end of the world and setting up a paramilitary organisation. I am still not clear why he sent them to me.

Result: The rare records I’d acquired to sell on went for 99p each. This alone adequately flags up my complete lack of business acumen. The rest went for roughly what I expected it to.

Miscellania

I ran into Danny in Spittalfields Market and tried to palm a load of occult books off on him. I assumed he must know some freaky people who are still obssessed by all this stuff. My better half was impressed by my new zeal for geting rid of things. But either he doesn’t know any wand-wavers or like me he’s realised that a lot of it is too much trouble.

Get home and divvy up a load of books into 3 piles:

• Recycle: Books which are rubbish and not worth any money.
• Charity Shop: Books which are OK and not worth any money.
• Amazon shop: Books which are out of print and already up there for over 20 quid.

Amazon turns out to be a very slow way of getting rid of things, but people do pay top dollar.

I also found reams and reams of correspondence from the days before the internet. (Christ, that makes me sounds about 80!) A very nice evening was spent revisiting it before it too was savagely recycled. People used to really write, y’know? When I did a zine in the 90s there were dozens of people who wrote back with feedback – lots of them doing letters of 3 pages…

I offered the good people of Dissensus the chance to come and pick up 60 back issues of The Wire magazine and there were no takers, so in the recycling they went.

So that’s it, for now, I enjoyed the experience overall and as you can see it’s given me a chance to reappraise my past tastes. I’m proud of my 100% positive feedback and will probably do this again at some point. In the meantime there are more pressing matters to attend to – more news about them soon.