Confessions of an eBay Trader #1: A Festival of Lessons and Carols

So there was I, keying in today’s offering for one-for-every-fair-and-rainy-day, my little eBay trading post. This is what I typed:

"KING’S COLLEGE CHAPEL A Festival of Lessons & Carols OVAL ARGO 1959 orig RG 190 mono 

On offer is the 1959 LP A FESTIVAL OF LESSONS AND CAROLS as sung on CHRISTMAS EVE, 1958 in KING’S COLLEGE CHAPEL, CAMBRIDGE, directed by DAVID WILLCOCKS w SIMON PRESTON, organ.  On ARGO, catalogue number RG 190." 

I scrupulously noted the details beloved by record collectors: 

"This is the FIRST PRESSING mono release, with the FULLY LAMINATED FLIPBACK THIN ‘CLARIFOIL’ SLEEVE, and the 1ST LABEL ARGO - dark blue, with the Argo motif enclosed in an OVAL design with a groove inside the perimeter." 

The record was playing as I wrote, “ From the arresting opening, a lonely boy chorister emerging from silence with a hushed ‘Once in Royal David’s City’, it’s evident that this is the ultimate Christmas record, and trounces Phil Spector’s Christmas Gift to You. In comparison, Wizzard and Slade are barbarians.”

I was warming to my task now, soaking up the atmosphere as the sweet little angels of King’s College Choir chirruped ‘I Saw Three Ships’: “Redolent of dusty chapels, dreaming spires, Choral Scholars in white altar gowns.” Now came a Lesson, a reading from St Luke. “The establishment at prayer,” I typed. Then another carol, ‘Gabriel’s Message.’ I deleted the previous line and entered: “A dream vision of Christmas from the dream city of Cambridge, preserved in aspic from Christmas Eve, 1958.” I pondered the significance of the date. At the time of recording, I was precisely two days old. 

Then I thought, “Fuck it, I’ll give them Sgt Pepper instead,” and hoped I wasn’t being disloyal to the cause of women bishops.  

Paddy on the Road Provenance

As I mention (monotonously) in each relevant listing, the records I'm currently selling on eBay come from the collection of the late Ian Chappell, and were acquired at Omega Auctions, Stockport, in late June. Amongst the more heavyweight lots at the Auction - far outside my pocket - was Paddy on the Road by Christy Moore (Mercury, 20170 SMCL), which was finally bought by a Manchester-based dealer called Nigel for the winning bid of £640. 

Donal Maguire, the great Irish traditional singer (the best, in my humble opinion), happened to be present because I alerted him to the event (he’s a fellow Oddfellows regular, and so, by definition, a friend). Maguire was flabbergasted at the price, and secretly thrilled, because he’s owned a copy since first release in 1969, and doesn’t particularly rate it. Indeed, he may have played it once, or twice at most. 

To make a hard story easy, after the failure of the ploy of distributing his card with a scrawled explanatory note amongst the serious dealers (suppressed by Nigel, I later learned), Donal asked me to sell it for him on my little eBay trading post, one-for-every-fair-and-rainy-day.

I'm not sure if Donal's stratospheric expectations of its value will be realised. It has, ah, three days left to run. 

Nigel finally sold his copy on eBay for £650, which represents a net loss after auction and eBay fees are taken into account. However, two Russian oligarchs looking for a new way of laundering money started a bidding war for his copy of Heavy Petting by Dr Strangely Strange, which finally sold for over £2000. Swings and roundabouts.

The Duendeist - A Job Description / Neglected Nugget #2: Morning Brings the Light

In English texts, the Spanish word ‘Duende’ always comes with the stock phrase - “this word is untranslatable in English,” which only goes to show that they haven’t tried. Here is a definition in Spanish, from a documentary about the late great flamenco singer Enrique Morente, extracted on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hikNqOfvmos&feature=relmfu  : “duende es el misterio de la transmision del arte”. Or, in English, “duende is the mystery of the transmission of art.” 

It occurred to me that, minus the mystery, the business of the transmission of art has been my chief occupation. I’ve been a duendeist all my life without knowing it. It unifies all those diverse and seemingly random activities: the music journalism, the composing. editing the small arts magazine GRR, painting, selling records on a Camden Town stall, promoting Abner Burnett. If you’re lucky the underlying pattern of life reveals itself, at any point from middle age on. For me, it’s all encapsulated in the single word ‘duende’. 

I wonder if this self-knowledge will help at my next Job Centre interview. “What is your occupation, Mr Butler?” “I’m a duendeist.”…  

And the eBay trading is all of a piece, being at much concerned with spreading rare and good music as earning a livelihood. Naturally, duendeism can sometimes be a thankless task. Which brings me to my next neglected nugget, Morning Brings the Light (TRA 219, 1970) by John James. 

Described on the sleeve as “a shy unassuming Welshman”, James was/is the arch exponent of a style that flourished briefly in the early seventies, when acoustic, ragtime-tinged guitar accompanied sensitive self-penned songs, and, for a while at least, the world seemed a more gentle and romantic place. Morning Brings the Light is the classic of the genre, and can be guaranteed to warm the cockles of the sternest heart. It scarcely registers that James’ voice is on the weak side. Oddly, his vocals got more frail as his instrumental virtuosity grew. He finally became another Stefan Grossman, but I liked him much better as another Ralph McTell. Morning Brings the Light is his masterpiece. Its eponymous successor, with a Hipgnosis cover, is only marginally less good. Significantly, the only non-originals were some Scott Joplin rags transcribed for guitar (this before The Sting inspired a Scott Joplin revival). He was already flexing his fingers for guitarist distinction.

And no-one was buying! Even offering the two together as a job lot for £10! And I actually have five surplus copies of Morning Brings the Light, courtesy of the Ian Chappell collection! Looking on the bright side, it solves my Christmas present problem this year.      

Edinburgh Folk Festival '63 & The Bogus Live

The way some people dream about sex, I dream about music. This might be a good place to keep my musical dream diary, if that’s not being too self-indulgent. Anyway, I can keep it fairly simple: Gladys Knight last night. 

I was playing LK 4546 and LK 4563 yesterday, that is (for those not discographical minded), Edinburgh Folk Festival Volumes 1 and 2, on Decca, and my thoughts turned to the bogus live album, that peculiar phenomenon that once flourished and is now, thankfully, as dead as a doornail. 

They  come in different varieties and there are several ways that the trained ear can spot them. 

Applause that starts before the song ends. This runs counter to nature but is a handy ploy to conceal the studio fade-out. A textbook example is ‘Marieke’ by Jacques Brel (Music for Millions, Philips 6395 216). If you only know the song as a Judy Collins lullaby, Brel’s vitality is exhilarating. Crescendo follows crescendo, until Brel is yelling enough to drown out the orchestra belting with full fortissimo (the presence of a full orchestra in modest club surroundings is another sign of the bogus live album). The applause enters at the peak of the tumult, which is unlikely, unless it was a spontaneous collective act designed to prevent Jacques from exploding the galaxy with incandescent energy. 

But even if they decently wait for the song to end, the applause on a bogus live album always enters too soon, because record producers, like broadcasters, can’t abide long pauses. 

Nina Simone’s Nuff Said (RCA, RD 7979) is a bona fide live album which inexpertly splices current studio-recorded hit ‘Ain’t Got No - I Got Life’ (1969) into the proceedings. The joins show, to say the least.   

Then there’s the bogus live album in which the artist is complicit in the deception. The classic example here is Charles Mingus pointedly telling a non-existent audience to be quiet (Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus, Barnaby Records, BR 5012). Contrast with the genuine live album where the audience is so silent they may as well not be there. I would offer Tokyo Concert by the Maria Kalaniemi Trio (Amigo, AMCD 754), recorded in Japan so the polite silence might be culturally engrained. And there are numerous jazz albums where the audio is as perfect as a studio creation, and the sound of clapping always comes as a rude shock.

Presumably, live albums are more economic to make than studio albums: so why pretend to be live at all? To garner a few sales from those who attended the 1963 Edinburgh Folk Festival?

Live noises may be grafted onto studio recordings by way of musique concrete. I dimly recall the kerfuffle when David Bowie appropriated a Faces audience at the beginning of Diamond Dogs (RCA, APL 1-0576). 

Oddly enough, the audience noise on Edinburgh Folk Festival Vol. 1 and 2 is treated more as abstract sound than a means to hoax the listener, so is closer to David Bowie than Jacques Brel. And what about those albums made in the studio but with a small, handpicked audience to ensure a relaxed atmosphere? This category includes The Dubliners (Transatlantic, TRA 116) and Bright Phoebus by Lal and Mike Waterson (Trailer, LES 2076), with Anne Briggs in attendance.

But going back to Edinburgh Folk Festival Vol 1 and 2, in 1963 Anne Briggs was the incarnation of purity and beauty. ‘She Moved Thro’ the Fair’ comes from Vol. 1 and ‘Let No Man Steal Your Thyme’ from Vol. 2. Let’s get the chronology right. Briggs was discovered when the cultural bandwagon Centre 42 rolled into Nottingham in 1962. She made her record debut in ’63 on The Iron Muse (Topic, 12T86) (I shall have to return to her contributions, ‘The Recruited Collier’ and ‘The Doffing Mistress’, both sublime, and very different in spirit from anything else on The Iron Muse); an EP, The Hazards of Love, appeared the same year she played Edinburgh.  

Of the other participants: Clive Palmer and Robin Williamson’s appearance predates their christening as the Incredible String Band and finds them in embryonic jug-band state. Archie Fisher and Ray Fisher impress. Archie, like Derroll Adams, has one of those voices that exude warmth and assurance. Rugged, fierce Scottish pride spreads like wildfire across the two discs, especially when Hamish Imlach essays the old Jacobin song 'Johnny Cope'. 

And here's the clincher. On a bogus live album the audience behaves like a good child from Victorian days: you address it once and then it shuts up. Compare Edinburgh Folk Festival Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 with Folk Festival (Waverley, ZLP 2033; reissued on World Record Club, ST890), which is a real live recording of the 1963 Edinburgh Folk Festival - specifically, Usher Hall - with the same artists (Nadia Cattouse, Ray and Archie Fisher: the Dubliners appear on the Waverley and are absent from the Decca LPs, presumably for contractual reasons). There’s an inordinate amount of singalongs, and clap alongs, and verbose introductions on the Waverley: all the things that give live albums a bad name.  Whereas the Decca pair are more intimate and self-focussed, with audience interaction at a minimum (and no wonder: my contention is that they didn't exist). 

  

There might be a third category: the faux-bogus-live-album-from-Edinburgh. Fortuna from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, 1976, proclaims the sleeve of Sweet Folk and Country, SFA 058, with the explanation: ‘Folk songs, poetry, music and humour from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, 1976.’ But the title is deceptive. There is no attempt to conceal the fact that this is a studio date with Miriam Backhouse, Dave Goulder, Irvine Hunt and Brian Miller, collectively known as Fortuna, who perform singly more than as a group. The small is quite open: "Recorded at Mid Wales Sound Studios/ Producer: Joe Stead". This is another jewel from the Ian Chappell collection. Miriam Backhouse beguiles with ‘Fairy Tale’ (a John Martyn song new to me; is it from his first LP?), and as for Irvine Hunt; well, I was reminded of the time I saw the late avant garde sound poet Bob Cobbing in Birdyak, which is the last thing I was expecting from a gentle folk waxing. 

Wild! 

GREAT LPs THAT YOU CAN FIND FOR A SONG ON eBAY

Well, Love Lilt and Laughter by JEAN REDPATH didn’t attract a single bid, no matter that it’s in better condition than most half-centurions - nearly, released in 1966 on Elektra/Bounty/Clan (yes, it has the unique distinction of being released on three labels nearly simultaneously: I expect Joe Boyd will be able to clear that one up) - or that Redpath possess one of the most wondrously pure voices since the phonograph was invented. How did the quote go? “To call Jean Redpath a Scottish folk singer is a bit like calling Michelangelo an Italian interior decorator”. How true, but no-one seems to appreciate the fact. 

This made me think of other LPs that can be had for next to nothing on eBay. Here is a random selection: 

Jesse Winchester, Third Down, 110 To Go, Bearsville. The Black Night hadn’t yet overwhelmed the Glorious Day on the eponymous LP (with the same striking gaunt portrait replicated four times on the gatefold cover), and this, its successor from 1972. Or perhaps the albums are brilliant just because of the balance of dark and light. Both are commonly found with a Buy It Now tag of £4.  

King Kong, on Decca, from 1961. The township musical responsible for the first wave of South African musical expats when it played in Princess Theatre, London, in 1961. I picked up the Original African Cast to go with my London Production Cast a few years back and had change from £5. 

The Oldham Tinkers, For Old Time’s Sake (Topic, 1975). And here’s one I got just last week for a measly 99p. It arrived wrapped in nothing but a Tesco’s carrier bag and sticky tape, mind. Caveat Emptor.  

WHO WAS/IS IAN CHAPPELL?

To recap, a priceless collection of folk LPs came up for auction in June this year, representing the estate of the late Ian Chappell, and I came away with 11 job lots, representing about 1,100 LP, which are currently dominating my listening and establishing my reputation as an eBay trader. But who was Ian Chappell, who died before he knew he was my benefactor? 

                                         From the Ian Chappell Collection: the incredibly strange Huvva! by Merit      

                                         Hemmingson conflates groovy Hammond organ and scraping Swede folk fiddle

Well, according to a label on one of the LPs, Chappell lived at 8 Waterloo Close, Waterlooville, Hants, PO8 8QJ. With no family and no children, all his leisure hours seem to have been devoted to cultivating the record collection. 

A Google trawl further reveals that his full name was John Ian Chappell, and reveals that he was born in 1949 and was director of the Hampshire-based South Eastern Museums Service. 

The multiple copies of certain LPs in mint condition would suggest he owned a record concession somewhere. Surely he was well-known in Hampshire folk circles? I joined the Mudcat online forum to find out more. (Do you know Mudcat? A fantastic resource. Google any enquiry on a folk music theme and all trails inevitably lead to Mudcat.) Who was Ian Chappell? I asked. It elicited a single reply. "Wasn't he a cricketer?" 

A Salutary story for vinyl junkies everywhere.

Mike Gets His Mojo Back/The Ian Chappell Collection

Apologies to all loyal readers for the enduring dormancy of this blog. What was it Sly Stone said? “Heard you missed me, well I’m back.” (Look what happened to him.)  

I shall strive to be a more regular correspondent from now on. Besides, I have a subject, renewed motivation and a new source of income since the music journalism dried up. I am now an eBay trader! 

I have my friend Cliff Lee to thanks. It was Cliff who sent me a link about an upcoming auction at Omega Auctions, in Stockport. There were some heavyweight items: oh, the usual suspects - Vashti Bunyan, Another Diamond Day; Led Zeppelin I with novel coloured lettering; Nick Drake, Five Leaves Left; Christy Moore, Paddy on the Road. And Lot 129 comprised two C.O.B. LPs, Spirit of Love and Moyshe McStiff, which attracted Cliff because band-member John Bidwell is a pal of his. I seem to remember that C.O.B. was a vehicle for Incredible String Band founder Clive Palmer. Indeed, the acronym stands for Clive's Original Band. 

My own interest centred on Lots 268-298, boxes labelled Miscellaneous Folk. The auction was scheduled for Saturday, 30th June, 2012. 

To make a hard story easy: the individual items mentioned above lay outside my price range (Lot 129 fetched £600), but - thanks to the consortium I’d managed to get in place - I came away with 11 boxes containing roughly 100 LPs each. 

My purpose was threefold: 

1. To boost my record collection and, to a lesser extent, those of my backers (thank you Ant, Al and Eva). 

2. To furnish material for my proposed book on a folkie theme. 

3. To establish my little eBay trading post, which I christened one-for-every-fair-and-rainy-day. This was appropriately folksy sounding and it announced my modus operandi: to list one record a day, thus guaranteeing a steady stream of income but without foul commerce taking my life.

I shall tell you how I got on tomorrow.