John Lennon and Plastic Ono Band – Some Time In New York City

This is a great record, not least for the inclusion of an even greater record: ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)/Listen, The Snow Is Falling’. It seems like such a relic apart from our times though, for me in a hugely sad way, a nostalgia I’m not at all entitled to as I’m not ‘of’ its time, strictly.

Neil Young – Decades

Old Uncle Neil is so totally brilliant he has become ubiquitous, but his utter ubiquity also obscures his brilliance. S’dialectical, you know. 99p.

The Sundays – Reading, Writing and Arithmetic

With its bookish title, this set an aesthetic agenda which has become totally mainstream. I love the music, but I cannot listen to it anymore. Some things which once stood out on the landscape have merged back into it, and for this I love the ammonites on the cover. Like them, this has to go.

M Ward – To Go Home

I listened to this again and frankly I’m not keen. No regrets. There’s a Daniel Johnston cover on it and this puts me off further. I had a very strong reaction against the fetish of Johnston as a ‘primitive genius’ a few years ago. Art Brut re-inscribed onto indie also carried with it an unethical whiff…

Stereolab – Mars Audiac Quintet

This is different. Their Marxist pop made me seriously consider keeping this CD, with its extra disc of Kraut-drone. Two tracks on here are genius, Wow and Flutter and Ping Pong, they are Hegelio-Marxist-Historico-Pop gems, describing Kondratiev waves of process, war and profit, and perhaps appropriately it is now listed on Ebay for 99p with absolutely no takers whatsoever.

The Happy Mondays – Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches

A fantastic album, such a shout from its time, but why, it seems at this point in history, would anyone keep a CD of it? History though, may well turn this around. Future regrets must be overcome via this electrical notebooking.

PiL – Seattle

This single, Seattle, entered the UK Top 75, where it stayed for 4 weeks and reached No.47 on 22 August 1987. This is the limited edition boxed single with a sew-on patch, a postcard and a Happy? badge. The vinyl condition is excellent, and the box opens in a counter-intuitive way, it folds back left to right, continuing the tradition of frustrating PiL luxury goods, which began with Metal Box, and its ill-fitting records. The image here is two photos together, one of the box cover and another of it opened with the badges and card showing. The single is taken from the PiL album Happy? released in 1987. In 1988 they toured America as part of the INXS Kick tour. Bill Laswell, who produced PiL’s previous album, was supposed to produce Happy?, but Laswell wanted to replace the PiL line-up with his own session musicians – as he did for Album – but Lydon wasn’t up for it. The production is very sterile, the default clean rock aesthetic of the era.

Elgar box set

This Warner Classics Elgar CD box set contains 5 CDs with Symphonies 1 & 2, the Pomp & Circumstance Marches, Enigma Variations, In The South, Falstaff, The Music Makers, etc. The box set also contains a big perfect bound booklet. These pieces were performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Sir Andrew Davis, who has served as music director and principal conductor of the Lyric Opera of Chicago since 2000. I bought this when I lived in Hereford, teaching at the art college there, as I thought I ought to. I became interested in English pastoralism for a while, and in particular Vaughan Williams, especially pieces such as Wenlock Edge.

Coldcut – Let Us Play

This included a CD-ROM of games, software and music, which seemed like the future when it came out, now it seems like a Georgian antiquity, un-useable and therefore consigned to the dustbin of history. Coldcut wanted to include a demo version of their VJAMM program. This was described, if I remember rightly, as a ‘Coldcut toybox’. The Let Us Play font was taken from an old Letraset book, it’s an interesting piece of perhaps ‘retro-future’, from several different angles.

The Walker Brothers – No Regrets

No Regrets – perhaps an appropriate choice of first sale item for my disaccumulation blog – is the fourth album by The Walker Brothers, released in 1975. No Regrets is beautiful, but Scott Walker would not contribute new songs until 1978’s Nite Flights. The photo of Scott is so telling, with his can of Newcastle Brown and hand up to the cameraman, obscuring his face. Such a different pose to the other two. I got it from a Levenshulme charity shop.