Increasingly the posher types of charity shop are abandoning vinyl records along with smelly old shoes and hoping to do their good works by selling pot-pourri and fair-trade coffee. However, as ever more causes for concern arise, another wave of less fussy places will pop up, cluttered with the all too familiar kinds of junk which really belongs in the bin. Panning for gold in such places occasionally pays off handsomely - but not so handsomely that anyone could be tempted to make a living at it.
I am well aware that some pop-minded dealers will chuck out all classics with a ruthlessness which I hope is costing them serious money, though I hate to think of the good things they might just be tipping. Maybe the sale of undistinguished classics could be speeded by the lucky-parcel method. Twenty discs in brown paper for three quid. Refuse to let them back inside the door!
I am almost exclusively a classical collector but my shelves are not so exclusive that I can't find room for lots of bargain discs, reissues and not-really-collectors'-items. I love record club titles and obscure pseudonymous releases and other stuff that might be worth ten pence, if that. However it does mean wading out into the centre of a river of shite. Exposure even just to their graphics year in year out must pose a hazard to mental health. Some of them I can dimly recall from old radio shows, others contain unwanted memories of unloved relations. Yet the nightmare quality of these objects persists, even when they are unheard. You don't need to actually listen to this stuff for its smell to cling to your clothes. Probably its most depressing aspect is the fact that these little things were meant to cheer people up.
There was an attempt a few years ago by some dubious chartacters to start a fashion for so-called lounge-music - I suspect they were charity-shop owners who could not move for boxes filled with dross by the likes of James Last and Burt Kaemfert.
It would be as well to name a few items which should go directly to the tip rather than take up valuable space for three years, impeding the fingers of collectors and depressing them and adding to the clutter of many a charity-shop. However there are some whole families of discs you can't even do that with, though they get on those odd web-sites where determined slackers play them and review them to see if they are as terrible as they look.
Face it, light orchestral records have outlived their owners. Anyone who ever bought a Mantovani record new has died. There are tens if not hundreds of Mantovani titles out there. Essentially a survivor from the days of palm court hotel ensembles, Paolo Mantovani sold millions of records. The cascading string sound was dreamed up by applying the lush free-bowing seamless style which Leopold Stokowski had adopted in the twenties. The lush impression was assisted by the Decca recording team who coaxed an impression of depth out of a small body of strings. To anyone accustomed to the classical orchestra, the result today sounds thin beer but the records were probably played on a radiogram with rich tone and limited top. Ranging widely over show-tunes, jazz-standards and light-classics, Mantovani reduced everything to a small set of moods, all of them unrecognizable today. Spotting the desirable Decca logo peeping out from behind a stack of other records, the classical collector will approach it with caution, as if to keep alive the fond hope that it is not Tom Jones or Mantovani.
If the neighbours dropped around to hear six-year-old aspiring pianists murder a few pieces, they could nod approvingly and smile, "He'll be the next Russ Conway" or "Mrs Mills had better watch out!" and so keep things polite without lying. These players were essentially percussionists and their main virtue was that they kept going unfeasibly long. To the musically indifferent, that seemed a great achievement. To the British, the big fat arms of Mrs Mills spoke of healthy stamina with none of the suspicious artistic tendencies of a Liberace. They pounded away at the keys in a healthy sexless euphoria which disguised the whore-house birth of the style. Throughout they smiled with the sort of osteopathic smile that reassured you even while they hurt your whole body. If they could stand it, so could you. Winifred Atwell did the same thing in black, though she looked quite elegant. It was skin-deep, though. Once she started bashing away, you knew you were in safe hands. In her way, she did a lot for understanding, if not exactly for harmony.
Strangulated, giggling comic Harry Secombe sold millions of records, very few of them intentionally funny. He was, my mother would assure me, a "trained" singer - as if that made it all right. Nobody ever says that about Placido Domingo. The religious strain was not a late peri-mortal tendency - he had been turning out hymns and semi-sacred ballads since the sixties at least. He was famous and people seemed to like him so he got away with a lot. In those days, if you found a half-decent plumber, you could also ask him to clear the leaves from the gutter, rewire the kitchen and feed the rabbits when you went on holiday. So if you found the round Welsh goon amusing, it seemed almost normal when the time came to buy a record that your choice should be Secombe singing. If the Great British Public has cleaned up its act at all, it is only in superficial ways. What Secombe did in the past for your Grannie or Auntie, the Russell Watsons of this will do for you, if you don't watch out.
Changing social attitudes have made the Black & White Minstrels unrepeatable on television, except in the context of social comment. Performing in black-face on the television now seems extremely weird but that does not render the records less weird. As they were billed as B & W Minstrels, I feel it would have been unthinkable for them to lay off the grease-paint, just because they were at Abbey Road instead of Television Centre. Again, we are talking millions of records - nearly all of them now filed in the land-fill waiting room which is a cardboard box in the less fussy type of charity shops. There may be one or two camp black ironists who seize these objects with glee and cart them back home to sit beside their Robertson's Golly brooches, their giant Al Jonson poster and their full length print of The Birth of a Nation.
Probably the weirdest thing about the Minstrels was the fact that their black-face act was completely gratuitous. Apart from the Camptown Races, the songs rarely had any ethnic implications whatever. Certainly there did not appear to be much sense of continuity with earlier black-face shows. The repetoire they essayed is still churned out on radio as Sing Something Simple. The accompaniment has dwindled to a wheezy Hammond organ but the stale old songs come swilling back from memory lane, like an unemptied bedpan down the corridor of a rest-home. You don't have to be black to fear the Minstrels!
Having mentioned the Hammond, we had better face the nightmare head-on. Dog-eared at the very bottom of the bottom-most pit of record hell are the Hammond records. They were not put out by the major companies, at least not in any identifiable way. They might have been behind them somewhere though, in the way that major wineries make bum-wines with their name kept off the labels. They say that Gallos started as unabashed bum-wine makers and have since had pretentions of grandour. Needless to say, no record label rose to adequacy or even normality on the strength of its Hammond organ releases. The mystery of the bum-wines lies in their sugar-content - it staves off the appetite for solid food. Otherwise it may seem puzzling why alcoholic derelicts opt for these special bum-wines. Cheap spirits would offer more of an alcohol hit and cheap ordinary wines would seem to most taste-buds to be preferable. However the bum-wine makers know their market clearly and so, it seems did the sellers of these Hammond discs.
Now you will try to tell me that the Hammond organ is horrible but harmless. However, I have evidence that it is carcogenic. Up and down the country in dismal precincts, underpasses and malls you will hear the whine of the Hammond. Some unfortunate gent - it is always a gent - is raising money for Cancer Research. It is a reason for him to get out of the house, buy a generator, find a site for his performance and instead of sitting at home in bereaved gloom he chooses to spread it around. You are my Sunshine, Look fot the Silver Lining, Hello Dolly, Tiptoe Through the Tulips. These are just some of the songs which may have given wives cancer as passive listeners in the home. Exposure to them in passing may be less harmful but it has yet to be established how poisonous theses things are to men, children and pets.
You might think that like tinned red kidney beans, the poison is mitigated by preservation. Perhaps there were virtuosi of the Hammond who could withdraw the toxins like a skilled puffer-fish chef. However, it has to be faced that anyone with any virtuoso tendencies whatever will never have sat at the console of a Hammond organ. The use of the word Console in this context is worthy of a cheap sympathy card and a banality of feeling which not even the most wilted of Liszt's Consolations could approach. Add to this the veneer of an auto-rhythm unit and you have what it takes for a Dance - a dance of the dead.
As a cheap entertainment-substitute, the Hammond made its career in downmarket clubs and homes. Its competition was never the pipe-organ or the orchestra. Its competition was Bingo and it always came off the worse. There is only one thing worse than the Hammond and that is - or are? - the panpipes.
Of all the horrid little jokes perpetrated on the paying public, this is one the paying public chose mainly to ignore. The discs existed and they were stockpiled and they were remaindered and they were everywhere. Yet no one ever left his or her house to buy a panpipes record. The only way they got into homes at all was by the sort of kindness with which a bookshop owner would slip you a calendar - in May. The corporate market, however, seems to have been magnificent: hotels, restaurants, bars, shops, toilets all resounded to the panpipes. There may have been a few who played the records at home - presumably the sort of people whose own interiors resembled the empty blandness of a chain hotel. If you fancied your own little cocktail bar, why not imitate the music? It could speak to you of the Andes, while you poured a Margerita - from a mix.
Casual listeners will assume there was one panpipes tune. They may think of the name of one Gyorgy Zamfir and leave it at that. Most people did. However it did not prevent a legion of satanic record producers spotting the possibility of a trend. No one ever listened eagerly to the panpipes. For about the duration of a three minute track, it is a novel tone-colour. Once heard, it is neutral filler. The novelty was mainly in the chuff. By shoving a microphone right up to the little thing, you guaranteed a chuff and instead of being thought a blemish, as it would be on a flute record, it was treated as a beauty-spot. The supposed Andean heritage of the thing gave it a certain green and ethnic aura. It was a sort of musical chiminea. And they proceded to cook their sausages on it.