Lost (in) Music

When Brian Matthew used to do "Sounds of the 60s" he'd get communications similar to "my husband's favourite record is XXXX, could you play it because he has never heard it since 1967 when it went missing in a house move" and more recent Chris Hawkins has a Lost Love feature where people write in with messages akin to "My favourite record as a teenager was XXXX but I haven't heard it since 1990".

Now the thing is we live in a digital age and we can communicate with anyone anywhere in the world instantly if we are both, in some form , online. A benefit of this is that you can usually easily find your favourite record. This blog relies so much on Youtube because you can find virtually everything on there, if I can't find it I will create a slideshow and put the record up there and hope it doesn't get pulled for copyright reasons. Most of them stay and you can check my channel which is a combination of such slideshows and live performances.

The other thing, even if you are not digitally connected, if you are lucky and have one , libraries and record shops can search out music for you, and they would be on the end of a phone. The people who contact Chris Hawkins have no excuse at all, they contact him exclusively by email so are connected.

In the nineties Voiceprint Records based in Houghton-Le-Spring re-released a lot of music digitally. This was a good model because the music was only downloadable so apart from the server and site costs they didn't have to invest in vinyl / cd print runs. There is still music on th eimprint (see below).The problem with digital media is it can be stolen over and over again that applies to video, music and e-publications.

So I should really play a song I have forgotten about, but if I've forgotten about it then I can't remember it so I will just play something that I haven't played for a while, although I want't to also play something fairly obscure which I had difficulty tracking down, but I did on either Amazon or Ebay. That song is "Dizz Knee Land" by Dada from 1992 and it is a great record.The title of the song spelling was changed by the group so as not to interfere with copyright laws, however "Disneyland" is also the nickname for the Orange County Jail.

Proper Properganda

Recently got involved with Proper Distribution distributing magazines and reviewing gigs and CDs after reading "Last Shop Standing" by Graham Jones (see here). The book mentions how Tesco demanded ten grand from Proper to talk with them about distribution , to which Proper decided against supplying the supermarket chain.

Despite the apparent impossibilty of competing against the supermarkets and X-Factor production line it's great to see that somebody can still produce quality stuff with integrity. Just tried this Amazon Widget thing here:





The label promotes modern stuff , esoteric stuff , repackages old stuff beautifully and it's a pleasure that they exist and care. The only equivalent I can think of is maybe Voiceprint who are based in Houghton-Le-Spring , I believe.



If you'd like to get involved the details are here and the Properganda page is here