since the vinyl threads can sometimes descend into chats of how much everything is worth and the priciest, more luxurious items available (guilty) thought i’d try a thread in the other direction
so - what’s the biggest record bargain you ever got? a great sale deal, or an amazing eBay or record fair find
(only things you bought yourself please, no gifts or inheritance albums)
managed to win Earl Sweatshirt - Doris for a grand total of £1.04 on ebay, cover a bit fucked up but album plays and sounds perfect
(postage then ended up costing 3 times as much as the album did lol)
Hope this is allowed…
In 2001 I was in The Sound Machine in Reading. The guy behind the counter mentioned that he’d been talking to the tour manager for The Magnetic Fields, and would I like a copy of 69 Love Songs for £8.99?
It’s a 3CD album and was priced as such everywhere. I’d tried to get it before but think I’d given up hope of paying less than £20 for it.
Sound Machine’s still good for occasional bargains. Seven or eight years ago I got three Talking Heads LPs for a tenner in total, all in great condition.
yeah i guess i assumed we all lived through an era of getting all-time-10/10-albums on CD for 50p, but a bargain is a bargain regardless! stick it in
Two spring to mind, both bought in Stirling of all places.
Got Bowie’s Low on vinyl for £5. Was in the shop window at Europa. Thought it would be wrecked but sleeve and record were in great condition.
Bought Led Zep IV in the Oxfam charity shop just around the corner from Europa for £4. When I handed it over at the till the guy looked at it and realised it probably should have been put on sale for a lot more then four pounds. Again, perfect nick.
If I’m being totally honest, it was the time I found the CD single of Pop Singer by Rachel Stamp for £1, when it regularly went on eBay for around £50.
I sold it in a job lot with a load of their other singles for about £5 years down the line, because somehow the market in Rachel Stamp memorabilia didn’t hold.
Oh wait, another one. Bowie again. Got Station to Station for $4CAN in Monreal. Great condition again.
Can’t remember what the conversion rate was back then but that’s £2.38 today.
Mono first pressing of Rubber Soul for £1
found it at a record fair from some guy selling off a whole load of stuff for £1 a go, had been looking for a mono copy for a while, but they kept going on ebay for £30+ (this was about 10 years ago). didn’t realise it was a first pressing till i got home and checked the matrix numbers.
it’s far from mint, but plays well enough
or a near mint copy of Springsteen’s The River 2LP, with two lyric inserts for some reason, for 50p from a uni record fair
Got quite a few classic albums by Bowie, Zeppelin etc for around £3 from various 2nd hand record places over the years, including the below.
Got it home realised it was actually a first press on Track records, actually fairly rare and going for loads on discogs so sold it and bought another £3 copy a few months later.
Which was nice.
Picked up both the Twin Peaks Soundtrack and the Empire Strikes Back Soundtrack before the former had been repressed and when you never saw the latter anywhere for a quid each. They are less impressive these days but for a while were absolute bargains.
Relationship of Command for a fiver in a 2nd hand store not long after release was nice.
Use Your Illusion II for a fiver (i think) was a hard to find steal on vinyl back in 2000 also
i mean I happily bought the Twin Peaks album for either £20 or £25 from Oxfam just before Christmas, so yeah £1 feels pretty great to me!
I’ll give you £10 for it?
The Covent Garden Fopp used to have a period of having one bizarrely under priced record every time I went in there. Got Menomena’s Mines for £3 (a brand new gatefold LP about 6 months after it came out) and The Antler’s Familiars (maybe £4 - they also had a live album of theirs for the same price that I weirdly didn’t go for) and ‘Makes a King’ by The Very Best for the same amount.
I assume they were trying to shift stock but seemed weird at the time and unthinkable now.
woooft
Hunky Dory and Bridge Over Troubled Water for a quid each before oxfam knew what they were doing with vinyl
Always laugh at how brutal they are these days. Found a copy of the first Velocity Girl album (which as best I can tell has never been reissued, despite being on Sub Pop) in one in Edinburgh, it was £65!!!
(And it was gone a week later)
i mean I love that album, but that price for something so relatively … inessential, compared to the other monster albums in the genre coming out then. Lol
I remember once strolling into my local chazza and was gobsmacked at the amount of weird stuff they had - I managed to come away with dalek’s back catalogue, some Tortoise albums, cocteau twins, some super furrys and local rock machine that fucking tank’s last album. all were about a quid or thereabouts, so was very happy. I posted my haul online with a comment about how hipster saltaire must be if someone’s getting rid of all this stuff for nothing, and as it turned out it was all donated by Nick from Falconetti - a band I’d put out on my label a few years before lol.
First couple that come to mind are Conor Oberst’s first solo album on vinyl for £6 and the massive hard case 3xLP + 2xCD + DVD edition of the final Oasis album for £8. Both from Fopp and both just a few months after they were originally released. Also picked up the first Billy Corgan solo album on CD, brand new for a quid.
At some point during the first lockdown I decided I wanted a vinyl copy of Songs From The Big Chair, so I hit Google Shopping and went for the cheapest new copy, which was £15 plus postage iirc. When it arrived I was mildly disappointed because they’d sent me a ‘2014 stereo mix’ variant with a green tint to the artwork. I only recently discovered that this is a massively sought after, long out of print Steven Wilson remix that diehard TFF fans are paying £200+ for.
Sold it and bought an used copy of the original album for a tenner instead
god charity shops used to be goldmines but i can’t even be arsed looking most of the times these days. never feel you can negotiate in a charity shop (
)but the pricing these days is insane. I started buying vinyl in the mid 90s and they were the best places to look!
