Welcome at Record Collector Magazine June 2023 Issue

You don’t need me to tell you that collecting comes in many forms and guises. In our Diggin’ For Gold section this month, Michael Green tells us about the rising value of gig
tickets and the increasing viability of collecting same.
I wonder how many people own all the tickets for the May-June 2008 gigathon by this month’s cover stars, Sparks, during their 21-night “spectacular” in London, where they played each of their studio albums in chronological order during the first 20 nights and premiered their then-new album, Exotic Creatures Of The Deep, at the 21st show. Were you there every night to, as it were, collect the set? Or, forget the actual gig tickets – did you, in an abstract sense, “collect the set” by attending each of the concerts and thus accrue the combined series of memories?
One other question occurs during the reading of this month’s cover story: how the holy kimono did it happen that a band – in the loosest, Steely Dan-est sense – who formed some nebulous time in the mid-to-late 60s, manage, 55 or so years later, to reach new critical and commercial heights and achieve new levels of “cool”, with landmark performances at venues of the prestige and grandeur of The Hollywood Bowl and Royal Albert Hall, at the combined age of 151? Reading Jeremy Allen’s interview with Ron and Russell Mael does provide some clues: something to do with ambition, invention, originality and a stubborn refusal to rest on one’s laurels. Qualities to accumulate and treasure, I feel.
See you next month,
Paul Lester

Download from:

NitroFlare

• Sound On Sound UK – June 2023
• Real Crime – Issue 102, 2023