Charity Shop Gold
 

I'm sure many if not all of you rifle through charity shops bins for records. I don't want to hear about how you found the first Les Rallizes Denudes/ Velvets/ SY record for 50p. No.

I want to hear about how you fell in love with something.

Recently - Per-cus-sive Jazz; Manito de Platas; Herb Alpert; Hammond Party Time; Neil Diamond; the master 40's violinist Eric Siday.

These aren't 'rarities' per se, but they are the sort of thing that is really good and you wouldn't find elsewhere. As soon as I sort out vinyl > digital I may start uploading the wonders of charity shops.

Glice this is weird!I just mentioned charity shops in the gay dad thread and you come up with this.How telepathic are we?

Gosh,this is soooooo weird man!

Yeah, I'll repeat for posterity: YOU MUST STOP LIVING IN MY HEAD.

I really miss the age concern charity shop that used to be in Fulham's Northern road years ago.I would spend hours in there going through the masses of vynil,cds,mixtapes etc etc.

Another great find was a mint copy of Erasure's Wild! for 50p, complete with the gayest poster imaginable inside.

a 13th floor elevators tape.

Talking of age concern i just spoke on the phone to the sweetest old lady you could possibly imagine.

My girlfriend gets sick of me wanting to go in every charity shop we pass. I forever live in hope, though, of finding The Dream Syndicate's "Medicine Show" on CD.

The best find ever is for me is a compilation of artists on David Tibet's label World Serpent.It wasn't just that i didn't know of the existence of such cd but also the fact that the music in it is spellbinding.It really nailed me to the wall when i first spinned it.

you buy records in oxfam?! what are you, a gypo?!

You go to HMV Toilet.Actually your mum takes you record buying every Saturday for a little treat.Woolworths,there you go.

i do go to the big hmv on oxford st, it has the best hiphop & metal sections i've seen in london.

So di i sometimesTthere are better sections of that type of music in many less central shops though.Trust me,i'm your doctor Toilette.

yeah, but i don't want to go all the way to croydon, or something. and where is better for hiphop on CD?

Harlsden has excellent ragga/dancehall etc shops if you don't mind risking your life for music

Do you have a favourite charity shop, Pork? Oxfam seems to always have a lot of stuff in, probably, I suppose, because they're they first place that people think of when they think of charity shops.

I really love some of the chairty shops that you get on the essex road in Islington.Have you ever been to the stuffed animals shop in there?I haven't been in and never will but they have bars in front of the shop window because animal rights activists heve tried breaking in many times.

Best finds for me have been the Violent Femme's first record, SY's Bad Moon Rising on cassette and a homeade Birthday Party tape with a handmade cover so well done I nearly thought it was official.

Edith Piaf and solo Uillean pipes record. Blinder.

Charity shops (or thrift stores as we in the states call them) are similar to therapy for me. You go in with no expectations of finding anything, you run into these odd people looking through odd things, and then you start the inevitable record rummage. They are 50 cents here, so anything goes. An hour later you leave with a mint copy of Henry Mancini's Best of, Lonnie Liston Smith - Vibrations, and a stack of 45's that look increasingly enticing by the moment. The whole experience is refreshing to me, which I find ironic, because the usual thrift store smells like dirty clothes and mold, and not to mention your local creepy, social deviant staring you down for picking up that pair of pants he was eyeballing 45 minutes ago.

All in all I think charity shops (thrift stores) in themselves are gold.

So, my housemate found a pile of records and a box of tapes in a skip recently. In amongst a load of standard classical tapes ('best opera arias', Swan Lake, that sort of thing) are a few mix tapes. These mix tapes are awesome. Which reminds me of that Dalston charity shop blog, which is also awesome, but I can't be bothered to find the link right now. But is in this thread somewhere, if memory serves.

Anyway, bump.

This reminds me that I should go on a charity shop hunt spree, one of these weekends. The Dalston one is pretty close to where I live and i haven't been there in a while, but there are some nice little ones throughout East London. Here's the links, twatface:

http://dalstonoxfamshop.blogspot.com...nomi-live.html

http://www.dazeddigital.com/projects...cle.aspx?a=538

Alice Coltrane's World Galaxy, original Impulse pressing for £1.50 recently. Charity shops pwn.

i once found a copy of Black Flag's Damaged in a hospital chairty shop, they haven't had anything thing that interesting since

shellac's the futurist, can't remember how much i paid but it was less than ten dollars; the cashier had no idea what record it was.