Home sweet home, but by the time I got to bed last night, it was 5 AM this morning. I got up at 10.30 AM for a sesh with Arktik Lake Tony and as Olivia arose, I decided to go back and get a couple more hours, I was up in time for the Villa/West Ham game (4-1), more as a target for getting up than a mad desire to watch the game. But watch it I did and lots of goals there were – I’ve suddenly started like Yoda talking.

You arrive home, even after a short trip and there seems to be loads to do – unpacking, finding a home for the new things you brought back, and suddenly it’s the nighttime again. I was peeling off labels from the second-hand CDs I’d bought on a previous trip to the Notting Hill Record & Tape Exchange. Great titles, so cheap, CDs have taken the same path that LPs took when CDs were first introduced. I wonder if one day they will make a glorious return, a new generation rediscovering the format as one has with vinyl.

I’ve filed away all the vinyl I brought back, now I have to set up the stereo in the studio room. I found a NAD amp on eBay for a very reasonable price, exactly the same as the one I have in the front room. My idea is to have two vinyl listening places (at least). Also, the turntable in the front doesn’t play 45 RPM but the one in the back will.

I have quite a large collection of 7-inch singles as well as 12-inch LPs. There’s something great about that format, often with a picture sleeve, a rare B-side, maybe a different mix, and in the sixties, likely not on the LP released around the same time. For example, a lot of The Beatles singles were not on the LPs. The whole Northern Soul phenomenon often came from rare and unknown 7-inch singles that hadn’t made it into the charts but were still classics of the genre.

Then there’s the cassettes, not that I brought any back with me this time, but who could imagine that they would make a comeback? Buried in the storage house I have hundreds and hundreds of cassettes which I will bring here to The Archive and try and figure out how to shelve them. I don’t really like the idea of putting them on top of each other, but it might be the only way. Making a shelf for cassettes would take so much wood for each shelf and probably be expensive. If you have any ideas on how to shelve hundreds of cassettes, please send pictures.

Different size books are also a problem, there’s no shelf that can deal with books that are different heights and depths. It’s even hard to find a shelf for just paperbacks, shelves are generally too deep. Sounds like I’m going to need some help from Olivia’s dad, haha, Gerd, are you there?

Music today has been The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Axis: Bold as Love, just to remind me how great those three studio albums they made were – Are You Experienced was released on May 12th, 1967, Axis: Bold as Love was released just six months after in the same year on December 1st, 1967, and Electric Ladyland was released on October 16th, 1968. I’m still looking for the French Electric Ladyland with the different cover art by Alain Dister. Hendrix’s total studio album output covered only 18 months of his short life. Smash Hits was released in 1968 in the UK and 1969 in the USA collecting together the better-known tunes with different track listings in the UK and the USA. All three members of this incredible band, Jimi, Noel Redding, and Mitch Mitchell have left us and we still miss their magic.

Music Of The Daze