The rationale...

Over the last thirty years or so, popular culture including music has increasingly drawn more openly from past decades, and consequently the business of reissuing recordings from the past has expanded enormously. This had already been for many years the case with the major artists, but in the early 1980s, catalysed by the use of vintage recordings in films and advertising, interest started to grow in the less well-known material - artists and songs that had missed out on record sales first time around.

As far as obscure 1960s pop was concerned, the process really started to snowball with the appearance of a three-volume set of bootleg compilation LPs called Chocolate Soup For Diabetics, which introduced a new audience to almost unknown beat and psychedelic singles from fifteen years earlier. A year or so later, in 1983, a properly licensed series of compilation LPs, Rubble, was begun, and by returning to the original master tapes displayed a vast improvement in sound quality over the Chocolate Soup set, which had been cobbled together from crackly copies of the original vinyl singles. Major record companies realised that there was some serious interest in material that had hitherto been ignored, and smaller labels began licensing it for reissue, often going to a great deal of trouble in the process - there are some recent reissues of 1960s singles, issued once again as 7 inch vinyl, that are technically superior to the original pressings. There are, also, still many bootlegs with appalling sound - and some truly terrible barrel-scraping 60s compilations about.

The process of rediscovery, reappraisal and reissue took a very long time to get off the ground with the music of the next decade. Apart from a mere handful of noble, pioneering efforts, such as the glam compilation Velvet Tinmine and the limited Spacegirl And The Starman and Here Lies Ebeneezer Goode 1970-74 LPs, an attempt to find the obscure 1970s equivalent of, say, Rubble would run into difficulties almost immediately - until recently, all that seemed to be widely available were endless 'greatest hits' compilations, a situation remedied (in part) by several recent and ongoing series of glam-rock CD compilations.

Nowadays, reissues are big business, and there is a healthy and mature industry occupied with repackaging the sounds of the past; there are well-selling music magazines whose review sections deal only with reissued records. Not everything can be reissued, though; and what this site attempts to do is provide an introduction to some largely unknown discs, with reviews, for anyone who might be interested in tracking them down. You won't find many expensive collector's items here (although there are inevitably a handful), as most of the records listed have so far defied the textbook definition of 'collectability' - ie valuable. Some of the records listed here are extremely difficult to find - but, once found, can be purchased cheaply.

This site, originally planned as an appreciation of 1970s music, has "scope crept" into other eras - in particular, music from the recording industry's first eighty years up to about 1960, which is still woefully under-represented in the reissue world. (Out-of-copyright tracks will be featured from time to time on the virtual record player, q.v.)

This is the second incarnation of the site; the old version, a single page of hard-coded HTML, was starting to get unwieldy with continued expansion. This update now has a proper database behind it, with a search facility. I hope you find its contents interesting and of use.