Revisiting my vinyl collection, one letter at a time...
I've been collecting records for as long as I can remember, and sometimes it's easy to skip over things, and forget what you've got. I'm going to start listening to things in alphabetical order, it give me a chance to look through my collection again, and give me an opportunity to share things with other music lovers, and vinyl collectors.
The rules are simple, I will start at A, and choose an artist from my collection beginning with that letter, next day I move on to B, then C, etc.
The story so far...
- A is for... Adam and the Ants - Kings of the Wild Frontier
- B is for... The Beatles - Abbey Road
- C is for... The Chemical Brothers - Exit Planet Dust
- D is for... Nick Drake - Bryter Layter
- E is for... Brian Eno - Ambient 1: Music for Airports
F is for...
Mark Fry - Dreaming With Alice
F already, feels like we're getting somewhere! Thanks for your comments and chats so far, it feels good to share some of my vinyl with people, and to hear other music in return, let's keep the conversation flowing!
Today we have something quite obscure, an album by acid / psychedelic / folk songwriter Mark Fry called 'Dreaming With Alice'. I can't quite remember how I first discovered this album, it may have been on the Sunbeam Records website, after they released the album as a limited reissue back in 2010, I may have heard 'The Witch' on the radio and then found the reissue. My memory is a little hazy. We are we are though, and I'm here with Mark Fry!
It's a lovely album, very lo-fi, but with some lovely performances, and the song 'Dreaming With Alice' threading through the album. It's folky, very understated, sometimes with a little flute reminiscent of Jethro Tull, and maybe a little like Bowie's Space Oddity or very early T-Rex. It's on Spotify if you want to check out the whole album, with a couple of tracks below...
The album was recorded back in 1971, after Mark signed a record deal with an RCA sub-label in Italy. It didn't sell many copies, original copies now go for around £1200, if you can find one. Luckily Sunbeam Records pressed a thousand back in 2006 so you can get one a little cheaper. My version is a 2010 pressing, which was limited to 1000 copies, so still not that easy to come by.
So here are a couple of tracks to whet your appetite, including the track that first led me down a Mark Fry rabbit hole - The Witch...