1537 vs. RSD 2014

I’m beginning to smell a rat.  For the last two years I have been away somewhere remote and inaccessible for RSD – last year it was the Night of the Living Owls, this year I was off having my head cleaned.  Interesting, I clearly married a masterful and subtle tactician.

Last year I was able to pop along to my favourite gilded palace of sin, the ever-wonderful Probe Records in Liverpool on the Monday afterwards and still snag myself the Mugstar LP I wanted.  Coming back from holiday so much later this year I didn’t even bother to pop in there yesterday.  Not that I was overwhelmed with things I wanted this time around, apart from the Gonga 12″ I wanted; depressingly I have been watching people trying to sell them for £30-60 on eBay last week, I mean I wanted one but not that much.  Ah well, I just filed it away in the gloomy corner of my enormous brain where I keep my mental drawer I have for Things-I-Really-Want-But-Can’t-Have*.

But just like last year I found myself today casually passing Probe Records at lunchtime (having had a brisk 15-minute walk to achieve this) and wandered over the threshold by accident.  There in a little section marked RSD 2014 I found a few records by a few people I’d never heard of before and I netted myself a copy of Earache Records Presents Masters of Misery on (very limited) vinyl, it’s a Black Sabbath tribute album with a brilliant, brilliant cover, featuring the melodious talents of, amongst others, Cathedral, Sleep, Brutal Truth, Pitchshifter, Godflesh and Iron Monkey – oh yes!  So I thought if that’s all the Black Sabbath covers I can find this year, then so be it.

However, just as I was extracting The Wallet of Rock (from the Jacket of Jive) I realized that there were a couple of other records I hadn’t noticed that had slipped into the rack in front.  One of them was a 10″ featuring a naked dude on the cover and a song with swearing in the title, which I thought was amusing and quite cool, one was something that looked vaguely dancey and then, came the moment that surely one day will mean that Disney make a heart-warming family movie about my life.  I flipped the next disc over and with it, my lid.  It was a pristine copy of Gonga Black Sabbeth, with brilliant pastiche cover, on clear vinyl with a free poster.  My hands trembled, the background music built to a shuddering climax and then in the movie version I was probably reunited with a long-lost relative/learned something really profound about life/rescued my family from a flooded mineshaft.

The music? oh yes, I keep forgetting these lovely records actually have music on.  The A-side is a cover of ‘Black Sabbath’ with Beth Gibbons from Portishead on lead vocals, by Bristol’s best stoner-rock-metal band.  The guitar tone alone is worth the purchase price.  The video is great too, put together using footage from the film Black Sabbath, of course.

I’m happy.

378 Down (still).

*like world peace, X-ray vision and a house carved into the side of a mountain with windows made solely from sapphires and a giant emerald front door.