Clutter & Junk

I visited the incredibly cluttered junkshop on Drottinggatan (Queen Street) on Saturday morning. This is an establishment which seems to exist primarily as an extension of its proprietor’s mania for accumulation and acquisition, and only secondarily as a place of business. There are sundry pieces of furniture there whose foremost function is as a base stratum upon which numerous other layers of trinkets, whatnots and boxes of stuff have since been sedimented. There are bookshelves there which are impossible to peruse, as they have been wholly or partially occluded by stacks of prints, or cases of scratched ‘78s, or by oddly-shaped brass objects such as may have once fallen off the back of a boat, and one would move these objects aside if only there were a square foot anywhere that they could be moved aside to.

And then there is the shelved alcove where the majority of the vinyl is stored, in cases and boxes and loose stacks. Whenever I visit the incredibly cluttered junkshop, I make a point of trying to look through as large a sampling of these discs as I can. This is not as easy as it might be, however, as the floor of the alcove is piled high with jumbles of books and piles of comics, such that there is only just about room in one particular spot to plant both of ones feet, and one is obliged to stretch up and twist awkwardly around in that cramped and dimly-lit nook to manhandle the boxes and cases on the shelves, which all becomes tiring after a while. Even so, on Saturday, I came away with an armful of records.

The first thing to catch my eye was a 7" single (above) promising to include sample extracts from a late ‘50s-vintage BBC English course. I like listening to some of that old-school Received Pronuciation, and went to the trouble of grabbing some mp3s from this disc, which follow below:

1. Calling all beginners
2. Revise your English
3. Meet the Parkers
4. English Intonation

The disc was quite warped, which accounts for some of the background noise. Besides this, I bought a few classical albums: a disc of pieces from Khachaturian’s ballets; Dinu Lipatti playing the Schumann and Grieg concertos; and a disc of Chopin waltzes. Amongst the many dozens of dodgy early-‘80s mainstream LPs and singles at this store, one oddity stood out, and I brought that home too: a typically eccentric 12" single by The Associates called Message Oblique Speech, whose b-side, Blue Soap features Billy Mackenzie singing in the bath while another Associates track plays in the background. Oh, and I bought two LPs by Shaun Cassidy as a gift for my wife, who had mentioned just a few days before that, as a 10-&-11-year-old, she was a big fan of his: until then, I’d only ever heard of his half-brother, David.

On a vaguely-related note: I owe the image that I’ve added the bottom of this page to another recent trip to one of this town’s second-hand emporia. I picked up a copy of a collection of short stories called Open the Door by Osbert Sitwell that had been published in 1947 by the Stockholm-based Bonnier company, under their Zephyr Books imprint, which issued numerous English-language titles under license from British and American publishers for distribution in post-war continental Europe, hence the text on the book’s back cover:

I took a liking to this text, and decided to scan & photoshop it to the best of my limited ability such that it could sit unobtrusively at the foot of these pages…