Among the many John Lennon vocal performances captured on vinyl, the following may not be the most familiar: “Yeah, I’d like to say hi to all of you … The message is, you know – if you like it, sell it…if you don’t, try and sell it anyway cos we’re all in the same business.” Lennon’s laconic pep talk can be heard on a 7 inch vinyl single recorded for EMI salesmen in 1974 to encourage them to push his new album. He can be heard, that is, if you have the £2,000 required to buy one of the handful of copies that were pressed.
The figure is quoted in the latest Rare Record Price Guide 2014, a bi-annual brieze block of musical small-print whose newest edition has just been published by Record Collector magazine. Among its 100,000 entries are details of releases so arcane they make the Lennon single look like a copy of Do They Know It’s Christmas?. Accompanying its release, the magazine is featuring its list of “The 200 Rarest Records Today”. To read it is to enter a world at once entirely recognisable yet utterly abstruse, where the Beatles, David Bowie and Queen rule the roost, but only in the bizarrest of out-takes and mutations. What is clear, however, from the article’s opening line, is that even with “gold on the slide, the price for mega-rare vinyl remains unaffected by the recession”.
“We’re talking about the top end of the market,” says Ian Shirley, editor of the guide. “Top end for a record is anything from £200 to £10,000. Rare means, one, there are not many of those records around, and two, they’re records people want to desperately own…
This then, is the consumate Vinyl Record Collectors Guide to the Value of Rare and Desirable Records. Welome to the Rare Record Price Guide.
THE BIRTH OF COLLECTING
When the collecting scene was in its infancy in the 1970s, the market was focused on particular artists or genres. All the early attention was concentrated on 1950s rock’n’roll, and 1960s beat music with major artists such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Elvis Presley and David Bowie attracting specialist “professional” collectors. The whole collecting scene blossomed during the 1980s and it’s now true to say that there aren’t any musical styles which aren’t collectable. Folk, dub, jazz, techno, hip-hop, blues, heavy metal, punk, psychedelia, progressive rock, film soundtracks, soul, funk, reggae, disco, mainstream rock and pop, even easy listening – each genre boasts its share of in-demand rarities.
The 2012 Edition
The current Edition of the Rare Record Price Guide will cost you around $100…even if you buy it direct from the publishers in the UK. The 2012 Edition on offer here (at a fraction of the current price, by the way) still featuires the most collectable vinyl releases of the past 100 years…that is a fact. Their actual value, as with all things secondhand and collectable will ultimately be decided by the market. As individual values will be determined by the vagaries of the current financial climate, the 2012 edition is still completely relevant as it lists the most important and hence valuable releases of our lifetime.
