Rat Records Shop News

Hello again electric friends and welcome to the silky antistatic world of The Inner Sleeve. It’s been a pretty intense time at Rat this week, as the mysterious Celtic Fringe Fiend that is Tom has blown into town to mine black gold for us all.

If there was a new Indiana Jones franchise about the dangerous world of tracking down music, it would clean up at certain box offices. As well as be cheap to film. The Rat crew expose themselves to situations of grave personal danger and compromised hygiene. These range from meeting Vinnie Jones impersonators in front of Croydon chop shop lockups to ignoring showers of asbestos dust from a loft filled with lost musical treasures. On this trip Down Sarf Tom managed 7 buys in 12 hours. This is an impressive average of tempting fate and living to do it again.

It can actually get really surreal. Some creature found or guessed his number, and basically threatened him with some kind of Jimmy Saville record. It was a Top 10 comp of fromage from the late 60s that would drain cool from the shop like a gold plated vampire. They insisted he should buy it, especially given the sad news of the man’s toe tagging. Tom suggested they seek some urgent professional attention elsewhere.

So what did he get for us this Saturday? Rock Heads will delight in a great selection of superb Classic Rock Albums from £5: Who, Creedence, Zappa, Neil Young, Big Star, Lou Reed, Ramones, Nico, Stereolab, Doors, Leonard Cohen running into Creation etc and a great selection of less Classic but Original Rock albums from Yes, Uriah Heep and BJH at £3. Light relief for the Soul Vinyl fans is provided by some tasty sealed copies from the Dusty Fingers sampling selection, and a seasoning of original Isaac Hayes LPs. There is also a taste of Reggae vinyl; Sizzla, Capelton, Luciano etc on LP, and late 90s Drum n Bass in beautiful condition at £2-£3; Virus, Moving Shadow, Reinforced, Audio Couture.

There will be more shocking tales from the Tartan raider next time, we just have to wait to get all the facts in and make sure the signatures on the release forms are clean so do bear with us.

Speaking of clean, your faithful Sleeve snuck into the shop last week to have a lost masterpiece by Freddie Hubbard restored to glory by Rat’s Loricraft PRC Mark 4 , one of only one and half available for public use in London. At first, he was concerned that Dom, who you’ll remember has heavier Dance and House oriented creds on his CV than a funky architect and bricklayer with nine triple jointed legs, was deploying some kind of exotic sampler to siphon the very best breaks for his own nefarious use. This was not the case. In fact, the record ended up looking like it had come from some time tunnel to 1974. When Rat first got this magical lady in, some were unsure of the benefits compared to the good old carbon fibre brush we all need. Tom had a box of perfect Unboxed Decca of the kind collectors kill their best friends to own; untouched for 40 odd years, except by the marbling effect of the vinyl reacting with the sleeve it’s in. They looked like a bad bathroom tile. The Loricraft made them new again, and all gave praise. For less than a crap cocktail, you can have ten records restored thus.

In fact, Freddie is now calling us. Firstly to apologise for his later falling off the funky train of quality, secondly to make us spin High Energy yet again. Goodbye for now, and see you in the racks!

Well, it’s been quiet the past few days here. I assume everyone is lying down in parks or by an open air swimming pool…but here we keep dealing with dusty wax, making it look shiny with the hard working Lauricraft cleaning machine. I won’t tire to repeat it, the results, especially on 12″‘s are absolutely stunning. If you do online auctions, you will almost certainly get a grade up from giving it a nice clean. Don’t hesitate to come to us a with a few well used records to test it. I can garantee you won’t be looking back.
Since it is so quiet, we also have plenty of time for the parts of the job we sometimes tend to overlook. So this week i spent a lot of time rersearching and printing rare records and CDs reviews onto removable stickers so hoping that a bit of information may make them more attractive. We still have 3 turntables availaible to listen to all the records before to buy, and one CD listeninmg point too. However, I am getting so sick of people singing out loud at the counter with the headphones on…I bet that doesn’t happen at Phonica or Rough Trade!!
In fact, we have all sort of characters, wityh varying levels of nuttiness, and it is not rare to have punters dancing around with the sennheisers on at maximum volume….you can imagine that none of those are the Indie rock type.
Maybe this has happened a lot more recently because we have been getting so much R&B, Hip Hop, Soul and Funk, thanks to the seemingly endless supply of “E.I” records in our basement! And I must say that this week is not going to be much different. However, Tom will be in town next week (while I will be travelling to my St Malo for a week of holidays) and he has loads of people in his agenda waiting for him to visit them and deliver them from the weight of their record collections.
Of course, there will laso be top classic rock, bit of Jazz and Reggae and Blues and dance stuff for good measure.

We also have a pretty cool supply of new or newish CD’s, priced between £4 and £7.

That’s it for now, I will return all tanned and smiles in two weeks time.

Best to you all.

Ph. Rat Records.

Well, first of all, a very big thank you to my dear friend Bua who has spent his spare time cutting us multicoloured records dividers.
It has taken time, but we have finally stickered them all and replaced the old grubby ones and the shop looks fantastic!
I am also very happy to see more and more new customers, always praising us for our prices and service. Indeed we are making every efforts to beat the spending cuts slashing prices to the limits of the ridiculous. Ask Biri and Aaron Liberator who bought all our classic techno records with a bright smile on their faces as they knew they were leaving with the bargains of their life!

This week though, no techno coming out. We have a nice collection of digital raggae twelves and roots 7′s, with  some fine Ska and Rocksteady classics. Considering that this is looking like the sunniest year in the UK ever, there’s never been a better time to take these sunbeams on wax home. Hurry on Saturday though, because I can’t see them lasting longer than two hours in the rack.
We also have bough a fine collection of Hip Hop, Modern R&B and Ragga albums and twelves, the likes of Snoop, Dre, Jay Z and 50cents, and some fine compilations of riddim and jungle.

But the bulk of what is coming out is from a fine collection we bought from a gentleman who used to buy music in the 70′s and took great care of it. He had a wide range of tastes, from Wetaher report to neil Young and Zappa, passing by Kraftwerk, Heptones, John Cale, Beefhart, obviously Stones and beatles and Zeppelin… he even had the Feelies, but as i am listening to it right now and enjoying it so much, this one may stay in my bag… (soz).

And of course, another box of Funk, Disco and House from the man known by all our regulars as E.I.

Best to you all.

Philippe-Rat Records.