Last weekend I had a little trip out on the bike to run a little errand, and took the opportunity to visit (yet) another record shop. Although we have none in Crawley or the surrounding towns, we are blessed with a huge number just a little further afield and I have been sampling them to determine which are worth making the effort to travel to.

A couple of shops have turned out to be not worth the trouble for me. Either the selection is tiny, or everything is at silly prices, like the shop where absolutely nothing is less than a tenner. Fortunately, most are OK and a few are outstanding. The one I visited on Saturday is one of the outstanding ones.

Tunbridge Record Exchange has an absolutely enormous selection, and I think I didn’t even see all of it. The only thing that stopped me getting carried away was the fact that I can’t carry much on the motorbike and had already popped into Wow & Flutter in Hastings earlier in the day.

I try not to get too carried away in a new shop anyway, not until I have got home and played my purchases. In this case one of the records I bought was the Yes live triple-album Yessongs for £8. At that price you might expect it to be a bit crackly but I have now played all six sides and the good news is that it sounds just as good as I remember it. It sounds terrible of course, because it really is a badly-made record and always has been but you can’t blame the shop for that. Not that I was bothered because it brought back so many memories of the many, many times I played this record back in the day.

I think I have been very lucky recently. Just the other week I was in Dorking at Spin Sounds. He has a box of pre-loved records on the counter that are dead cheap because the quality is variable. At £4 each or three for a tenner they are worth a punt. Last time I was there I got The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, Carole King’s Tapestry, and an AC/DC album from that box and all of them were fine, but the Genesis one was exceptional. I have no idea why that one wasn’t a tenner or more just on its own.

I’m still a fan of a couple of shops in Hastings, Hove, Arundel and Eastbourne but as the weather is getting colder and wetter I think I will be visiting Dorking and Tunbridge a bit more.