One bloke. Far too many records.

I bought this for €3 at a brocante knowing absolutely nothing about Mari Wilson. The cover had me expecting something from the 1940s, 50s or 60s, but when the needle dropped and 1983 exploded out of the speakers, it turned into record roulette in full glory.

I bought this for £4 because I recognised the names and thought it looked worth a punt. I did not even properly clock that it was a soundtrack until I got home. What followed was a brilliantly strange 1978 Beatles cover odyssey, an even stranger film, and a dead-wax rabbit hole that does not quite match the version usually documented online.

I’d always filed a-ha under Take On Me: massive song, iconic video, job done. Then my wife brought home a free, battered old library copy of Scoundrel Days and completely ruined that assumption. It’s dark, strange, beautifully recorded and constantly shifting between different corners of the 80s, and somehow this scratched ex-library LP plays like nobody ever borrowed the bloody thing.

I bought this £1.95 charity-shop LP because I thought “Merseybeats” meant a compilation of Liverpool beat bands. It turned out to be an actual band, a set of 1977 stereo re-recordings, a sleeve signed by Tony Crane with a second mysterious “TED” inscription, and a pressing whose two sides appear to have taken different journeys through Phonodisc. Not bad for something I bought because I like The Beatles and a bit of Scouse.

I was only going to Aldi for a quick food shop, then I had the seemingly harmless thought that I’d stop at Action and see if they had any vinyl cleaner. Three hours, four shops, a trolley, four CDs and two tiny easels later, I still didn’t have the bloody thing.

Most grading systems ask one media grade to describe two different things: what the record looks like and what it actually sounds like. Those usually correlate — until they don’t.

The sleeve says Germany. The dead wax says the story travelled further. This is how one copy of Scoundrel Days turned into a small industrial-history rabbit hole.

There is a point where an online bargain stops being a bargain and starts becoming a shipping invoice. Brocantes have ruined me for sensible record buying.