Just out of curiosity: In those dark pre-internet days (before eBay, Amazon, mp3-downloading programmes, etc), what was it like trying to amass a band or artist's back-catalogue? Did you have to rely almost totally on normal retail outlets to find albums? Was it frustrating as hell trying to complete music collections??

pre internet, i never heard of an artist's back catalogue.

Depends on how you wanted to do it (eg if you wanted to get Rykos or vinyl etc). Second hand stores were always good for finding the deleted stuff. And independent record retailers were also very good at acquiring anything you wanted, whether it be from overseas (but you had to accept paying inflated prices) or simply records they didn't have in the shop. For the rarer items, record fairs were the go.

Turn off the television - put on romantic vinyl

Indeed, those were difficult times. Today it is almost too easy! Record fairs and second hand shops. And mail order!

Living in a small town where the record fairs didn't even come, I relied heavily on obscure little garage mailorder companies whose addresses you got from ads in the music press and who would send you their badly typed catalogs a few times per year. Interested as I was in 80s electronica, my Fad Gadget and Silicon Teens collections were painfully built up, used single by used single, over that kind of mailorder.

Mind you, even getting to hear stuff like the Arnold Corns recordings, or Kraftwerk's early works for that matter, was not an easy thing! Imagine the confict - once you got your hands on a rarity, you had to decide whether to ruin it by playing it on your turntable...

It's LABRYNTH, idiot!

Far from being dark & reticent, Ziggfried, those were brilliant, explorative & sunshiny days - record stores were brimming over with artists albums & the stores themselves were everywhere, I mean quite literally everywhere - I purchased my first vinyl copy of Pinups in the Serengeti.

Mana, I would have loved to know about the aluminum Rykos back then. They are supposed to sound great.

They're not all that - the original RCA CD's are the best sounding.

Yea I know, I wish Bowie would do something about his awful sounding catalogue. You'd think that Bowie, the perfectionist, of all people, would care.

He's really starting to get on my tits.

In reply to:

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Far from being dark & reticent, Ziggfried, those were brilliant, explorative & sunshiny days

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I was wondering if maybe it was more fun back then trying to find albums you were after, when it wasn't made easy by the internet. Actually, there's a lot to be said for the pre-internet days. Like when it comes to movies. I kinda rue the fact that with the internet, you find out pretty much exactly what a movie is all about, when it's coming out, who’s in it etc, ages before it’s released. I think I preferred the old pre-web days of magazines and word-of-mouth, when movies which you didn't even know had been made popped up.