Get on the right track baby (Tony Sheridan) (LP 1-3)

Good morning people! It's a new dawn!

My vinyl vault

Having spent a couple of years completing the epic singles countdown (I thought I had 300, turns out it was nearly double that), it's now time to go one bigger.

What could that mean? It means -writing about every album I own!! 

Gulp - this could take a while!

CDs and more CDs

Indeed, it would take me a few years to get through just The Beatles catalogue alone so some guidelines are required which I may or may not adhere to as time goes by.

First up my collection is arranged in genres, so I'm going to rotate through them so that I don't get stuck on my genre or one artist.

That means vinyl and CDs will get mixed up too and I'll be ranging over albums from the last 100 years. So forget about alphabetical! Exciting, right? You bet!!

Very deliberately, I want to write about original albums as they were intended (I LOVE albums), so - no 'best of' collections for this baby, and no compilations of various artists at this stage either.

As with the singles, I want to highlight certain aspects of each album. There will still be a hidden gem but I'll be adding my favourite standout track, hopefully with a clip, the album cover and anything of note that I can think of/remember, like where I bought it and when.

I'm also going to attempt a simple rating system to keep myself amused (it's over in the left hand column). 

Okay - enough preamble. Here's my first step on a (very) long and winding road...

The Beatles  The Beatles First (Double Vinyl - Polydor, 1968) *

[+ The Beatles Tony Sheridan And The Beatles (CD - Charly Records, 1992) *

The Beatles Savage Young Beatles (CD - TKO Magnum Music, 2002) *]

Genre: Beatles (you know it)

Places I remember: I bought this in Auckland in the mid seventies from the bargain bin rack at George Courts in K Rd. in the company of one Greg Knowles.

Fab, and all the other pimply hyperboles: Cry For A Shadow (Lennon/ Harrison) is a terrific little instrumental homage to The Shadows (great title huh) and a neat workout for George.

Gear costume: What I'd Say? The fabs used this Ray Charles rave up in their Hamburg days - Mark Lewisohn reports that Paul used to spin their version out to 15 minutes or so - here it's a thrifty version and a real gem! I think this is the only place the track ever appears - I certainly can't find it on anything else - not the BBC recordings, not Live! At the Star Club, not on Anthology 1.

Active compensatory factors: Yes, inevitably, we start with The Beatles because the first genre in my collection is BEATLES - together and solo are collected together and have pride of place. Where else would I start?


These first three albums are part of the huge repackaging market in pre Parlophone Beatles material - tracks recorded in Germany with and without Tony Sheridan.

It was these recordings, in particular The Fabs version of My Bonnie, that first sparked interest from Brian Epstein - driven purely by a keenness to track down music his target audience was searching for.

Although there are hints (like the harmonies in Sweet Georgia Brown) they, of course, do not sound anything like the post 1963 Beatles, but... many of these tracks are a lot fun.

The vinyl double album is the best of the three collections I have - four sides, 23 tracks.

Where do they all belong?: Nobody would actually start with this as their introduction to The Beatles but the logical progression from this one (apart from Live! At the Star Club on YouTube) are the other early albums by the British invasion bands that followed - like The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds, and The Hollies.