Charity shop time machine to the past...

I'm a regular visitor to my two local charity shops, which, rather conveniently, are located about 50 metres apart from each-other on the high-street. I'm not sure what the staff think of me, spending ages carefully checking through every single CD in the rack, but over the past two or three years I've been going to them, I've uncovered some long-since deleted singles and bargain-price albums from my favourite artists - in the process saving me an absolute fortune in having to buy them from Ebay.

My latest purchases were:

Depeche Mode - Ultra
New Order - The Best Of
The Stone Roses - Second Coming
Now That's What I Call Music 37

The first three are all some of my favourite bands of all time. And finding these albums at two quid a go, I just had to have them. Sure, I already have the tracks on my iTunes (and in the case of Ultra, a re-released deluxe edition), but there's something inherently beautiful about purchasing the originals. In their slightly scuffed cases and with the little price-tag sticker on them, they are so much a part of the 90s - the era seems to seep out of the very CDs themselves. Buying them in this way, you are getting more than just the music - here you have a little time-capsule, a link back to the past, a window into the world in which these albums first appeared.

Hunting for the edit...

In these days of party playlists and iPod mix-tapes, sometimes all we want is a radio edit. As artists seem to every-frequently pack their albums with four-minute-plus long tracks and lengthy instrumental segways between songs, we're often left with little bits and pieces that while perfectly fine in the context of the album, just don't fit when we're listening to the track individually.

Now, normally this wouldn't be a problem, but in an age of declining 'proper' single releases - where there will be no official CD release, or in some cases no digital release either. Instead an album campaign will just see a stream of 'promo singles' and the artist will just leave the public to download the lengthy album versions, forcing fans who want the edited versions to track down expensive radio promo's on Ebay or wait til the edit surfaces on some random compilation CD months later.

When we hear a song on the radio, that is the version of the song we want; yet still these versions never seem to surface with anything approaching regularity on the regular download services.

Maybe it's just the completist in me but sometimes all I want is a nice three-and-a-half minute long version of a song, all the awesomeness packed into a bite-size chunk I can comfortably fit into my daily commute.