Woking auctioneers to sell collector's 30,000 vinyl records
A collector's 30,000-record vinyl collection is set to go up for auction in Surrey with an expected combined price of more than £80,000.The sale, run by auctioneers Ewbank's in Woking, will be held on Wednesday and Thursday.The unnamed deceased collector had been buying records for more than 60 years and vinyl specialist John Silke said the collection was "jaw-dropping"."This has been the biggest single cataloguing job of my career – an extraordinary experience," he added.
A Peel Sessions collection, featuring artists including Jimi Hendrix, Joy Division, New Order, The Smiths, Nico and Stiff Little Fingers, is expected to fetch between £800-£1,200, while a collection of Pink Floyd albums is expected to sell for up to £800.Mr Silke said when he visited the collector's home almost every room was filled with records, including the garage.He added: "I rifled through a few boxes and then I took 200 photos on my first recce to try to get a grip on what there was. "I spent the next three nights just studying the spines of the records in the photos and it became clear what an amazing Aladdin's cave of music we had found there."
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The Guardian
2 days ago
- The Guardian
Sly Stone obituary
Between 1968 and 1973 Sly Stone, who has died aged 82, changed the direction of African-American popular music not once but twice. Initially promoting a utopian vision of racial and sexual unity with catchy, imaginative and anthemic songs, he then morphed into a shadowy, stoned figure whose downbeat music mirrored the disenchantment of the early 1970s. It was in 1968 that his band, Sly and the Family Stone, released the single Everyday People, an appeal to unity that topped both the US pop and R&B charts for four weeks in early 1969. Everyday People's catchphrases – 'different strokes for different folks', 'we got to live together' – reflected an optimistic, racially inclusive America and ensured that Sly, with his bright smile and brighter threads, became an iconic figure to many. He and his band had a huge US following, their energy and optimism making them flag bearers for the nascent hippie movement, while appealing to both black and white audiences. In 1969 the band released the adventurous album Stand!, which opened with the title track urging listeners to stand against injustice, and was followed by the dissonant Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey. By now the likes of Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye were studying Sly: he was an icon of black power and arguably the most influential talent in popular music. The band's powerful performance at the Woodstock festival in 1969 – with Sly driving the audience into a frenzy as he chanted I Want to Take You Higher – provided one of the highlights of the Woodstock feature film, and magnified their fame. Then the band relocated to Los Angeles in late 1969, releasing Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin), a propulsive funk number that topped the charts in 1970. Sly then began to shut himself away in a Bel Air mansion, consuming huge quantities of cocaine and angel dust (the hallucinogen PCP). The album There's a Riot Goin' On took almost two years to emerge – a lifetime in pop music. It was a Sly Stone solo effort in all but name and its sound was no longer bright and bold but sombre and low-fi, recorded with an early drum machine and a few close friends (the guitarist Bobby Womack, the organist Billy Preston) sitting in and getting high. Sly's record company, Epic, was aghast, fearing it would alienate his audience. But once again Sly proved himself ahead of the pack: Family Affair, the first single to be released from the album, was a US No 1 and has since gone on to become a contemporary music standard. Nothing else on There's a Riot Goin' On possessed the commercial potential of Family Affair, but the album was a murky, compelling insight into Sly's weary but creative mind – and its drug-induced mood of ennui and cynicism appeared to match that of many Americans experiencing a comedown after the excitement and hopes of the 60s. Riot topped the US album charts and effected a profound influence on African-American music. It is now regarded by many as a masterpiece. Born Sylvester Stewart in Denton, Texas, Sly grew up in Vallejo, California. His mother, Alpha, sang and played guitar at a local church, and his father, known as KC, served as a deacon. With his siblings, Sly sang in the Stewart Four, a gospel group that played in churches and even cut a 78 record. He taught himself to play the guitar and soon mastered the organ, harmonica and a number of other instruments, becoming lead vocalist of the Viscaynes, a doo wop group with whom he released two singles in 1960. After studying musical theory and composition at Vallejo Junior College in Fairfield, California, he was hired by Autumn Records, producing pop hits for the Beau Brummels and Bobby Freeman (and writing Freeman's C'mon and Swim). Sly maintained a hectic schedule during the mid-60s: leading his own band, the Stoners, and working as a DJ at the KSOL radio station in San Francisco, then at KDIA in Oakland, at both of which he was a pioneer in playing contemporary rock music alongside R&B. He formed Sly and the Family Stone in 1966 with his brother Freddie on guitar, Larry Graham on bass, Cynthia Robinson on trumpet, Jerry Martini on saxophone and Greg Errico on drums. His sister Rose joined on electric piano after the release of the group's little-noticed 1967 debut album, A Whole New Thing. Sly wrote all the material, played guitar and keyboards, and sang, too. Sly and the Family Stone were a radical proposition from the start: a multiracial, mixed sex band who blended elements of contemporary rock with a James Brown-influenced dance groove. Their afros and long hair, and fashionable clothes, stood outside the R&B mainstream, in which matching suits and processed hair remained the norm. With their harmonising, their habit of using different members to sing individual lines, and Graham's popping bass technique that would come to be the signature sound of funk, they had a unique feel. Only three months after their second album, Dance to the Music, which contained their first hit single (a Top 10 success in the US and the UK) with the track of the same name, they released Life, an unremarkable collection of songs that produced minor hits with the title track and M'Lady. A year later came Stand!, and then, as Epic grew frustrated at receiving no new material, a Greatest Hits collection was put out in 1970. It reached No 2 in the US charts and has since gone on to sell more than 5m copies. With Sly working for two years on his next album, Epic's president, Clive Davis, froze his royalties to force him to get a move on. When Davis finally received There's a Riot Goin' On he was shocked by its contents. Although his worries about the album's unsaleability proved to be ill-founded, Davis did, however, have genuine cause for concern in the years after Riot. Sly's drug intake escalated, and he became increasingly paranoid and isolated, regularly refusing to perform at concerts (leading to riots by furious audiences) and surrounding himself with thuggish bodyguards. Their threatening behaviour led Errico and Graham to leave the band and the 1973 album, Fresh, although it contained the Top 20 US single If You Want Me to Stay, was not a great commercial success. The following year the album Small Talk proved a critical and commercial failure, and 90% of tickets for a 1975 concert in New York were left unsold. The Family Stone dissolved and Sly attempted a solo career, but subsequent albums failed to sell. In 1977 Epic released him from his contract. For more than four decades he created little. Rarely performing or recording – his last album, Ain't But the One Way, came out in 1982 – he generally made the news only when arrested for cocaine possession, in court for not having paid tax or fighting with various managers over royalties. A comeback was mooted in 2007 when a European tour was booked, but Sly's reluctance to perform for more than 20 minutes, plus his new band's ineptness, meant the performances were widely ridiculed. After that he existed for many years as little more than a ghost, often reported to be living in his van, still a superstar in his own mind. In 2023 his autobiography Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again), written with Ben Greenman, was published and Stone gave interviews in which he claimed to be free of his drug addictions. Seemingly, his daughter Sylvette and a new manager, Arlene Hirschkowitz, had combined their efforts to ensure drug dealers no longer had access to Stone. A feature documentary, Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius), directed by the musician Questlove, was released in 2024. The popularity of the music he created between 1968 and 1973 had never faded – Prince, D'Angelo and Lenny Kravitz were among the many musicians influenced by him. Indeed, the US critic Joel Selvin wrote that 'There are two types of black music: before Sly Stone and after Sly Stone.' He is survived by three children: Sylvester, from his marriage to Kathy Silva, which ended in divorce; Sylvette, from a relationship with his fellow band member Robinson, and Novena, from another relationship. Sly Stone (Sylvester Stewart), musician, born 15 March 1943; died 9 June 2025
Daily Mirror
3 days ago
- Daily Mirror
BRIT Awards to be held in new UK city as show moved from London for first time
Show bosses have chosen Manchester to host the next two BRIT Awards in what has been described as a "massive coup" for the city. The city that spawned era-defining artist such as Oasis, The Smiths, New Order and The Stone Roses is to play host to the Brit Awards for the first time next year. Manchester's Co-op Live arena – the biggest indoor venue in the UK – will host the awards in 2026 and 2027 after 45 ceremonies in London. Andy Burnham, metro mayor of Greater Manchester, said: 'This is a massive coup for Greater Manchester. After 48 years, it is great that this prestigious event is about to arrive in the UK capital of music and culture. 'Greater Manchester has an unparalleled music heritage known around the world and this summer will play host to some of the biggest gigs on the planet. That was made possible by our commitment to new talent and giving emerging artists opportunities to make their name. 'Celebrating the Brit Awards here is the next chapter in its story and you can be sure that we will help them do it in style.' Next year's Brit Awards will also be the first of three years under the stewardship of Sony Music UK, which spearheaded the move to Manchester. It paves the way for the annual ceremony to move to other parts of the UK in future years. The Mercury Music Prize is being held in Newcastle in October, also moving out of London for the first time. One source said: 'London has a bit of a stranglehold on the music industry with the majority of record labels being based there. "This is the perfect response to that and will land really well with fans.' The Brits have been held at the O2 Arena since 2011. Before that, they were hosted by a variety of venues in London including Earl's Court, Alexandra Palace and the Royal Albert Hall. Jason Iley, chief executive of Sony Music UK & Ireland, said the move to Manchester would, 'invigorate the show and build on the Brits' legacy of celebrating world-class music'. The Brits began as the BPI Awards in 1977 and have been an annual event since 1982. They became the Brits in Live opened in May 2024.
The Guardian
6 days ago
- The Guardian
CMAT, pop's gobbiest, gaudiest star: ‘Everyone else in music needs a kick up the hole!'
Ciara Mary-Anne Thompson, or CMAT as she's professionally known, says she can clearly remember writing the song that changed her life. She was 22 and having moved from Ireland to Manchester, was working in TK Maxx and, at the weekends, as what she's fond of calling a 'sexy shots girl': 'Cash in hand, £8 an hour, 11pm to 3am, teetering up and down the stairs of a nightclub in the building where Joy Division shot the video for Love Will Tear Us Apart with a tray of Jägermeister shots they'd put a bit of dry ice in – burned your skin if you got it on your hands – selling them for three pound each. Terrible job. And just getting absolutely stoned out of my bin all the time, doing whatever drugs anyone would give me for free. I had absolutely no friends.' An attempt to get her musical career off the ground, 'trying to make hyperpop because I loved Charli xcx so much', had come to nothing. She had just broken up with her 'old, weird' boyfriend and was 'completely alone in a flat in Chorlton, thinking: 'What have I done?' I got really, really, really upset. I kind of looked at myself in the mirror …' She lets out a snort of laughter. 'I feel like there's so many film scenes where people write songs and I'm like, 'that didn't fucking happen like that', but this one did. So I'm crying, grabbed my guitar and wrote I Wanna Be a Cowboy, Baby! in like 20 minutes. And that was that. I thought: 'I know what I need to do now.'' A couple of years later, I Wanna Be a Cowboy, Baby! was one of a trio of smart, witty, country-inflected songs that catapulted Thompson to lockdown-era fame in her native Ireland, turning her into what she calls 'a big fat pop star' in a matter of months. Her debut album, If My Wife New I'd Be Dead, entered the Irish charts at No 1, its success spreading to the UK, Europe, Australia and the US. Her second, Crazymad, for Me, featured a duet with John Grant and was nominated for an Ivor Novello award and the Mercury prize. Success all happened 'purely because I've got better at writing songs', and came surprisingly easily, she says. 'Whenever someone's like, 'Oh, is it really difficult?' There's parts of it that are difficult, but in general, I'm just like 'This is class, no issue at all. This is great.'' There's no doubt that CMAT is a fantastic pop star, and you can see why Sam Fender has her opening for him in a series of stadiums. Arriving at her record company offices direct from a photoshoot, she looks extraordinary. Her clothes are a riot of bright clashing colours, her enormous sunglasses initially hide eyes thick with glittering blue makeup: she manages to exude a certain chaotic glamour while eating a pasty as a late lunch. She is incredibly forthright on a huge range of topics. She stands up for trans rights – 'If you think of social media as like a video game, you rack up the spoils really high when you decide to go for a group of people who are already at risk' – and confronts the culture of wellness and self-improvement or, as she calls it, 'the rise-and-grind ethic which is making people insane and making them unable to communicate with other people because they're so obsessed with focusing on themselves'. Sometimes she's too forthright for her mum, though: a recent appearance on Adam Buxton's podcast provoked a dressing down. 'She told me it made her cringe: 'That lovely posh Englishman, so well spoken, and you calling yourself a cunt the whole interview. And you're not a cunt, you're lovely.'' And yet, she concedes there has been a significant downside to her breakthrough. 'The kind of headspace that good songs come from is one of extreme emotion, extreme depth of feeling,' she says, 'which has an impact on my life. I do live in that really heightened state of emotion all the time. I'm crazy and I do crazy things, and I have crazy relationships with people.' She doesn't mean crazy as in wild or outrageous, she qualifies. She means crazy as in authentically unwell, or – as she puts it with characteristic bluntness – 'mental'. Now 29, Thompson thinks she has always suffered from auditory hallucinations, but during the making of her third album, 'I started actually hallucinating. I was in New York, writing. I didn't realise for the first two months that was what was happening, but I basically imagined the entire apartment I was staying in was crawling with insects, that I had insects crawling on my skin all the time. I was calling the landlord, letting off bug bombs, I made them throw the couch out because I thought it was covered in fleas. I was itching all the time. I was texting a group chat of friends, sending them pictures of all the bug bites on me: New York's disgusting, full of insects. And they didn't exist. I went to the doctor and showed him my bites and he said: 'Those are stress hives; you're mental.'' (Possibly not an exact diagnosis.) 'I was hallucinating the whole time.' For that reason, she worries that songwriting might not be a sustainable occupation for that reason, or that taking medication might cause the flow of songs to stop. But whatever the pains staked in writing its contents, her new album is superb. It pushes at the boundaries of her previous work's sound: into synth-heavy territory on the title track, pop soul on Running/Planning and distorted alt-rock on The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station, a song during which the constant sight of the TV chef's face in Britain's motorway services seems to bring about an existential collapse in the mid-tour CMAT. It arrives in a sleeve featuring its title, Euro-Country, written in the kind of Gaelic script beloved of Irish theme pubs, above an exceptionally striking photo based on Jean-Léon Gérôme's 1896 painting Truth Coming Out of Her Well. It features Thompson emerging from a fountain in the middle of a shopping centre near her home town of Dunboyne. 'Blanchardstown shopping centre,' she says. 'For the first 10, 11 years of my life, it was like my local village. My sister, who lives in Blanch now, goes to the shopping centre every day. You drive there if you want to see other people and then you drive back home again and live in your house by yourself.' That's the reality of much of Irish life, she says. 'There's a kind of space that Ireland is occupying in western media culture right now, a little more fetishised and trendy than it's ever been. Americans think it's cute; English people are like, 'Ooh, I love Guinness and Kneecap and The Banshees of Inisherin, and I'm getting my Irish passport and mmm, I love potato farl.' People talking about Hozier like he's a magical, delicate fairy from the bog. It's a romanticised version of Ireland that doesn't exist. It's a really hard place to live, a really hard place to grow up, unless you have money, which we didn't. So yeah, magical, beautiful, mystical Ireland: it's a shopping centre, that's what I grew up with. A shopping centre.' Ireland's recent history suffuses Euro-Country, which features vocals in Irish, songs called Billy Byrne from Ballybrack, the Leader of the Pigeon Convoy and Tree Six Foive and a title track that she describes as 'a collage, a mood board' about the financial crisis that engulfed the country in 2008. 'I was about 12 and it all happened around me, it didn't really happen to my family directly,' she says. 'My dad had a job in computers, we didn't really have any money, we weren't affluent, but we were fine. Everybody else on the estate we lived in worked in construction, or in shops, and they all lost their jobs. Everybody became unemployed. Then, in the village I grew up in, there was a year or 18 months where loads of the people I went to school with, their dads started killing themselves because they'd lost everything in the crash.' Initially, Thompson thought she must have misremembered this. 'But I dug deep, did research and the amount of male suicides that happened in Ireland at that time was astronomical. When I hit secondary school, teenage boys started killing themselves as well; that was very common where I grew up. I think it was a kind of chain reaction as a result of the economic downturn. I'm not blaming anyone – no one ever purposely tries to cause that much harm. It's trying to get all this stuff together and think: 'Why did all this happen and how do we stop it from happening again?' I don't have the answer but I think we all need to keep looking at it and really fucking try to hound ourselves into a position where we're not just thinking about monetary gain all the time.' Euro-Country is a noticeably more political album than its predecessors, which tended to focus on relationships and the chaos of her personal life. Thompson says she couldn't really see anyone else in her position doing it, so decided to take it on. 'No one is dealing with capitalism as a force for bad, this really fucking horrible putrefied version of capitalism which has absolutely had a line of coke up its fucking hole since Covid, where the richest people in the world are so much richer than they used to be five years ago,' she says. 'Pop stars won't come out and say that because they'll be absolutely shot for it, because they've all done brand deals: 'Oh, I love my Dove moisturiser.'' Thompson was one of a number of artists to pull out of Latitude and other festivals over sponsor Barclays providing financial services to defence companies supplying Israel. She says that as soon as she removed herself from the lineup, an upcoming deal with a designer perfume brand disappeared. 'They ghosted me. I lost a lot of money. But who fucking cares? I'm aware of the fact that my career is going to struggle as a result of this stuff, but I also think everyone else in music needs a kick up the hole. Where's all the fucking artists? Where's all the fucking hippies?' Of course, another reason why musicians might feel abashed about mentioning politics is fear of a social media backlash, something Thompson knows all about. Last year, an Instagram video of her performing at BBC Radio 1's Big Weekend festival attracted so much abuse – largely directed at her weight – that the BBC was forced to disable comments. She laughed it off at the time, suggesting she should be imprisoned for the crime of 'having a big fat ass', but returns to the subject on her current single, Take a Sexy Picture of Me (it has turned into that rarest of things: a song about body shaming that has provoked a TikTok dance trend, with it-girl Julia Fox and Chicken Shop Date host Amelia Dimoldenberg participating). 'Prior to moving over to the UK I would never have thought I was plus size,' she says. 'And then I started working with fashion directors in London for photoshoots and started hearing: 'Wow, you're so lucky I collect plus-size Mugler because no one else will be able to dress you.' I thought: what are you talking about? I'm a size 14! I thought everyone was this size! Why are you being so weird? But truth be told, if someone on the internet calls me a big fat ugly bitch, I'm like 'yeah, whatever', I don't fucking care. But I started realising that other people were witnessing it and other girls, young girls, were witnessing this happening to me on a fucking huge scale – what must they think of that? How is it going to make them feel, particularly if they're bigger than me?' She brings it back to commerce. 'In day-to-day real life, if you think being fat will stop people from ever wanting to have sex with you, let me tell you that is not the case in such an extreme way. I've seen the girlies out there doing unbelievably well for themselves, right? But [because] fatness is not commercially viable, it's not in the realm of commercial attractiveness.' Online, she says, the body image discourse brings out 'weak-willed, spineless people who have been brutalised by commercial viability, criticising someone for not falling within the realms of what is easily sellable'. Thompson says she is aware that the political bent of Euro-Country is a big ask of audiences in 2025, when pop seems to largely function as a means of temporary escape from a terrifying world. 'It can be read as incredibly cringe and incredibly earnest and on the nose, right? It's an embarrassing thing for me to be asking of people. Because it's not trendy to be earnest any more. I'm aware of that, and …' She laughs again. 'Actually I don't care. I don't care if I'm putting my foot in it, I don't care if I'm saying something wrong. We've all been too measured, too careful because we're being witnessed all the time. I think we need more willingness to fail. Even if it's futile, you've got to fucking try. Because it's fucking depressing otherwise.' Euro-Country is released via CMATBaby and Awal on 29 August
