Going for a song | 10 September 2015

This column does like a bargain. Indeed, it not only esteems and relishes a bargain, it has also worked long and hard to prove Milton Friedman wrong. Sometimes there really is such a thing as a free lunch. And for those of us still wedded to the notion of owning music on some kind of solid, tangible medium (vinyl, CD, dusty box of cassettes at back of cupboard), these are great, cheapskate-friendly years in which to be alive. Almost every song ever recorded can be bought for a song. And still we mothwallets can claim the moral high ground, because we’re not actually stealing it, unlike everyone under 40. As Fagin once sang, ‘In this life, one thing counts. In the bank, large amounts.’

It was probably inevitable, then, that I would be drawn to the record companies’ latest wheeze for making the most of their now vast and lumbering back catalogues. The old Warner companies, now tiny components lost within a faceless corporate empire, call it ‘Original Album Series’, and other companies are now following suit. What it boils down to is five albums by a particular artist, packaged together in five CDs, and sold for between £10 and £15. These are never quite Division One artists: there is no such Beatles package, or one from Pink Floyd. But there’s a Doobie Brothers, a Jethro Tull, an Echo & the Bunnymen, at least two Emmylou Harrises, a Keith Jarrett, one from Be-Bop Deluxe, another from Everything But the Girl. Often it’s the first five albums by an artist; sometimes, if there has been a really huge seller, it is strategically excluded. Each CD comes in a tiny cardboard case duplicating the original vinyl sleeve. To read it you need an electron microscope, or maybe the assistance of Donald Pleasence in The Great Escape.