Ok...For starters, this clown, who seems to have named himself after a Cadbury bar, had actually taken to writing his moniker with a black indelible felt tip pen on the actual covers of big name stuff...I take as an example 'Pet Sounds,' clearly an earlyish pressing but with 'Wispa' above the little goat's head (or actually partially on the white goat, just to make it more visible). He'd done this on a whole series of albums that one particular vinyl emporium had seen fit to display. He hadn't done it to The United States Of America...Or so I thought...until I got it out...Still, he'd looked after the playing surface, so I can't grumble...but...why???

It dawned on me, in this era of The 'New Vinyl Revolution,' there are an awful lot of sites and blogspots making an awful lot of noise about how great such and such a pressing is, the superior quality of their sound systems with this, that or the other pre amp...all that jive. The internet is full of them and very useful some of them are too.

What isn't covered quite so much, if at all, scarcely, are some of the 'horrors' of buying vinyl. Vinyl is archeology...when we buy vinyl, we are buying a little piece of history...and as is the case in archelogy, people leave their 'mark' on something that remains there forever. Words actually fail me as to why people can allow record sleeves to be written on...I suppose people have kids and leave their records carelessly about the place, only to find that there has appeared a sort of sub standard storyboard of Dangermouse, but in an unfinished way.

What is a little bit more baffling are instances where someone has taken to writing, for example, someone's name and full address and postcode in biro on a front cover of something like The White Album...but it happened...a lot...

I'm also interested in just how poor a state a record can get into...again...I'm really not sure what happens in its journey...but there are in existence, records that are very valuable, or at least relatively so, yet the best you'll ever EVER find it is FAIR condition.

Warping...how low can you go?

So then, in this blog, I'm particularly interested in hearing about your knackered vinyl woes and niggles, in order to get a bigger picture of the down side of the otherwise pleasurable vinyl hobby...