Colin was a lovely fella, I’d guess 10 or so years older than me. He used to come into the shop a couple of times a week and just chat about music, and if I had anything weird and strange that he didn’t know he’d generally buy it. He had an encyclopaedic musical knowledge and had seen almost anyone you could name live. He was constantly out and about at gigs seeing new bands.

I started hearing from other people that his record collection was stored in a freight container it was so vast. They’d also tell me how he would regularly finance new bands that he liked, sending them into the studio and pressing up their records. He started telling me about a band he’d seen in a small pub in Wales somewhere who he thought were fantastic and they were gonna be huge. He financed their recordings and the pressing of an album and one day he dropped by the shop with a copy of this album and said to have a listen and let him know what I thought next time I saw him.

It’s a beautiful thing with a kind of Impressionist design on the cover, pressed on Blue vinyl. Did I like it ? Not really, it reminds me of some bizarre union twixt The Fall, Captain Beefheart and Kings Of Leon, not really my thing at all. The sad part (or maybe not given the previous sentence) is that I never got to tell Colin that as before I got to see him again I got the news that he’d passed away. I very likely won’t play this often if at all but I’ll certainly never part with it cos it’s a reminder of Colin, a genuinely cool and generous man.

Gasoline - https://youtu.be/pRD8XYxceuQ?si=mb6b6sSUerTT2NHF