One of the joys of record collecting – or vinyl to those of you that are unable to understand music that doesn’t come on shiny discs – is that some of the sellers of vinyl quite often throw stuff in a ‘bargain bucket’ and you can get three or four LPs for a fiver. A fiver for an armful of vinyl is worth taking a punt on, and quite apart from the fact that the record might be physically dubious, you never know, it might turn out to be worth listening to. You know the sort of mild panic that comes over you when you succumb to the three for two deals – you can never quite figure out what the third one should be?

Well, I’d grabbed a bunch of stuff – all 80’s, as they are in these circumstances, typically, and I was looking through the racks trying to work out what to take a chance on to make up that elusive fourth purchase. In the end I closed my eyes, and picked one. Well, it fitted the bill – I’d never heard of The Big Dish, or their “Swimmer” album. I handed over my denarii and headed for home, wondering why I never get that feeling you used to get when you’d splashed your pocket money on a saturday morning in WH Smith on a new record. I digress. I do that a lot, which is why I don’t write for a living… Well, it was unplayed – it still stuck to the inner sleeve, so I thought I’d take a chance on playing it on my Linn (I have a Thorens that I use for physically dubious stuff…).
It isn’t often I get sonically clobbered by a record – largely because I’ve heard most stuff and I know what to expect – but this record did that for me. From the opening track (Prospect Street) to the last track, I was captivated. It has 80’s production values, but thankfully no Yamaha DX7 synth washes, and it has a feel of what Hall & Oates might have done if they had collided with Lloyd Cole on the way to see Go West. It is a slice of intelligent pop, of the kind that existed before Stock, Aitken and Waterman took over the remainder of the decade’s output.