Remainder bin treasure

Remainder bin vinyl was a source of treasure for any youngster on a limited budget.

Record companies would find themselves with a vast warehouse stuffed with unsold records and ship them out at a fraction of the cost.

An old promotional trick back in the 1970s used to be to send out vast quantities of an album and then declare it had 'shipped gold/platinium' in the hope of getting some momentum going.

It could fail spectacularly - Casablancas Records was so notorious for it that the company was given an unofficial slogan: 'Shipped gold, returned platinum'.

Once they'd given up on selling them at full price, record companies would then send out with a slightly mutilate sleeve to stop record shops from craftily flogging them at full price.

This could involve chopping a corner off or cutting out a thin slice from the sleeve. Which beats using them as landfill for road building in China, I suppose - the fate that befell the unwanted CD copies of Robbie Williams' Rudebox album.

Back in the 1980s, Manchester had a record shop originally called Yanks, then subsequently Power Cuts, that was stuffed with hundreds of these bargain records.

It was a large, bare cellar shop that would occassionally open up an extra, even bigger, room stuffed with vast amounts of vinyl, little of which cost as much as a fiver.

The staff were as curmudgeonly as you'd expect of any decent record shop and you famously had to hand in your bag at the counter before proceeding any further.

The annual sale was also legendary, with people queuing from 6am to snap up albums from prices that started from 29p.

You'd join a vast queue, convinced that there would be nothing left by the time you got in there before finally leaving with a vast bag of random goodies. Half of which would turn out to be rubbish, of course...

Nowadays new vinyl is printed in strictly limited quantities and prices seem to start at £9.99 and rise rapidly from there, so Yanks/Power Cuts increasingly takes on a Shangri-La like quality in my mind.