Or Cat Stevens or the Moody Blues or Led Zeppelin.
It’s quite possible that Eric would have ended up with those, assuming, of course, that the artists in question continued to hold his interest. He was well on the way with all those examples, but there were a couple of (I thought) good reasons why those artists were noticeably absent from Hughesy’s collection.
For a start, if I needed to hear those albums I knew where I could go to hear them. As well, some of those artists were played so much back in the days when I listened to the radio that buying a copy didn’t seem necessary.
That’s why my Creedence collection amounts to one Best of CD, bought to play in the background at a party when my usual listening wouldn’t be all that popular.
On top of those considerations, if I wanted to hear, say, Cat Stevens, which I didn’t feel too inclined to do in the first place, there was plenty of his stuff on the radio,and practically everyone I knew had the albums.
In other words why get the new one from Cat Stevens when I could be getting the latest Van Morrison instead?
There were other factors pushing me along the same road.
There might be someone out there who can explain why a Woolworth's store in Townsville, north Queensland should have multiple copies of virtually every obscure album that appeared on Festival Records or the labels that made up the Phillips/Polygram group on sale in the cut out bins.
I’ve often wondered who did the ordering.
Was there some freak somewhere in the Woolworth's hierarchy who wanted to help underground artists?