RECORD COLLECTOR / NOVEMBER 2026 No.589 / その他

Issue 589 – November 2026

Hello reader

Just ahead of the publication of the 19^th Rare Record Price Guide, we have, this month, gone to town (literally: our office is in Fleet Street) and made the latest issue a special on the subject of collectables.

Notice that it is divided up into genres. When I were a lad (adopts northern Hovis-TV-ad accent) it were all youth subcultures round these parts: punk (anarcho or otherwise), skin, Ted, soul boy, mod, metalhead, and so on.

In the world of collecting, people still do break things down into discrete genre parts, to a lesser or larger extent, which is why we decided, for our annual rarities list-a-thon, to invite a series of genre experts to each write an overview on the state of collecting their chosen music specialism – metal, Northern soul, reggae, pop, rock, post-punk, the genres we consider to be hottest right now – followed by a discography for that field of music.

You should, after reading our 14-pager, be able to hold your own (your own copy of the RRPG, a hefty tome to say the least) in any pub conversation on the matter.

We cover the waterfront, genre-wise, in our features this month. Sylvie Simmons meets Elvis Costello to explore in depth the making of his 1977 debut album, My Aim Is True. It’s not the first time that they met – that was, in fact, in 1977 – and hopefully, given the quality of the encounter, it won’t be the last.

Elsewhere, we range freely from metal (Tygers Of Pan Tang) to new wave (The Rezillos), singer-songwriter (Iain Matthews) to avant-garde Sheffield proto-electronica (Clock DVA).

Meanwhile, our 10 Of The Best this month is power pop, we go Under The Radar with Marsha Hunt, and into the Engine Room with Blue Weaver, while Dr & The Medics heard that we missed them and so have decided to come back… and Steve Hackett picks his favourite discs.

Our ‘From The Vaults’ archive reviews section features a bumper crop: Daryl Easlea assesses the contents and impact of The Beatles’ newly expanded Rubber Soul, Jon Harrington considers David Bowie’s pre-fame recordings, Chris Roberts explores Genesis’ debut album while Nick Dalton and Michael Heatley give the thumbs-up to brand-new releases from Echo & The Bunnymen and Richard Thompson.

In News we hear about Brian Eno’s reactivated Opal label. RC Investigates looks at musicians’ own vinyl collections, from Hendrix to Weller. Our Collector this month is Led Zep-ologist and RC contributor, Dave Lewis. VAF inspects reader enquiries about Nico, Dear Mr Time and Junior Murvin. In Not Forgotten we pay tribute to Dolly Parton, Frank Beard, Tim Curry and others. Dan Synge, author of Whatever Happened To The Teenage Dream and a new contributor to RC, rediscovers the joys of ‘soft rock’. We spend 33 1/3 minutes with Arthur Brown. We travel to Birkenhead for this month’s shop Of The Month and go to gigs by Biohazard, Hawkwind and Ronnie Wood.

Varied? It is, as Barrington Levy used to say, broader than Broadway.