Welcome to 784533.co.uk!

I'm David, and I live in Inverness, Scotland, having recently moved here from Edinburgh. This website is my second go at putting something on to Internet - my first effort, a somewhat sardonic trawl through the charity-shop world of Contour and Hallmark LPs and other awful aural detritus, called Collecting Crap Records, was launched on an innocent public over ten years ago. Although now long gone, it did quite well for itself, being featured in a couple of Webby-type magazines and getting at least one mention on the Beeb.

So, at last, after rather more months than I'd hoped, this site is finally being pulled together, kicking and screaming every centimetre of the way. No apologies for the content, which still centres on collecting obscure records (although not, with luck, crap ones this time) but incorporates the two newer loves of my life: rabbits and Iceland.

If you want to get in touch, key the following address into your e-mail program. You'll have to type it by hand, I'm afraid: the purpose of using a graphic instead of text was to scupper any spam web-bots, an approach which has, to date, been 100% successful.

The In The Garage link is to a site run by my old pal Johnny, who like me was in a garage band in Edinburgh in the mid-to-late 1980s. There are pages on his bands (The Pterodakyls, Johnny & The Deadbeats) and mine (16 Dillons), as well as some "period" photos and posters which, we hope, convey something of the atmosphere of those long-gone days.

Purepop! is the blog / website of Barracuda and record collector extraordinaire Robin Wills. The site is a veritable (velvet) tinmine of information about the less-travelled byways of 70s glam music, copiously illustrated with tasty picture sleeves and further leavened with some great soundclips.

The ingenious Record Reverser deserved inclusion purely because it's one of the most defiantly and gloriously pointless ideas ever. Should you ever wish to, you can achieve much the same effect with CoolEdit, Audacity, a halfway decent reel-to-reel tape recorder, or, if push comes to shove, a roll of 50mm parcel tape, a keen eye and a steady hand. Full marks to 'em, though, for spotting this niche market. What I particularly love about this site is the fact that someone's gone to the trouble of making a five-minute instruction video...

More soon, eventually!