A humble address to all 'eighties music' DJs

So, check this out:

Keep or destroy? Smash it up or hang on the wall?  

Wtf is it, you're probably wondering (or not). Well, naturally, it's part of yet another of my thrown-together bits of super-amateur art, knocked together at home when I had a spare 30 minutes the other day. This is the full thing:

A piece of art called 'Twenty-two tunes on wood'  

                

These are record middles punched out from 7" singles sometime in 1987, when I was slaving away in a high street record shop (HMV in Coventry). Customers who were buying records intended for jukeboxes (remember them?) wanted the middles removed so we used to stick the singles into a clunky metal device which would chop out the unwanted middle (clunk). These bits of "waste" then just went in the bin. Until one day ... I thought I'd start keeping a few of the orphaned middles if they were from half-decent records. So look. Just look at my pitiful picks, the jejune taste of a 23-year-old! The Clash, King Kurt, the Woodentops, the Smiths, Half Man Half Biscuit, the Shop Assistants, Theatre Of Hate, Everything But The Girl, Sisters Of Mercy (gulp). Truth to tell, there were originally about 40 of these record middles which - miser-like - I held onto for decades. They included ghastly things like the Coventry City FA cup single from 1987 and a few other duds like New Model Army or dull reissues like the Troggs' Wild Thing (good song, but the reissues were always a bore as records). I've even got a bit of pictorial evidence here. So my new art thing (it's not outsider art, it's er, insider art) is, I guess, a representation of a slightly more "respectable" set of records from the era. One of the people who used to regularly request these punched-out records back in those long-ago Coventry days was the band booker at the local polytechnic. He also stocked the jukebox in the polytechnic bar (busy man), and I seem to recall he would even sometimes "match" some of the new-release records he carried back to the jukebox with specific upcoming gigs he had lined up. Yeah, it was all very canny. Anyway, never mind those pub DJs these days who play Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran and Tears For Fears at godawful "eighties" nights. They should be playing these 22 records*. Just think of it - the June Brides' This Town faded into Thee Milkshakes' Out Of Control, the Fall's Mr Pharmacist into This Mortal Coil's Song To The Siren, That Petrol Emotion's It's A Good Thing into The Jesus And Marychain's Everything’s Alright When You’re Down. It'll be immense. A huge hit. They'll be flocking to places that play these records. They'll be dancing on the tabletops ... 

*NOTE: this blog post comes with a special prize. If you can correctly identify every record from these 22 record middles I'll personally send you an offcut of the OSB wood used as the backboard for this piece of would-be art. Second prize is two pieces ...