Friday 1 May 2020

Looking for something to watch?

Record Safari follows Alex Rodriguez, the vinyl buyer for Coachella festival's record store, on a buying trip round the States hitting local record stores along the way and chatting with store owners and collectors. Some of the people he meets are well known (WFMU's legendary girl group collector Sheila Burgel, Nuggets compiler Lenny Kaye etc), others less so but everyone has a cool reminiscence or record or two to share. Some of the shops seems to have just ridiculous numbers of second hand lps. It's hard not to be a bit jealous of the folks who get to rifle through those boxes and shelves of dusty records on a regular basis. Alex, himself, is a low-key, amiable fellow with a penchant for vintage band t-shirts so spending an hour and forty minutes in his company is easy and there's always the fun of trying to spot cool records in the background e.g I'm sure I spotted a 7" in a generic 13 O'Clock Records sleeve and a little corner of that legendary Savage Resurrection lp.


Icky Boyfriends is the kind of band that Not Unloved should have known about 25+ years ago but, somehow, didn't. Scrappy, slightly juvenile loser punks without an ounce of fidelity, they must have been fanzine gold in their day. "I'm Not Fascinating - The Movie!", their contribution to the history of no-budget cinema, is an enjoyably rough and ready (think that ace first Redd Kross film) tale of a band on the rise who get signed and then trashed by an unscrupulous music industry exec. Sure it's, basically, a bunch of pals having a bit of knowing fun but they did have some help from some pals with some solid underground credentials: I spotted the name Aaron Dilloway in the credits and the director, Danny Plotnick, was one of the crew behind 80s/90s zine, Motorbooty (thanks for the scoop, TQ!), who also directed a few other short curios that are well worth a few minutes of your time, especially if you dug The Loud Family.


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