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In the mid-90s when I wandered into Vinyl Experience a second-hand collectors’ shop on Hanway Street in London’s West End, for the first time in a few weeks and while I was checking out the various specialist collectors boxes that they kept behind the counter, I noticed about 50 sealed cardboard boxes under the LP racks. On asking the shop owner what they were he said, “Oh that’s the remnants of the Carlin collection we got a few months ago”. “What’s that all about then?” I ventured. It turned out that this famous music publishing company had decided to throw out all its old demos and samples as surplus to requirements. Mark Hayward, the shop’s owner, had snapped up the massive collection which included demos and acetates from every major popular music act of the 50s, 60s and 70s, including Elvis, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie etc. etc. etc.

There weren’t many early Northern Soul venues that didn’t feature artists from the legendary Mirwood label, so it was joy to discover in 2004 that Ace had purchased the Mirwood and Mira labels, resulting in Jackie Lee’s ‘The Duck’ getting a fresh, digitalised outing on “The Mirwood Story Volume 2” along with Jimmy Conwell’s “Cigarette Ashes” and Mine Exclusively” by the Olympics. Both Lee and the Olympics also got their own solo sets on Kent along with an Afro-Blues Quintet Plus 1 release on Beat Goes Public.

It would be safe to assume that all of Ace Records' illustrious staff got into the reissue game as an extension of their passion for record collecting (a certain Mr Carroll would be first and foremost). And the collector mentality continues to inform much of the way we all go about searching for vintage source material; from the way discographies and master numbers are studied like auction lists, via the browsing of tape libraries as one would racks of vinyl, through to that ultimate moment: the fondling of the master tape.