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Ace's policy is we do not employ interns. As a small company everyone has their own responsibilities and we simply don't have the time or resources to train and supervise anyone employed on a short-term basis. We believe an intern's time and effort would not be rewarded with proper training and experience and we do not wish to exploit people.

We now charge postage to UK addresses at cost price. For all other territories packaging is free and postage is charged on a weight basis.

Sand and deliver!

With the temperatures rising and the juke box blowin’ a fuse, the Ace sun seekers have packed away our double-fleece duffle coats and winter wellies for another month and assembled a shiny summer collection to keep the clouds away.

We’ve got bright ‘n’ breezy tees, sunshine pop, sweet 'sol' music, hot rhythm & blues, factor 9 folk, beach boys, beach girls and every other kind of Pet Sounds to help you top up your tune tan while the weather is on our side.

Wouldn’t It Be Nice to add to your Ace collection? God Only Knows we appreciate your interest…

Whether you want to dip your toes in our cool musical pool, or make a splash with the full-on belly flop, there’s plenty of great stuff to keep you groovin’ from now until the rainclouds come back.

You won’t need your sunglasses to see that we’ve got plenty of audio heat for the feet, and a woody full of attractive seasonal T-shirts that will both wow the honeys and impress beach bullies enough for them not to kick sand in your face.

You can be assured that our generous prices won’t ‘Wipe Out’ your bank account. You will still have enough money to ‘Get Around’ in at the pub later on, or our name’s not Brian.

Why bother with sun cream, ice cream or any other kind of cream when you have the cream of the Ace catalogue at your disposal? Surf our selection today and Catch A Wave of sonic sunshine… 

Comedy writer Ian Martin stumbles through our back catalogue, making random observations and proposing a toast to Ace Records’ eclectic avenue of dreams.

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What’s a “guilty pleasure”? I’ll tell you what it isn’t. A guilty pleasure is NOT just a really good pop song some dickhead likes.

You know the sort. Pop-up celebrity, crowdsourced personality, cultural smartarse. “My tastes are so eclectic it almost physically hurts me…” he murmurs to himself in some frictionless Sunday supplement profile, making you want to physically hurt him. “Oh I listen to everything, from Run The Jewels to Baroque opera. From cool jazz on my beloved collection of 78s to the really impenetrable bits of Penderecki delivered directly via neural implant into my hippocampus…”

Here he will perhaps allow a coquettish smile to fall like dappled light across his facial ladygarden. “And you know what? It’s cheesy I know but I confess I have a soft spot for Tamla Motown. Especially anything by Marvin Gaye. OK sure, it’s a guilty pleasure. But sometimes you just need something sweet and frothy, right?” Shit off, you snobgoblin.

FACT: guilt is an internalised emotion, pop-pickers. The concept of musical guilty pleasures only makes sense if the person judging you, making you feel guilty, is YOU. In the privacy of your own kitchen, why would you feel guilty if nobody’s there to mock you? Because YOU’RE always there to mock you. Example: Now You loves that old ELO track. Yeah, that awful, peppy knock-off Beatles track which was so comprehensively despised by Then You. Now You distinctly remembers Then You and your Then Mates being pretty nasty about Jeff Lynne And His Mulleted Hommage. Then You sneers at Now You still. Look at him, the little bastard, with his acne and his backcombed hair and his insufferable pretension and by the way terrible clothes. 

Nor should guilty pleasures be confused with musical differences. You should see my wife’s face when she returns unexpectedly to the house to find me alone in it, doing what a lot of blokes do while alone in the house - listening to the Beatles. I love them, she hates them. I suppose there is sort-of guilt. She feels sort-of guilty if I switch off the Beatles, I feel sort-of guilty if she has to listen to them. Oh, and please don’t make that citrus face at me and suggest I “use headphones” either. That’s not how 20th Century People listen to music. We like our music to gush and tumble through several cubic feet of air, painting the floating molecules with sound, thanks very much.

And on the subject of being a 20th Century Person, allow me to suggest that the “guilty pleasure” has been reinvented by 21st Century People as a shaming device. Fifty years ago it was OK for me to like blues music. Like a lot of white boys, I came to Robert Johnson and John Lee Hooker and the rest via rock and roll and white boy R&B. Fleetwood Mac, all that lovely Blue Horizon stuff…

But try telling Twitter you like blues and watch the revisionists recoil in disgust, as if you’d just said you like golliwogs, segregated education and plantation minstrels. Well I’m so sorry, humourless Roundheads of New Puritania, I can’t unlike what I liked then and still like now. I won’t be guilt-tripped into discarding my musical youth as colonialism and misogyny. I’m old now but still white, and I like hip-hop too which infuriatingly may contain racial allusions and bitches and whatnot and I am bored stiff by my own argument so HERE ARE MY RECOMMENDATIONS FROM THE CATALOGUE OF ACE RECORDS MY MOST FAVOURITE RECORD COMPANY EVER. Not really recommendations, actually. I don’t know what you like, do I? But this is what I like.

Urged on by rare soul collector Gilly, who had solved the Northern Soul mystery of “What was the identity of the singer who recorded the Rose Valentine cover-up ‘When He's Not Around’?” (as played on acetate by Richard Searling in the latter days of Wigan Casino), Ace Records went ahead and purchased the tapes and rights to the work of Detroit producer Dave Hamilton. Gilly told me how Dave had been an original member of Motown’s Funk Brothers, had played guitar on ‘Reet Petite’, ‘Boom Boom’ and ‘Please Mr Postman’, had recorded the Chalfontes for Mercury and had run the Topper label. He also said there were some great unissued numbers that Dave had copied onto a reel for him to get played on the Northern Soul scene.

I was not that knowledgeable about the Wigan cover-up, but I realised it made a great story and would create much interest. After Dave’s untimely death, I visited his widow Alice and listened to some of his tapes. I thought they were worth gambling on. At the time I could identify only one full CD’s worth of material with a few spin-offs for other compilations. We shipped the tapes back to London, allowing us the luxury of time to fully explore the material.

Our first “Dave Hamilton’s Detroit Dancers” CD featured most of the tracks that had drawn us to the catalogue. In further researching the tapes we began to discover unheard gems such as ‘Who Are You Trying To Fool’ by Little Ann (the true artist on that Rose Valentine cover-up), a recording later described by Ian Levine as the best non-Motown Detroit soul production. The rare soul collecting scene continued to view Dave’s work favourably and records such as ‘Sweep It Out In The Shed’ by Tobi Lark, Dottie & Millie’s ‘Talkin’ About My Baby’ and James Lately’s super-rarity ‘Love, Friends And Money’ went from strength to strength. Then the rare funk scene exploded and Dean Rudland was able to compile a BGP CD of late 60s and early 70s grooves. Additionally Dave’s jazz productions on himself and his tight band came out as the unreleased “Soul Suite” LP he had hoped would make his name in the late 60s. Dave’s jazz background also led to several of his tracks featuring in our “Mod Jazz” series and there were some excellent modern soul recordings from artists such as of Gil Billingsley and James Carpenter.

Meanwhile, we had been sitting on many unmarked tapes. Every few years we would haul a couple of boxes up from our storage facility, don the headphones and plough through several days’ worth of recordings. These varied from poorly copied old jazz radio shows to fully produced versions of songs Dave was trying to get to Motown’s Jobete Music publishing company. Tapes for some incredibly rare 45s eventually turned up, along with odd acetates, allowing us to release a third volume of “Detroit Dancers” and a new volume of funk, followed by a general “Detroit Soul” CD.

The EU then joined in the fun with a request from the Finnish company Timmion to issue an LP of Little Ann’s recordings. The faux 60s album was a great hit, particularly among the younger soul demographic, and it led to a similar project on O.C. Tolbert, who also cut enough tracks for a very impressive Kent CD of his own.

That one mythical 1966 recording that remained embedded in an old acetate was responsible for eight great CDs and we’re still counting. From small acorns, mighty oak trees do grow, and we’ve not even started on the gospel tapes yet.