I'm doing a batch of 12" singles at the moment as I'd picked 16 records off the shelves at random and 3 turned out to be 12"ers and one was a 10". It seems quite a high proportion as I've never been overly keen on the 12" as a format. Sure, they sound a lot better than 7"ers, but they are often filled with remixed dross rather than the original song you wanted. Only rarely do they have an extra original song not found on the 7".
My Debut turntable also requires me to switch between 33/3 & 45 manually by switching the belt (essentially a rubber band) using a little tool they provided. To get at the belt, you've got to remove the 'platter', so the who production is sufficiently annoying to leave most 12" records unplayed for years. This wasn't the case with my old cheapo record player that was automatic, and I'd bought amost all these 12" records back then.
Anyway, that's enough whittering on about the annoyance of the 12" single and onto Nirvana. In Bloom is a weighty picture disc which was supposedly 'strictly limited'. Yeah, right. There's a bunch on eBay as I type, and not many bidders. The more I think about it, the more of a meaningless phrase 'strictly limited' becomes.
I bought 'In Bloom' at a short-lived record shop in Didcot, Oxfordshire. Suffice to say, I didn't pay much for it as local record shops were 'chart return shops' and record companies used to pile their new releases in them to be sold cheaply & therefore get them in the charts. Nevermind had already been out for over a year, and this release was just milking its success. Nirvana were still one of the very few bands that I liked that had got anywhere near the charts, though, so I snapped it up.
How often do I play it? Perhaps once before? What's the point - A-side just like the song on the album, so that's been heard enough times already. B-side - live versions of sliver (which I used to have on 7" before someone with light fingers filched it from my collection) and Polly. Live versions are almost wholly a waste of time unless they do something dramatic to the original song, and these two just rumble along, sticking closely to the original versions. They are pretty well recorded, but that's about it. So, a record that's more of an object than something to be played.
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