RSD: Sweet as Sugar

I've resisted Record Store Day before now owing to the whole idea of fighting swarms of people (who will probably just put their purchases on eBay) only to find whatever I'm after has sold out. Plus, most of the items are overpriced and not particularly exciting. However, Saturday saw me casting my cynicism aside and queuing outside of Spillers in Cardiff (the oldest record shop in the world). I'm in the slow process of collecting as many of my 50 albums to take to my grave on vinyl as I possibly can. Some I still have from when I first bought them, some I replaced with CDs and some I never bought on vinyl in the first place. In this latter category was Sugar's 1992 masterpiece 'Copper Blue'.

Record Store Day saw a very special release of 'Copper Blue' - a triple LP on three different colour platters. The original album is on silvery-grey. The other two discs contain a great live show from the time and are on gold and blue vinyl respectively. It was simply too lovely-a-thing to miss. Worth getting up early on a (frankly gorgeous) Saturday morning for.

I stood in the queue with a lady I know through work and a young Mancunian guy who is a student nurse. We talked music, gigs, a teeny bit of work, and more music. After an hour we finally crossed the Spillers threshold and managed to get what we wanted. Yes, I bagged a 'Copper Blue', and believe me it's even more beautiful in real life.

The experience was far nicer than I thought it would be. Friendly, relaxed and, dare I say it, fun. Quite looking forward to next year now...

Here's a couple of live tracks from that Sugar set. The version of JC Auto is particularly brutal.

• Helpless [live] - Sugar (from 'Copper Blue' [25th Anniversary Edition])
• JC Auto [live] - Sugar (from 'Copper Blue' [25th Anniversary Edition])

I also managed to grab Spillers' last copy of 'The Home Internationals' EP by the Wedding Present. Many of you will know the track Wales from last year's brilliant 'Going, Going...' album. As well as that song, Gedge and gang recorded three more post-rock instrumentals for the EP, each one named after a UK nation. England contains a poem written and narrated by Simon Armitage, while Northern Ireland is a paen to a certain legendary footballer called George Best, who I seem to remember a previous record was named after...

A video of the band in the studio has been released for Scotland and includes some sounds from a Scottish pub, no doubt something more than a few readers will be familiar with.