Is ‘No Parlez’ the most common charity shop record?
During the height of the CD age in the 1990s and 2000s, with vinyl records seemingly doomed to become an obsolete musical medium, record collectors, DJs, and old souls of all sorts were able to enjoy a field day of great finds and even better deals while crate digging.
In the years before eBay, in particular, assistants at charity shops weren’t going to waste their time researching the individual values of old records someone dropped off in a cardboard box with insufficient structural integrity. This meant that, on any given day, you might be able to scoop up a rare pressing of Led Zeppelin II or A Love Supreme with your loose pocket change; you were doing the shop a favour, really.
Of course, finding those diamonds in the rough always involved the tedious task of briskly combing through hundreds of records of decidedly less financial and cultural value: Top of the Pops compilations from the ‘70s, Barbara Streisand Christmas albums, Cliff Richard everything, cringey minstrel records salvaged from the attic of someone’s racist grandmother, and more. Legally, all shops were required to have at least two copies of Herb Alpert’s Whipped Cream & Other Delights, or maybe those just stood out for other reasons.
In any case, with today’s charity shops now understandably doing their due diligence to identify valuable vinyl before it goes out on the sales floor, record shopping in these establishments has become more of an interesting archaeological study than a treasure hunt. All those aforementioned, undesirable records are still there, but there’s also been an influx of legitimate, chart-topping rock and pop records from the 1980s, as more of the Baby Boomer generation either chooses to give up their collections or leaves it to their kids to handle.
This phenomenon, combined with the unexpected bounceback of vinyl, has led to an unusual new dynamic, as charity shops are raising prices on old, hit records by recognisable names, even though those records were produced in such enormous numbers that every household has probably either owned one or given one away already.
Paul Young’s 1983 debut album No Parlez seems to be one of the records people most associate with this phenomenon. In its day, No Parlez topped the UK charts for five weeks and went on to sell over a million copies in the UK alone. Forty years later, sadly, 990,000 of those records are now in charity shops, as the nation collectively snapped out of its Paul Young hypnosis by the 1990s, leaving minimal interest even in nostalgic spins of this record.
I’m not necessarily convinced that No Parlez is the most prominent ‘80s charity shop album, however. If you close your eyes and imagine your own local Oxfam or Goodwill, flipping through the stacks, what do you see? Probably a similar line-up of platinum sellers that (a) people are now happy to give away, and (b) not that many people are happy to pay money for now.
In my own experience, Bruce Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love, Elvis Costello’s Kind of Blue, Eurythmics’ Be Yourself Tonight, and U2’s Rattle & Hum come to mind as the kinds of records people were buying their partners and parents as Christmas gifts because they were semi-ubiquitous in shopping malls at the time, but, as a result, very few people have a deep, personal connection to them.
There are some notable differences between US and UK charity shop all-stars, too, of course, as Sports by Huey Lewis and the News and John Cougar Mellencamp’s American Fool are more likely to pop up in the former, while T’Pau’s Bridge of Spies and Chris Rea’s Road to Hell are staples of the latter.
If someone is willing to do a scientific study on this as a graduate thesis or something, we may be able to determine, once and for all, if Paul Young is truly the king of the charity shops.
