In 2008, alongside my Tuesday-records-from-Spillers, I had my monthly-records-from-Damaged. Damaged Records was a small shop in the antiques market in Cardiff that sold punk records and was only open at the weekend. If you wanted any record Black Flag ever put out, Damaged was the place to go. The monthly-records-from-Damaged grew out of the fact that you'd go into Damaged, spend a while chatting to Welly, the guy who ran it, and then feel kinda guilty if you weren't buying anything, so I decided that I'd go in monthly and find something I wanted. He had plenty of good records so I probably could've stepped it up to fortnightly and still not run out of things to buy. I bought this Avail record on one of those Saturdays.
Rewinding a bit, the first time I really listened to Avail was on a tribute to Sublime (I'm not counting their song on Short Music for Short People, because 30 seconds isn't the best way to hear a band). I was never really into Sublime, but a friend had brought one of their albums on a road trip in Australia and we all enjoyed it. A year later I found the tribute album for £3 in the January sales and it had some interesting names on the tracklisting, so I bought it. The highlight of the whole album by far was Avail's cover of Santeria, which I'd easily rank in my all-time top 20 covers (and made it onto a mixtape I made with that exact theme). From that point on I made a note to check Avail out.
However, this album is the extent to which I checked Avail out. I like it, but I've simply not seen any of their other records since. I've heard the earlier ones are the place to start, so maybe one day I'll pick one of those up and it'll encourage me to get more. Verses is probably my favourite song here, ironically, for the chorus alone.
Anyway, my favourite Avail-based story is that once shared a taxi with Tim Barry. It was the Sunday morning of Fest, he had been staying in the same hotel as us and we were all heading into town. I think he started talking to us, possibly because of our British accents and we talked for a while about the riots that summer and some other things. Eventually it transpired that he was Tim Barry and I was reasonably, but not 100%, sure that he was the singer in Avail. I wanted to say how great I thought Avail's cover of Santeria was but a) I wasn't sure enough that he was definitely in Avail to say it without running the risk of embarrassing myself and b) I'm not sure if you're allowed to compliment someone on a song they didn't actually write, and I couldn't remember any of the names of the songs on this album. So I didn't say anything Avail related. He was a really decent guy though and was genuinely interested in what we had to say, which was nice. I'm looking forward to his upcoming tour with Sam Russo.
Format: 12", insert
Tracks: 12
Cost: £9 new
Bought: Damaged Records
When: 29/11/08
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no
