Vintage gear and lost treasure

It feels like everything is available, ‘gettable’, and knowable now. We can’t wait for anything anymore. There is no delayed gratification. Even waiting for Guinness to settle sucks! The joy of unexpected discovery becomes rarer. Take the joy of discovering music, not by pressing play on an app (an app that’s destroying musician’s livelihoods), but the old way of recording cassette tapes of your favourite radio programs or sifting through vinyl stores, or your sister’s record collection to find a gem. 

Or take Tinder and the whole singles market. No-one wants to wait. Finding the love of your life by accident or by devine intervention seems remote now. What kind of love is found through a marketplace anyway ? Or take the writing of, or the waiting for, a real letter or a postcard. The time it takes. The personal touch. Think also of gaining wisdom from elders in our community. The pearls of wisdom and what it means to them to impart that knowledge. That is their gift to us and makes them proud of their own legacy. It's often all they have left. We would often just prefer to turn to Google. 

Its hard to find any unexpected bargains! This is the case with most commodities, whether food, musical instruments, or general second hand charity shop items or bric à brac discoveries. Vintage drums! I remember paying 150 Scottish pounds in 1999 for a beautiful gold sparkle 1970's Premier kit, same as the one used on early Pink Floyd tours. It was in a shop in Glasgow and apart from touring with it in The Frames, I have used it in many recordings since. It has such character and personality, again arguably missing in some of the modern generic factory kits these days.

I also bought a 60's Rogers blue sparkle kit up in the North for 450 pounds in 2003. The last of the bargains? These kits fetch up to 4000 dollars these days. Unfortunately, owners and sellers can find the exact value of items and auction it online with an accurate pricing nowadays.

My favourite kit and best discovery was an old WFL Ludwig 1952 wood finish 5 piece kit. I saw a tiny ad for vintage bric a brac and instruments in a music shop in Boston in 1999 and followed the directions to an old dilapidated warehouse at the end of the line, out of town. I used it in the US on The Frames tour but the sound engineer complained, saying that the kit didn't suit the band sound. I had the bearing edges specially done anyway by Anton Nodal in mid Manhattan, one of the many admirers of the kit. 

My mum was an auction room junkie and loved the thrill of discovery but was also addicted to the adrenaline of bidding! I inherited it, furnishing unfurnished shitty flats in Dun Laoghaire where I was renting back in the day. And finding the odd rare musical instrument or hifi separate! In those big Auction rooms of Buckleys in Sandycove for example, there was a real thrill of ‘you never know what you might find’ and the innocence of the seller not knowing the value and thrill of finding a bargain. But you had to wait til every Thursday for the fix. 

So…You can imagine the buzz when we, as a family, went on a last minute adventure holiday to The Algarve and the Sunny Sunday morning and got a taxi to the Ferraguda gypsy market and found all sorts of rare treasures and haggled a few amazing deals from the leather skinned vendors. We got talking to one of the vendors, a veteran of the Northern Irish troubles who was with the British Army as a young boy and he seemed remorseful for his actions and at the time wished someone had explained some Irish history to him and the exact nature of what was happening there. He suggested that he, and many other young naive soldiers, would have very definitely tried to earn the Queen’s shilling elsewhere. 

It was then that I drifted off and went all Walter Mitty….. 

We climbed jagged rocks in the burning sun and when shelter was found, marked the map with an 'X' where we thought we might find this rumoured treasure. We wondered whether making the voyage was akin to madness with all the odds stacked us with the crashing waves and local vigilantes waiting to splinter our dreams. But the locals offered little resistance to our small battalion of swarthy pirates. What we found was beyond our dreams. There glistening like jewels in front of us were priceless artifacts that were most likely  stolen from kings and emperors, the artefacts themselves journeying across dusty dry deserts and milky rivers; There was an ancient Indian Mridangam drum; a silken embroidered cloth once possibly worn by an ancient pharaoh queen, a  Tibetan Mani Chos Khor prayer reel , old illustrated dusty books, a rare precious water carrier surely made from gold and sapphire, a pair of north African sandals with studded gemstones , and jewellery that dazzled in the golden light and dripped with elegance and charm. 

In celebration, we drank barrels of coloured elixir with beaded bubbles winking at the brim, as we chanted and hammered drums along the cobbled streets before embarking upon our trusty sea vessel, passing castles and magical rock formations on the high seas. These are the very same seas as Vasco da Gama and his oaky crew set upon voyages of discovery themselves. We climbed high to the heavenly ceiling of our senses, travelling away from this paradise, and eventually back down to our familiar lives, days later, knowing that even if no more treasure is ever found on this earth again, we can take solace in knowing that it can always be found amongst us, and within us.