The Listening Club - 23rd April 2017

Greetings folks,

Hope all is well in your zones. Not doing too bad here in Amsterdam, nursing a small birthday hangover from yesterday, saving the big one for Kings Day later in the week, naturally, even though the awesome early spring weather has decided to crap out just as the local party season gets going, but hey, we'll make the most of it as we always do. Hip-flasks at the ready...

Last week I was away indulging in some fine brews in Bruges (and chancing upon a highly impressive show by Lubomyr Melnyk along the way) so that man @JimMcCauley was here running things, many thanks to him for hosting @EastVanHalen's pick of Prince's last album "Hit N Run Phase 2", which went down very well with the assembled, or at least so it seemed from Bruges... Many thanks to Steph for the pick, and for sailing the frisbee back across the ocean to @SamSmitter, who is here with this week's pre-match...

"These days I often bore my children with stories of the dim distant days before pretty much all music was freely available at all times on any number of devices. Back in the day, I tell them, I would even sometimes buy music based purely on its low price. As with most things, this was almost always a mistake, evidenced to this day by a good box full of obscure-for-a-good-reason vinyl including bargain bucket gems like Cola Boy's difficult second 12 inch single. The one major exception to this was the magnificent tradition of the label sampler album. These were usually albums full of great and surprising tracks costing something like £1.99. My pick today is an early sampler CD, one that I wore out, and that was my first introduction to many legendary artists. Still giving good value today. I hope you enjoy it! Sam x "

Okaydoke. Direct download is here, and the HearBeSpoilers stream is below:

See you at 8pm BST (GMT+1) for playback!