Back in March, The Horrors‘ Tom and Rhys, aka Spider and the Flies, made a pair of mixtapes for us called Up and Down. You all loved Up, but I think you were a little darked-out by Down. Since then, The Horrors brought out their amazing second record, and so they’ve been on tour in America, scuttling through record shops, buying out the vinyl history of a nation. To go with the story of the tour, Tom’s made us a mix spanning the divine discoveries from Chicago to Albuquerque. Click through to read and listen to what travelling around America is like.

During April and May, us and The Kills went on tour around America and Canada. Sometimes we’d all get on stage at the end of the show and play “Baby Please Don’t Go“. Sometimes it wasn’t very good, but we had a lot of fun doing it. Josh discovered his love of finding pool bars in one street towns and honed his skills by putting the other person off as they were about to take their shot (particularly his use of a technique taught to him by Phil Good, he called it the “Wang”). We also had a bus driver called Dennis who would only listen to Hank Williams and say things like, “I don’t eat vegetables, they’re bad for you,” and, “Seat belts? I call them idiot belts!”

But really going on tour is an excuse to go to the dozens upon dozens of record stores scattered all over the sprawling cities and lonely one-street towns (which were also called cities, much to my confusion) that you pass through during the long cross-country drives. Some of them are well organised and comprehensive, others are basically dusty record scrap yards. What’s remarkable is how some of the stuff you find has even ended up there; I found Steve Reich releases from when he was a student at a shop in the desert in Albuquerque and I picked up some 70s Bollywood soundtracks in Brooklyn. Particularly satisfying was finding KStarke Records in Chicago, which was full of cheap, original copies of classic Chicago house, music that had been made, played and then discarded all within that city, an idea that eBay has pretty much destroyed. The owner, Kevin, who was behind the counter, was playing with a TB-303 the whole time we were there, as if to cement the fact that his place was THE place to buy this stuff from. By the end of the trip the back lounge of the bus was full of records and most of us had run out of money, and we hadn’t even considered how to get a few hundred LPs and seven-inches back into the UK (Faris is still fighting customs on a few charges, I think).

This is a small selection of those records, spanning Detroit techno, Chicago house and the weird, wild world of Bollywood funk. Enjoy!

Tom Furse - From Chicago to Bombay

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TOM FURSE