As you can probably tell from the cover scans here, I've never been one of those guys who treat their records with the care an archaeologist gives to Etruscan pottery shards. As far as I'm concerned, records are here to be played, and since I don't ever plan on selling any of them, I never pay much attention to what they're worth. (Also, living in a house with three cats means that there's not much likelihood that the spines of any of my LPs is going to remain unclawed, so what's the point?) However, I always like to find out how much the Times' first album goes for on eBay -- it regularly sells for well over a hundred bucks -- because I paid 20 cents for this copy at a Best Buy in Albuquerque in October of 1995. They were having a deep clearance sale that included a lot of old LPs, which by this point consisted of over three dozen copies of the soundtrack to John Travolta's lame Saturday Night Fever sequel Stayin' Alive, the Giant Records issue of Shonen Knife's Pretty Little Baka Guy and this. The Shonen Knife record was pretty great, but this is absolutely one of the best value for money purchases I've ever made.

Ironically, although I was already a Television Personalities fan by this point, I didn't know about the Times when I bought this, and was surprised to learn when I opened the DIY silkscreen sleeve (the back, incidentally, is blank save for a piece of paper glued to one corner with the song titles typed onto it) that the album was on Dan Treacy's Whaam! label. In fact, as I later learned, the Times at this point were basically the Television Personalities with Ed Ball as singer-songwriter instead of Treacy. Although Ball has maintained a career for close to 30 years now, the honest truth is that I don't think he's ever been a patch on Treacy as a songwriter, although he's always capable of a few gems. (His 1996 solo single "The Mill Hill Self-Hate Club" is one such goodie, if you ever locate it.) An early version of "I Helped Patrick McGoohan Escape" was released as a single under the name the Teenage Filmstars in 1980, during the period when Ball and Treacy didn't have stable names for their project(s), but I kind of prefer this version, which is a bit peppier and more lo-fi.

-Stewart Mason