Vinyl love: The Wonder Stuff “Never loved Elvis”

(Vinyl Love is a series of posts that quite simply lists, describes, and displays the pieces in my growing vinyl collection. You can bet that each record was given a spin during the drafting of each corresponding post.)

Artist: The Wonder Stuff
Album Title: Never loved Elvis
Year released: 1991
Year reissued: 2021
Details: Limited edition, HMV 100th anniversary exclusive, OBI strip, brown

The skinny: I hereby interrupt our regularly scheduled ‘Vinyl Love’ programming of my favourite albums from last year to bring you one of my favourites from thirty (!) years ago. The Wonder Stuff’s third album, “Never loved Elvis”, is what our friend Aaron over at KMA would call a grail find for me. It’s the only album from my Best albums of 1991 list that wasn’t already on my record shelves and was one that I never thought I’d find. It was almost by random that I discovered it had been reissued last November as part of an HMV anniversary series in the UK, the only problem for me was that it wasn’t available for purchase here in Canada. Not to be deterred, however, I managed to procure a copy with the help of a fellow vinyl addict named Jim, whom, some of you may remember, used to run an excellent blog named Resurrection Songs. I gave the record a spin within hours of receiving it in the mail and it immediately transported me back to those days of walking around my small hometown while my Walkman transmitted these very tunes to my earbuds. Needless to say, I sang along with good old Miles Hunt for the album’s entirety.

Standout track: “Welcome to the cheap seats”