It Only Took Me 18 Years and $6 to Find This CD

For collectors, a fruitful search is often its own reward. It's a bonus if the music is good to boot. I heard about The Snapdragons in 1991 or so, while I was a DJ at UCSB's radio station. I had a brit-pop show, so naturally I was heavily into British pop. Not exactly sure how I found out about this band, but I was on a mission to find "Dawn Raids on Morality", their first album. I had a "trading buddy" in Scotland named Gedge, and we'd correspond by email (which, of course, in 1991, was for geeks only, and was performed via dumb terminal and 2400-baud modem) and occasionally trade CDs. He knew I was looking for The Snapdragons and one day an LP box showed up and it was "Dawn Raids on Morality" on LP! I really wanted the CD, but frankly, I was happy to get it at all!

I knew The Snapdragons's label, Native, was very small, and I knew there weren't many copies floating around, especially outside of the UK. In 1997, I used a newfangled electronic device called a CD burner (this burner which was the size of a stereo receiver, took a digital input, and burned a CD at 1x speed...all for $3500) to burn a CD-R of that LP. Note that first I recorded it from LP to DAT, because the burner only took a digital input.

The search for the Dawn Raids CD was somewhat hindered by the fact that the name "The Snapdragons" was adopted by a U.S. band in 1991. (They suck, by the way.) I had of course set up a recurring search for "Snapdragons" on ebay, and typically the email notifications I receive are for the sucky band.

Fast forward to about 6 months ago...I received a notification for The Snapdragons and it turns out to be Dawn Raids on Morality for 99 cents from a guy in Australia. All told it cost me $6 or so with shipping. And to complete the circle, I found Gedge on Twitter. What a small world it is indeed.