"How much are the snooker balls, mate?""They're tomatoes!"
That exchange, overheard while ploughing the boot-field in search of now-redundant record players, says a lot about the state of mind induced by the ceaseless visual, then sometimes tactile scanning of thousands of heterogenous objects every Sunday morning.
The umbrella and sewing machine make regular appearances, the dissecting table is less in evidence. Myriad chance juxtapositions and slippages of context spark off trains of thought and lines of enquiry, which, half an hour earlier, over a rushed breakfast would have seemed unthinkable. In the research process the boot-sale occupies the bracing middle ground between the musty archives of the reference library and the sterile information overload of the internet.
Over the course of four Sundays this Autumn I carried nearly three times my own bodyweight of redundant hi-fi equipment across the muddy fields of Derbyshire. More than unusually aware of their mass, I decided to calculate the market values of this particular cash-crop. The average price for bootsale record players is 16.5p per pound, there is a wide variation between models, as the table shows.
As the booting season draws to a close, this chaotic installation, with No Overall Control, is my own Harvest Festival offering, made from the good fruits of the good seed scattered on the land, where, each Sunday morning, I religiously plough the fields in search of the meaning of life.
Tony Kemplen 1997
Price per pound of the various record players used in No Overall Control
Model p/lb National Panasonic 7 ALBA Designer Series 33 Saisho 25 Fidelity (Small) 36 Fidelity (Large) 19 Beogram1500 9 Fidelity UA8 15 Ferguson Studio 20D 11 Stereosound 22 HMV 17 Fidelity Music Master 14 EKCO Sound Project ZU5k 5 Windsor Stereo System 14 Prinzsound Stereo System 8 9