KEXP Record Fair 2018: DJ Kevin Cole on His Acetates and Records by The Only Ones

All week long in advance of KEXP’s third annual Record Fair this Saturday, Sept. 8, Afternoon Show host DJ Kevin Cole gives us a look inside his record collection at some of his rarest and most loved records.

The Only Ones put out three brilliant studio albums between 1978-1980, and although the band’s life span was short lived, those records were such a big part of my life, a constant companion for years, they’ll always be deeply meaningful to me. For bands that I love like the Only Ones, I’m pretty much a completest—wanting to collect and hear anything and everything singer, songwriter Peter Perrett put out. I lived in England for a period in 1983 and ’84, spending weekdays traveling all over London and the country searching for records, and then selling and trading records on the weekends at record fairs. Fortunately for me, during this period, if you looked hard, you could still find a lot of punk, post punk and first wave new wave records at really good prices.

The Only Ones were a misunderstood band while they were active, and in the wake of their break-up in 1982, seemingly out of favor, so I was able to find pretty much all of their records, in various formats, including white label promos of singles like “Another Girl, Another Planet.” One day while digging deep in a bin of records at a junk store, I found this pictured 7” single acetate of the single “Fools.” Acetates are extremely rare, one off discs created by using a recording lathe to cut a song directly onto a special lacquer-coated disc. They are made one at a time and generally only a few are made to test a mix of a song—before making an actual test pressing. So for me, finding an Only Ones acetate in a junk store for 10 cents was like hitting the emotional jackpot! Also shown in this post, the 7” and 12” version of the Only Ones very first single, “Lovers Of Today” bw “Peter and the Pets,” which was released in 1977 on their on record label, Vengeance Records.

Peter Perrett had a band pre-The Only Ones called England’s Glory that recorded demos in 1973 which were never released at the time. As interest in Peter Perrett and the Only Ones began to increase later in the ‘80s, these demos were released in 1989 as the Legendary Lost Album, a test pressing of which is pictured here.