Early December I ordered a CD from the Torture Garden website's merchandise section... I had asked the DJ at Tight Laced for info on a particular track he often plays, and it turned out to be on a compilation from TG, which I figured would be a safe bet to have some other good stuff on it too!

The website was nice and easy to buy stuff from, I got from knowing roughly the name of the album to putting in my credit card details and clicking the order button in about ten minutes flat. I got a confirmation mail from TG saying the order had been received and then I went to bed, expecting it to arrive in a couple of weeks (slightly concerned that it would get caught up in the Xmas postal chaos).

Two days later, I got up to find a jiffy bag on my doormat with a CD in it from TG. Wow, that's fast service I thought, eagerly ripping it open. Unfortunately it was the wrong CD ! (I ordered Extreme Clubbing 1 and got the latest version, Extreme Clubbing 3). I had a listen to see whether I should just keep this one and re-order the original one, but it wasn't really to my taste, so I emailed TG and explained the situation...

Their reply was confidence inspiring - "Please post it back to us, we will despatch the correct CD as soon as possible. Sorry" (or words to that effect). Excellent I thought, and sent it back...

Unfortunately (again) they turned out to be out of stock of the one I wanted, and so it has taken this long for my copy of Extreme Clubbing 1 to turn up - it arrived in the mail yesterday, and has been played about two dozen times already! It was a longer wait than I would of liked, but the first track is really a classic and was worth the wait. The rest of the album is also good, with occasional spots of really good, so my money (I think it was about £16) was well spent in my opinion.

On the whole, it's not an impressive story, but judging by the extremely friendly and professional way it was handled along the way, I suspect my experience may be atypical - I'd be interested to hear of other people's experiences of buying TG stuff. In the meantime, if anyone wants a good album to buy, I can recommend Extreme Clubbing 1, especially the first track, "Twisted" !