What happened? Shit, oh yeah so, I was writing this and got distracted so I've started it again and was going to blather on about records and why I'm hooked on them. Remember CD's? Remember how they were once seen as the saviour, the answer to getting up and flipping the record over? Well, now you have to listen to something from beginning to end in one go. Tapes were cool, they're a bit chic at the moment but I can't see them returning to where they once were.
My first records were at christmas when I was eight or nine years old. I was given an old record player that used to live in the attic and was almost entirely made out of white plastic- even the speakers. People brought me singles and I had a Madness album -Absolutely, their second and a nasty Shakin Stevens album of his first band, The Sunsets which was still music for Holiday Camps but had slightly more of a Rockabilly ensemble thing ogoing on. But still, it was a Shakin' Stevens record and I have no excuse for not having burned it or thrown it out of the window at kids on bicycles.
CD's were fodder for the new wealth of the 1980's who promptly taped them so they could listen to them in their car, or who, like I and many others, had only tapes of said albums recorded by somebody who was the only person with a player. You wanted to believe the sound quality was better but, in the end it was still a tape and depended entirely upon the quality of your stereo.
Minidiscs proved a pointless medium for prerecorded music and bombed. My local record shop, back at the beginning of the last decade, had a minidisc of Londons Calling on the shelf for years, next to the Cassette racks and above the CD's, next to the picture discs and box sets. When Vinyl ran out of luck, and you could buy stuff like The Faust Tapes for less than two quid, I switched to cassettes, it was cheaper (did I talk about this in my VU post? Shit,) and there was a large variety to be found. It also meant the unparalleled joy of digging for tapes in charity shops, which brought up interesting finds.
At some point I realised I would be moving overseas and made the painful choice to sell my vinyl and switch to CD's. Knowing that a great many albums went to good homes was helpful, but there were a great many that just got dumped at charity shops (that many of them came from charity shops in the first place helped a little) but I just swaapped out for the discs, which now I'm swapping again for the vinyl, if I can find it. Those seven years have been tough and now many albums I first bought in the 1990's are almost impossible to find, even with the new kid- the digital download- poncing around the block and kicking everybody in the shins.
I don't know, I'm finding great things on the internet- albums long lost or only owned by collector scum-, even CD reissues which are long out of print, but at my cringing little collectors core I hear the vinyl crackle in the headphones and I just want to hold that album, to smell its musty left-in-a-barn/shed/attic odour and to clean its little grooves with a q-tip and some isopropanol detergent before setting the stylus down into its rumbling walls and let the music issue forth. Because in the end, it's really all about the music, the vibrations, the plates cut to press the records.
I could go on but it might get a bit perverse.
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