It was a darkened living room with just a dim light in the corner, my son held the disk delicately by its edge and with the same reverence that I had bestowed on it some 32 years earlier when I first obtained it. Still in pristine condition the dark black, jet black glossy grooves reflected a small portion of my youth and the engraved sound of Elton John's Funeral for a friend. Stephen placed it onto the record turntable that he was given for Christmas, I laid down on the sofa, eyes shut, and wallowed in the percussion intro to the track which quietly grows up into a crescendo of rock with attitude. I lay there remembering the day I bought it in W.H.Smiths in Shirley, Solihull, taking it home eager to hear it as soon as I could. There is no doubt in my mind that when you bought a vinyl album you really felt that you had purchased something tangible, it was big but it also demanded a little TLC too, you had to go to the shops as well, no down-load, no Amazon. So I got it home and, as Stephen did, I reverently placed it on the record deck, lifted the needle gently positioning it onto the edge of the record, put my head phones on (the size of coconuts on each ear) and shut my eyes in preparation as the needle was drawn into the album. A ritual yes, but I liked my music and at that time it was a large part of my life and now some 30 years later my son has got it too. He has had it for a long time but recently, with the resurgence of the Vinyl, he has 'got' the record thing under his skin.
Stephen has been producing a web site called we write lists for some time now and has made a lot of contacts in the music industry. He has a series called Six Albums where he gets music artists to write about their favourite albums and he even managed to get Rumer’s first ever online interview well before she released her first single!
Check his site out....
http://www.wewritelists.com/
So today we went to Kings Lynn where I had found an excellent Vinyl record shop and had promised to buy him some records to say thanks for helping me move the bigger bits of furniture. WELL it was like 2 school boys in a sweet shop, Stephen digging around for anything on his 'hot' list and me digging through adding up how much my record collection was worth! Stephen was meant to catch a train back to London but we missed two of those whilst we ferreted through this seam of nostalgia. He ended up buying several Albums including Pink Floyd's The dark side of the moon and even I bought a couple too. I swear that the shop had nearly everyone of my records and of course the selection available ended abruptly in the late 80's, just like that, finished, retired, redundant, no more demand as the new, young pretender, the CD made its move into the market.
The quality was pure and they were smaller, a more Compact Disc for sure but something was lost, something special, something unquantifiable but very real. I notice that on Duffy's new Album one of her tracks has a slight added hiss to give that vinyl feel to the production and it was none the worse for it either. Yes, something was lost, a simplicity and for those of a certain age perhaps a small part of our youth was lost when the vinyl silently slipped away.
Enough of the old times, over the forthcoming weekend I will be painting the Kitchen ceiling and walls but have an issue with so called exposed beams which I do not wish to spatter paint across from my paint roller. With this in mind I have come up with a cunning solution, I have covered all of them with sheets of paper, so now the room has unequivocally been totally and utterly parcel wrapped, my New Years present sadly....
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