We all consume music in different ways. I’m not much of a fan of Spotify. I don’t have the premium option and therefore don’t “store” albums for future streaming. I only occasionally check into Spotify for one-off album previews and only rarely check out the odd playlist that platform offers. It isn’t that the cost of premium is prohibitive or anything like that, far from it, it’s just that Spotify doesn’t really hold much appeal for me. Other members of my family swear by it.
I’m relatively
old-school, and most of my current music collection consists of CDs and mp3s
(albums downloaded). My collection in each of these formats is extensive and
varied. Some might say its huge and rather excessive. The mp3 option, for all
of its flaws – compression, variations in bitrate quality – offers the
portability I crave in a way that still allows me to “own” a copy or file of
the music I listen to. The CD option appeals because I like to collect
“physical” things and stack them on a shelf.
Having said that,
purchasing CDs is a less frequent indulgence these days, and the vast majority
of new additions to my music collection in recent years have arrived in the
form of album downloads/mp3 files, which are meticulously tagged and filed away
with all the pedantry of a particularly speccy and spotty OCD librarian.
In the late 1970s
and throughout the 1980s, when I first started collecting music, it was a
combination of vinyl records and cassette tapes. By 1992, my collection was
extensive and – in the wake of CDs becoming the most fashionable form of
consumption – largely redundant. Desperate for cash, and determined to embrace
the CD format just as soon as I could afford it, I sold virtually everything
I’d spent the previous 15 years collecting – vinyl and cassette tapes, the vast
majority sold in bulk to a trader on Wellington’s Cuba Street. Sold for
peanuts. It broke my heart.
Well, it did, and
it didn’t. It did because they were my life; the only tangible thing(s) I had to
show for more than a decade in the workforce. And it didn’t because my life was
undergoing major change and I desperately needed the money to fund
long-yearned-for overseas travel. And hey, I couldn’t fit that little lot into
the one backpack I left the country with, could I?
It just made sense
(at the time) and it made even more sense that when I was flush with the green
stuff, I’d be able to rebuild the collection – replicate it, even – in the form
of CDs, which had fast become the mainstream poison of choice. And that's exactly what I eventually did … but I also held on to a number or tapes and records I
couldn’t or simply wouldn’t give up. I stored them at my parent’s abode for the
duration of my travels. The most precious and sentimental stuff; the first
vinyl record my Mum ever bought me (Glen Campbell’s Goodtime Album, 1970). Something
passed down to me by my Dad (The Green & White Brigade’s The Holy Ground of
Glasgow Celtic, 1968), and naturally enough, a childhood first love, 1978’s
Solid Gold Hits Volume 22. Plus a few others, which I may or may not get to in
future posts.
Among the handful
of cassette tapes I couldn’t bear to part with were The Cure’s ‘Seventeen
Seconds’ (1980), and New Order’s ‘Movement’ (1981). Those albums remain firm
favourites today, although I tend to listen to each of them in a newer format
nowadays.
Since then – since
The Great Purge of 1992/1993 – I’ve purchased very little in the way of vinyl,
but I have added a few records here and there, and I’ve “inherited” a few albums
to add to that small core set. Last Christmas, when I was gifted a very cute
and portable “record player” I had yet another purge because it was clear that
some of the vinyl I had was simply unplayable – badly scratched, tatty, and/or
filthy – and I figured there wasn’t much point in keeping them or trying to
salvage them. Which means my collection today is even smaller (about 40 albums
and a handful of singles) but rather more selective. I can play what remains
and what remains tends to be those records I value most. That’ll be my focus in
this series of blogposts.
With new vinyl so
much more readily available than it has been at any time across the past couple
of decades, I also harbour sneaky plans to add to this wing of my wider music collection.
But for now, it strikes me that the most unique or more interesting works in my
post-purge music collection exist in the vinyl format, so I’ll try to cover off
ten of the best in the coming weeks, with a short post about what makes each
one so special.
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