The Vinyl Files – Introduction

For the blog’s 600^th post (yay me, etc) I want to introduce a new “series” focusing on the small but precious set of vinyl records in my collection. I plan to roll out a post per week, over the next few months, looking at ten of the best or most important records within that collection. But first, some context … 

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.

Classic Album Review: The Cure - Seventeen Seconds (1980)

This is the first of five classic album posts featuring the work of The Cure ... all written a while back, and I’ll post them to the blog in chronological order:

Every avid music fan has a special place in their collection for a select number of albums they’d consider all-time favourites. No two all-time lists would ever be identical because taste is such a subjective, personal, and often intimate thing.

If ever I was attempting to compile any such list of personal Desert Island Delights, Seventeen Seconds is just as likely to be one of those albums sitting right near the very top. And I guess for me, that’s been the case for more than 30 years now. This, despite the fact that many of the band’s hardcore fans are unlikely to rate Seventeen Seconds as their “chosen one”. Yep, taste is a very personal and intimate thing indeed. As Robert Smith himself suggests on the excellent ‘Play For Today’ ... “it's not a case of doing what's right, it's just the way I feel that matters, tell me I'm wrong, I don't really care ...”

 

Having been seriously impressed when Faith came out in 1981, I worked my way back through the then not-so-extensive (at that point) Cure back catalogue and Seventeen Seconds quickly established itself as the benchmark by which I would judge all future Cure releases.

Through the years I’ve found myself returning to it and it never lets me down. For me, it captures perfectly the headspace I found myself dwelling in back in those late teenage post-punk years of 1980 thru to 1983, and although any rational sane person may consider such a notion pretty unhealthy, it remains a period of my life that I just can’t let go. Just another one of those boring “soundtrack of my youth” … “best days of my life” scenarios - call it a time, place, and had to be there, thing.

And how many seriously deranged (or otherwise) post-pubescent Gothboy-wannabees could relate to the words contained within the album’s finest moment ‘A Forest’ … “come closer and see, see into the trees, find the girl, while you can ... come closer and see, see into the dark, just follow your eyes, just follow your eyes …”

And to give Smith his due - he got the next bit right as well - the girl was NEVER there, and yes siree, it was ALWAYS the same …“running towards nothing, again and again and again and again …”

(*Unlucky in love, your blogger adopts a mock tortured pose for effect*)

From the experimental atmospheric instrumentals (of sorts - they’re rather more like interludes) ‘A Reflection’ and ‘The Final Sound’ through to the classic simplicity and repetition of ‘In Your House’, ‘Play For Today’, ‘M’, and ‘Secrets’, this is a finely crafted piece of work. Then there is, as mentioned above, the utter and total genius of the band’s seminal work ‘A Forest’; hugely influential, often copied, frequently covered, but never bettered.

It is often said that familiarity ultimately leads to contempt; in the case of Seventeen Seconds the opposite applies. That familiarity takes me to the sort of comfortable warm zone seldom found amid dark, stark, and otherwise obscure surrounds. Each to their own, but this is a back-of-the-hand album, I know every last chord change, each and every nuance in Smith’s burgeoning voice; conscious nor subconscious anticipation of either never wears thin.

The 2005 Deluxe Edition CD release – at least my third such copy of the album through the years, but my first on disc – contains a bonus CD which features different versions of the tracks, live versions, alternate takes, home demos of non-album material, rare ‘Cult Hero’ stuff from the band’s earliest incarnation – but to be honest, none of it could be considered “essential listening” regardless of how collectable it may once have been. I was a little disappointed with some of the sound quality on the bonus CD – I really wanted a definitive version of ‘Another Journey By Train’ (an instrumental b-side of some repute) but found the demo on this distorted and muddy. Still, that must be considered only a minor complaint, and it takes nothing away from how I feel about the original album as a whole.

Seventeen Seconds … a measure of life.