Vinyl Whores

An earlier version of this article previously appeared on the website www.nominalmusics.co.uk in 2000.

When I first started publishing pages to the web in 1995 (as Red Elvis Central through the University of Essex), I ran a weekly review of between ten and twenty seven inch singles picked up at various charity stores around Colchester. This stack of vinyl, of various shades of degradation, was mostly culled from the late seventies and early eighties - commercial electronic pop, classic and obscure. My religious binge-purchasing of seven inch releases from bands such as Tears For Fears or OMD rose to near addiction levels, and by the summer of 1998 I was unable to visit a town or village without first checking out the second hand vinyl in the thrift stores - the Cat Rescue shop in Lexden, Colchester seemed an unlikely place to spend a lunch hour from work, but when it meant that I could get a rare seven by 808 State, I didn't really mind. Financial limitations (and various other lead weights around my neck, the details of which would not make pleasant reading) meant that record purchasing near enough ceased completely. After moving from Colchester to Luton in August 1998, my turntable remained disassembled for many months, leaving the burgeoning boxes of neatly-ordered vinyl to slumber in their filthy sleeves. With the exception of a few isolated forays into Luton and Dunstable's almost infinite reservoir of charity outlets, my consumption of vinyl was limited to picking up the odd battered album from the Oxfam next to my workplace. Hence, although quantity was reduced, the quality of my purchases would rise - so, instead of grasping for the Gary Numan single that I knew I wouldn't like, I would be a bit more measured. This has meant that I have instead picked up a rare promo copy of Miles' Birth Of The Cool and Lee Hazlewood's ' The Very Special World Of…'. Until about two weeks ago, I had not connected the turntable for about six months, although I still had managed to build up a neat stack of new vinyl singles and albums. My wife had also raided her parents' house and found an old record box containing all of her old sevens and twelves, so, in a moment of retro abandonment, we decided to play some.

I had completely forgotten the feeling and emotion attached to playing records compared to the neat convenience of CDs or MP3s. To today's youth, at least those not influenced by dance music or into indie (where the 7” is once again fashionable), vinyl must seem so old-fashioned and inconvenient compared to the minimal effort required with digital media.

But that's exactly what makes playing records so exciting - the effort involved by the listener through dusting the grooves or calibrating the tone arm means that he or she is actually somehow overseeing and participating in the act of letting the music play through the amplifier. There is also the feeling of holding something delicate and precious - whilst a CD can play through a misplaced fingerprint, a vinyl record can be terminally damaged by a slight scratch or from the transfer of oil from the fingertip. Add this to the fact that a vinyl single or album is housed in a very flimsy cardboard sleeve (as opposed to the immaculate sheen of a plastic CD case) and one begins to comprehend why avid vinyl consumptives want to treat each individual piece as carefully as an antique dealer would handle a Queen Anne table. Vinyl is physical, music made through contact, whilst digital media are somehow more precise due to the technologically-advanced nature of their recording and playback hardware. One imagines vinyl as having a finite lifespan, whereas CDs seem to be built to last forever. Also, the sonic manipulation of digital media is essentially flawed to the point of impossibility, despite the intervention of new mixing consoles and certain avant-garde elecroacoustic composers - where are the CD compositional equivalents of works by Steve Reich, John Cage, Pierre Schaeffer, Christian Marclay, or even the scratching dexterity of hip hop’s finest? Put simply, it can't be done. In two of music's most forward-looking genres, vinyl is still at the very heart - where would rap or any one of dance's viral tranches be without the use of turntable and vinyl record?

Listening to old vinyl relics such as my first seven, Nik Kershaw's 'The Riddle' or Michelle's pile of late eighties pop dance singles rekindled the old feelings of youth and teenage experimentation that the purchasing of CDs actually prohibit. This prompted us to remember trivial things like 'I was doing this on the day that I bought this,' or 'I was going out with so-and-so when I bought this,' or 'I remember what else I bought that day.' These pieces of plastic are like points along a continuum, events separated by days and weeks of saving for the next single or album. Perhaps I'm reading it wrong, perhaps it's music in general that we use to measure the passing of time, but I don't think CDs or MP3s can or will have the nostalgic impact that vinyl has. Is anyone, after all, likely to recall the first MP3 they ever downloaded? (For the record, my first was the free album Bovine Life II : Social Electrics, a collection of obscure electronica created using filesharing.)

Recording to CD is now a cheap and cost-effective way of mastering that can be done from home, a by-product of the bedroom-based self-build ethics that punk facilitated. Ironic then that punk's teenage snarl and 'fuck you' attitude has lead to the decline of vinyl, replaced instead by the mature, tamed spirit encapsulated as the zeroes and ones of digital recording media. Listening to The Stooges' debut album on remastered CD feels so clean and pure, yet the sleeve and potential within the songs tells you that this should be dirty and ragged - perfect for the filthy grooves of a vinyl album and battered cardboard sleeve. Inevitably, it is difficult not to accept that CDs - in all but sound quality - are superior and more convenient than vinyl records, no matter how much audiophiles will try to convince you. We want simple lives, no matter how complex our listening ear, but vinyl will always remain a quintessential part of music's development. We could not have anticipated MP3s or hard-drive recording, so what's next? You can be assured that vinyl will still be there in some shape or form, even if it's reduced to the mere ghost of a sampled scratch on a future digital hip hop opus.