Vinyl Fantasy

Saturday morning I took a stroll around town which took me to a store called Movement, a cool place stocking good-as-new designer furniture and other knick-knacks from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. I’d bought a couple of Jazz LPs there some time ago. This time around, though, the man had a whole new stock of vinyl, not just Jazz, and all in fine condition: I ended up buying eight albums: Sinatra at the Sands, a 2-LP set from ’66 featuring the Count Basie Orchestra; Flowers, a mid-’60s compilation-album by the Rolling Stones; The Songs of Leonard Cohen and also Cohen’s Death of a Ladies Man; Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues (the Bringing it All Back Home LP retitled for the European market) and Blonde on Blonde; Snap! by The Jam; and the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks….

It’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve gotten into buying vinyl. It happened that during one incursion into a junkshop I started rifling through some boxes of records that they had, most of which were of mid-late ’80s vintage: Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Eurythmics, Paul Young, Milli Vanilli, and the like. I was having great fun, and, when my wife came over, she suggested we look & see if they had any old record-players there too. Luckily, they did, and not just a record-player but an entire ’70s hi-fi system with a Ferguson amp/receiver, an Akai cassette deck, two speakers, a microphone and headphones, all for just 300 SEK.

So we bought the thing, and with it a big pile of records including Peter Gabriel’s So, Sweet Dreams by the Eurhythmics, and What Up Dog? by Was (Not Was); 12" single versions of Relax and Two Tribes by Frankie Goes to Hollywood; a nine-LP Reader's Digest box-set of ‘Your Favourite Classical Melodies’, a quadrophonic recording of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherezade; and an original ’50s pressing of the South Pacific soundtrack. Since then I’ve bought dozens more discs, mostly classical, and acquired a new Kenwood turntable that I could plumb into our main hi-fi set-up.

The odd thing is that I’ve no particular sentimental attachment to black vinyl as such, and never owned any records when it was still the #1 format, going instead straight from cassettes to CDs. Even so, I do enjoy fond memories of LPs and 45 singles…

When I was about seven or eight years old our mother gave her old mono record-player to my sister and me, along with a stack of ’60s singles, which ranged from an orange-labelled copy of the Byrds’ version of Mr. Tamborine Man, to Wink Martindale’s Deck of Cards, songs which are worlds apart, but which, at the time, I believe I loved equally well. Also, from about that time I can recall that we would pick out the LPs from my dad’s collection that we liked best, and he’d let us play them on his ITT record deck. I particularly liked a ‘Best-of’ collection by Fats Domino, and Desperado by The Eagles. My dad would also listen to the Stones, CCR, Cream, Roxy Music, Fleetwood Mac… that kind of thing. I always preferred his taste in music to my mother’s, which took in Lionel Richie, Dr. Hook, and the like.

My sister’s earliest vinyl enthusiasm was for ABBA, and, much as I would pretend to dislike their music, I was secretly in love with the way Agnetha and Anni-Frid could harmonise; I enjoyed the corny songs like Fernando and Chiqitita best of all. She was given the two Greatest-Hits sets, and later also Voulez-Vous on LP. Of the singles she bought I can remember the Boomtown Rats’ I Don't Like Mondays, Hazel O’Connor’s Eighth Day, Don’t Stand So Close to Me by The Police, and, incongruously, Woman in Love by Barbara Streisand… LP-wise she also bought Blondie’s Parallel Lines, which became a great favourite of mine.

I, meanwhile, much as I loved listening to the radio, never bought one single or LP, preferring instead to nerdishly spend my money on computer games & accessories, and it wasn’t until I was given a Walkman, aged seventeen or so, that I started buying music on cassette for myself. My first purchases were So by Peter Gabriel, already mentioned above, and Love by The Cult: at the time I thought their song She Sells Sanctuary really rocked. Oh my.

Posted by misteraitch at June 16, 2003 11:41 AM | TrackBack