I like my iPod but records are beautiful

In a retro move, I got a record player last Christmas.  I have a few records in a cupboard that I never got to play due to lack of a turntable so when my mum rang sometime in September asking me what I wanted to Christmas, I figured I’d ask for a record player.  It might be the most teenaged thing I’ve ever done, as long as the teenage in question was pre-1990 (as mine were… just).

As for the aforementioned records, it’s not an extensive collection, nor does it contain any titles that would earn me any respect.  My record buying was done largely in the 1980s and CDs had well and truly taken  hold by the early 90s, so the records I kept in the cupboard are sort of like a time capsule of pop music from the Eighties (especially, for some reason, from England).  I’ve always been suspicious of people who, when asked about the first album they bought, say something that, if believed, meant their musical tastes were fully-formed and brilliant at age 11... “Yeah, first album?  Joy Divisions's Unknown Pleasures...”.  Admit it - your first album was the “Grease” soundtrack, just like everyone else…

Anyway, among others there’s most of Madonna’s eighties catalogue, a Prince album, as well as Duran Duran, including that curiosity of 80s music, a 12” remix of The Reflex.  Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin) is a piece of pop perfection so my reason for buying Scritti Politti’s Cupid & Psyche was sound.  Don’t know how those Sade records got in there though…they’re mine?  Okay.  But she’s probably the only person from the eighties who can look back at old photos and not think “why did I wear that? Why was my hair so big?  What’s with the all the frosted eyeshadow/lipstick/blusher?”

So when I set up the record player and selected ABC’s (underrated classic) Lexicon of Love to play, everything about playing records came back to me, as if the 20 odd years of CD’s and now digital downloads never happened.  Sliding the record out of the plastic sleeve, being careful to hold it by its edges, with my fingers touching only the label.  Lining up the hole in the middle of the record with the spindle at the centre of the turntable.  How to move the stylus and the sound of the needle landing on the first grooves of the record.  Then the slow, steady turn of the black vinyl.  As a reflex, I even walked around carefully, so as not to make the record jump.  It’s is funny to think of something so familiar now being kind of antique knowledge.

My almost perfect recall of certain song lyrics from my teenage years isn’t just because I was young and didn’t have much else to remember…The size of the records meant reading the album sleeve was easy and you actually got to know all about who worked on it and the larger font size used meant reading the lyrics was not a squinty trial.    I’m sure it is why I had an encyclopaedic knowledge of music back then, which I started to lose once CD’s turned up.  And with downloads, how are today’s young music tragics going to get all that info?  I know you can download it or get it from a website but reading it on your smart phone probably isn’t the same as sitting back, reading the album sleeve while the record is playing.

And it was easier to get to know the song titles because they were printed on the label so you absent-  mindedly read them every time you put the record on or changed to side two.

And Dave Grohl is in agreement.  In a recent interview he spoke about how he introduced his daughter to records, although there was no 80s music time capsule in his house - he had a Beatles box set handy (as an aside and an interesting piece of trivia, did you know that the first album to have lyrics printed on it was the Beatles’ Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band?).

There’s a romance about records, and it is only partly nostalgia.  Yes the records sounded a little bit scratchy and the needle jumped a couple of times, but it was nothing cleaning the record didn’t fix.  Okay, CDs have better sound quality,  and could contain a whole heap more music, plus they aren’t as easily damaged.  Digital downloads are cheaper and I do love the shuffle function on my iPod but I’m not sure they can hold a candle to the aesthetics of a record.   I’m not an expert on the history of design and it is possible I’m not thinking back much further than the art deco era (something of a high point in humanity's artistic endeavours IMO) but I think perhaps more care was taken in how things looked which was lost once built-in obsolescence took hold and things were designed to be easily replaced.  There’s a reason vintage-looking appliances are still popular.

Or maybe in fifty years time, people will look back with a sense of nostalgia when they see an iPod.

Yours musically