The Vinyl Reprieve

A year or so ago my wife woke up and said, “can we go and buy a turntable?”

Still half asleep I replied “I’m not going to IKEA on Saturday.”

“I said turntable not dining table, a record player, stupid.” 

Now my wife is not a spendthrift, she does not have a shoe collection Imelda Marcos would be proud of, so when she said she wanted to buy what could be considered a luxury item I happily went along with it.  

We didn’t own any vinyl, all of it had been de-cluttered a couple of house moves ago, (Yes , yes I know…) in fact the only LP in the house was a Frank Sinatra album belonging to a friend, why we had it I still don’t know. 

A few hours later we were in a shop buying a compact turntable with built in speaker, we then spent the rest of the day trawling charity shops and raiding parent’s houses… the in-laws kindly donated an impressive original pressing of Rumours, my Mum’s house much to the disgust of my wife provided a Readers Digest box set of Johnny Cash, You’ve got to love a bit of The Man In Black. 

Our son looked at the black discs and exclaimed “Wow they are massive, they must contain loads of music.” 

“Err no son, let me explain…..” 

Now the big question does vinyl deserve it’s renaissance? Yes and no. 

Streaming (like mix tapes in the eighties) has destroyed the art of making an album, we pick and choose tracks for a playlist for the gym, for relaxing, for car journeys or listen to three hours of an artist’s best tracks, we don’t seem to listen to a well structured album anymore. An album like Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Welcome to the Pleasure Dome should on no account be shuffle played (some may say not played at all but that’s a different debate.)

But On Spotify (other streaming services are available) I can listen to anything I want, finding it in seconds. Putting on a record player is an effort and you listen to a whole album, the wheat and the chaff.  

Both approaches have their benefits. You could be a Beatles super fan and track down an original stereo recording of Sergeant Pepper’s on vinyl for squillions of quid and play it (if you dare) in revered silence to family and friends or you can stream it and be a Beatles super geek by removing Within You Without You and replace it with Penny Lane which was recorded as an EP at the same time and not put on a studio album, then argue that you have created a better album than the original (trust me you have). 

Listening to an LP now has now almost become an event in our house. We will not drop the needle on to the third track because we don’t like the first two, where we would normally skip on streaming (or on a C.D) In fact in Midwich Cuckoo’s AKA The Village Of The Damned, (Please bear with the tangent I’m going off on) an early Sci-fi novel by John Wyndham, a character Gordon Zellaby, questions the ethics of interrupting a gramophone record out of respect for the artist, We get that feeling now whilst playing a vinyl album.

Vinyl has now got its own separate chart and is a mix of new albums and the classics, Dark Side Of The Moon, Rumours etc. Vinyl sales are going up year on year. The first six months of last year were nearly twenty percent up on 2017 (source - https://bestclassicbands.com/2018-vinyl-sales-7-10-18/ ) 

An added bonus is that they are great to give as presents, their increased price makes them less of an impulse buy, more of a considered purchase. 

So will vinyl survive its second wind? I think so. C.D’s may die as they offer nothing over a digital MP3 file or stream, not convenience, tonal quality, but vinyl offers nostalgia and warm tones over the clipped tones of a digital file, so both will go forward and grow in strength and C.D’s will go in the dustbin along with Compact Cassettes and 8 track Cassettes (ask your Granddad about them, a fixture of 1960’s/1970’s cars.) 

In our house both will reign supreme, my wife will do the ironing to vinyl and I’ll vacuum with headphones on to streaming. And together we will snuggle up on the sofa together and listen to either….