reminds me of childhood memories...

I know I'm talking about music a lot at the moment, but I'm afraid that one of the consequences of buying a record player has been that I am reconnecting with the whole experience of listening to music on an album-by-album rather than song-by-song basis.  Still, from your point of view, I suppose it at least makes a difference to me harping on about running or somesuch.

My record buying policy is generally to either buy albums that I don't actually own in any format - like Folsom Prison or Live at San Quentin by Johnny Cash - or to buy albums that I absolutely love but may already own.  At the weekend, I visited the Music Exchange in Nottingham and picked up a couple of the key texts from my youth, both in gloriously heavy 180g vinyl editions.

My only copy of "Appetite for Destruction" is actually a rather scratched CD.... so scratched, in fact, that the ripped copy in my iTunes library is missing "My Michelle".   I bought this album on cassette in 1988 and listened to almost nothing else for nearly a year, until the release of "Pump" by Aerosmith finally broke its tyrannical grip on my stereo.  I'm sure you don't need me to tell you that it's an absolutely blinding record, perhaps one of the best debuts ever released.  Forget the awful mess that was to follow, this is an almost perfect record that still sounds pulsatingly vital today.  My copy boasts that it is a "Premium Audiophile Pressing on Heavyweight 180g Vinyl in All Original Packaging!"  Well, given that it doesn't feature the cover above, this is a lie.... but it does come with the familiar black cross tattoo artwork, and the songs are the same, so....

It's a brilliant album.

You know how sometimes the strangest things can trigger surprisingly vivid and specific memories?  A few years back, I went to visit an old school, and the smell of the changing rooms unexpectedly took me back to being about 8 years old.  Listening to my other weekend vinyl purchase has much the same kind of effect, taking me back to the sixth form at school and listening to music, drinking coffee and eating Jaffa Cakes.  I actually discovered the Red Hot Chili Peppers through 1989s "Mother's Milk", but it was 1991s "Blood Sugar Sex Magik" that had me hooked.  They've done better albums since, but this is the album that reminds me of being 17 years old.  When I put it on and listened to it all the way through for the first time in years, I was slightly surprised to find that I was still word perfect on many of the tracks and found myself happily singing along:

I've got a mellowship, I've got a fellowship
I've got a nonstop "Yo swan" hello chip
Born to adore the big bad bison
Thunderstorm and a man like Tyson
Popcorn peanuts lookin' at big butts
No I cannot keep my mouth shut
Rockin' to the beat of the fabulous forum
My Lakers I adore 'em

[Mellowship Slinky in B major]

It's probably just as well that I'm on my own tonight, eh? The cat's disapproval of such things can surely be taken as read.

Another superb album that still sounds pretty fresh today (even if the band themselves don't sound quite the same since John Frusciante left).

Both BSSM and AFD played a massive part in my musical education and it feels great to listen to them again on vinyl with fresh ears.  If getting a record player has done nothing else for me, then it's been worth it just for that.

By way of contrast, my other purchase of the weekend was "Bish Bosch" by Scott Walker.  It's supposedly the third and final part of a trilogy of albums by Walker that also includes "Tilt" and "The Drift".  I haven't listened to it yet, but if it's anything like those other two albums, then it's not exactly going to be easy listening and may feature percussion on a slab of meat.

Well, it's good to mix it up a little from time to time, no?

Incidentally, whilst we're on the subject of discovering vinyl, what's with some records having a hole smaller than the spindle on the deck?  What's that all about?  That certainly never happens with MP3s, and it looks like I may be doomed to listen to side A of "Hatful of Hollow"over and over again for the rest of my life.  It could be worse, obviously, but there are so many other things I want to listen to as well....

I hear my needle hit the groove....

I'm nearly forty years old and I've just bought my first ever record player.  Perhaps that seems remarkable, especially for someone who likes music as much as I do, but that's just the way things worked out.

Neither of my parents really listen to music, and I didn't grow up in a house filled with their records from the sixties.  By the time I started listening to music, I had a little radio cassette deck, and it was only natural that the first albums I had were in that format.  I got my first CD player in about 1988, and from that day on, almost everything I've bought has been on compact disc.  Oh sure, with the arrival of the iPod I started to download things, but more often than not I was also buying a copy on CD.  I can remember going to record fairs at the Birmingham NEC when I was a student at Warwick University, but I was on the hunt for Smiths albums on CD - they hadn't yet been re-released by Warners and were quite hard to get hold of.  My copy of Hatful of Hollow was a French import, if memory serves me correctly, and I was very pleased to have found it.  I didn't look at any of the thousands of boxes of records at all.

Records just didn't come into it: it was an old, inconvenient format that had never been especially relevant to me.

....but recently, something changed.  I already know that MP3s are pretty far from being the perfect way to listen to music.  iTunes is connected to my proper stereo at home, and out of idle curiosity, and because I had the CD to hand, I did a side by side comparison of the two formats.  The difference astounded me: CD is not famously a warm listening experience, but the sheer extent of the difference in quality really spelled out quite how much quality is lost in the compression.  It's convenient though, isn't it?  To carry your music around in your pocket and to listen to anything wherever you happen to be.  I found myself increasingly listening to the same playlists over and over again, and only really listening to albums when I was sat in my chair at home and could stream them through my good speakers.  Music was becoming disposable to me; something that I played in the background as I did other things.

That realisation didn't make me feel happy, and I idly started to wonder if I might get myself into vinyl: the quality of the records is much better now, on the whole, than it used to be back in the day.  In addition, most LPs now came with free MP3 files too, making the whole thing seem a lot more accessible.

I didn't initially do anything about this impulse... but then my boss gave me a copy of Louder than Bombs by the Smiths on 180g vinyl for Christmas.  Well, that forced my hand somewhat, and before long I was researching record players.  Then I bought a record player.  Never having owned or really used a record player, it was something of a delightful voyage of discovery learning about setting the counterweight, applying the appropriate downforce and hooking the little anti-skid weight on in the right place.  You don't get this with a CD player, do you?  Goodness me; no wonder obsessives love this format.  I never even knew that my amplifier had a little thing on it for hooking the little widget on with the input cables.  Anti-static or something?  Who knows?

It all seems to work okay, and that's the most important thing.  I already love the ritual of putting a record onto the deck, putting the needle onto the vinyl and hearing the familiar pop and crackle as it starts to play.  The fact that you need to pay close enough attention to turn the record over every twenty minutes or so means that you are that much more involved in the music.  That was pretty much exactly what I was looking for.  I'm also quite taken with the record sleeves.  I know that all of you already know this, but it makes a MASSIVE difference looking at the pictures and the sleeve notes in a format somewhat bigger than the average CD booklet (never mind an MP3 download).

My record collection is small but growing.  My plan is to only buy things that I really, really love or things that I don't already have.  I've added Hatful of Hollow to Louder than Bombs; I picked up copies of The Velvet Underground & Nico and Johnny Cash Live in San Quentin whilst in New York.  I have lots of Johnny Cash already, but I don't own those albums in any format and they sound brilliant.  My absolute favourite purchase so far is the box set of Scott Walker albums from 1967-1970 (Scott, Scott 2, Scott 3, Scott 4 and Til The Band Comes In).  They look absolutely magnificent in this format in a way that the CD copies I have never will.

Now **that's** why I wanted a record player......

I'm hardly the first person to discover the joys of vinyl, but better late than never.  Besides, a man should have a hobby, right?