RECORD TIME a meditation on vinyl

Technology scares me. Not in a ‘computers-are-going-to-take-over-the-world-and-robots-will-be-their-footsoldiers’ kinda way. My problem is that it moves too damn quickly. I’d just bade a tearful goodbye to my cassette walkman, and got on speaking terms with a discman, when everyone else started flirting with mp3s. I couldn’t believe how fickle people could be. Can’t we commit to anything nowadays?

So, I decided to take a stand. I reversed the trend and went back in time. I discovered the glamorous, intoxicating era of vinyl. And now I’m happily trapped here forever.

Early on, the fact I didn’t actually own a record player was just a trifling detail. I threw myself headlong into buying the records themselves. I guess it’s no surprise that I quickly lost control. If music is art, then surely vinyl is the natural medium. The cover is a perfectly square canvass of 12 x 12 inches.

Then there’s the vinyl itself. In its purest form, it’s a circular slice of fetishism: sleek, neat, shiny and black. And, like any good fetish, records can be subverted in delicious fashion. Coloured vinyl has the power to complement an album like nothing else (The Cure’s crimson smeared Pornography cover? Match it with red vinyl. The Beach Boys’ lush Pet Sounds? An ocean-green disc. The Beatles’ white album? You get the picture. Speaking of which, don’t even get me started on picture discs).

And let’s not forget the simple genius of the seven-inch single. In the twenty-first century, a song is just an entry on a list; zapped into our Mac in seconds and forgotten about seconds later. But in days gone by, the seven-inch proudly said, “No wait! This song matters. In fact, it matters so much that it deserves a whole big side of this disc.”

But while the quirks of vinyl gave me much delight, they also presented an inevitable flipside: a quick road to bankruptcy. So, before long, I set myself some firm ground rules.

First, I had to get over the delusion that I was buying records on the basis that they were an “investment”. The popular myth that most old records have astronomical financial value is just that. A myth. And even if my collection did, by some fluke, accrue value in years to come, I could never part with it anyway.

Second, I had to stop gorging indiscriminately. If I already owned the music on another format, I couldn’t purchase it again on vinyl. Even if that did mean walking away from the Kings of Leon’s Aha Shake Heartbreak on 10 inch double-vinyl (man, that one still hurts).

And finally, I had to buy a record player, so that I could actually listen to the stockpile of albums, singles and 12-inches I had cached. This proved far easier than I had anticipated. Thanks to superstar DJs, turntables are now back in demand and widely available. I picked up a basic one for three hundred bucks.

When I played the records for the first time, it was clear that my vice had just become an addiction. Each unintended crackle makes every piece of vinyl utterly unique. Nobody – not even the artist – will ever hear the music the way that you do. And the fragility of the records gives you a new appreciation for the songs. Vinyl must be treated with the same love and care that the artist invested when they originally crafted the music. Otherwise, you will scratch the record, making you feel like time is forever repeating itself, repeating itself, repeating itself, repeating itself, repeating itself…