Let me say upfront that I've been a vinyl addict
ever since I bought my first album back in 1979. Many more have followed since.
I'll also say upfront that I'm not going to delve into the usual hoary clichés
that make up the reasons why I think vinyl is the best format to deliver
music; the full cover art, the warm sound, the sheer sense of physical occasion
that's involved in putting the needle into the groove (etc. etc.); it's all been
said before by better writers than me and I'm afraid I've got nothing new to
bring to that particular party (except to say that I agree with every word).
In any case, that isn't what this blog is going to be all about, not directly anyway. Suffice it to say that, as that self confessed vinyl addict, a stack of them lined up like soldiers in a box can turn my head quicker than any pretty girl and I can never walk past a pile of albums without stopping to browse through them, wherever they may be. And with the increasing absence of dedicated record shops, this tends to occur on my regular forays into charity shops to see what goodies folk have given away for a good cause.
Browsing these environments though is a lot like panning for gold, with me as the keen prospector. There's more heartache than joy, but the odd sparkly nugget of a Beatles mono album or a Big Star single on Stax will more than make up for the mountains of silt and (often literal) dirt that has to be sifted to find them. But now instead of flipping past and junking the junk, I'm going to see if there really is heaven in a grain of dirt (sic) by taking some of these previously flippantly discarded discs home and actually giving them a bit of a listen.
I'm aware that there's going to have to be a degree of subjectivity in choosing what I put up on these pages - after all, one man's shit is another man's cherished Mantovani box set - but in order to ensure it's not entirely whim based or a pander to my inner prejudices, the broad criteria I'll be following in selection are:
And once listened to, I'll sum up my thoughts via these pages. If it turns out to be gold (or even fool's gold; I don't set that high a bar), then it will take it's place alongside the other discs in my collection. If it doesn't, then I'll simply return it to whence it came (don't worry, I'm not going to be so cheap as to ask for a refund) and let it end its days naturally, wherever shit charity shop albums go to die.
In any case, that isn't what this blog is going to be all about, not directly anyway. Suffice it to say that, as that self confessed vinyl addict, a stack of them lined up like soldiers in a box can turn my head quicker than any pretty girl and I can never walk past a pile of albums without stopping to browse through them, wherever they may be. And with the increasing absence of dedicated record shops, this tends to occur on my regular forays into charity shops to see what goodies folk have given away for a good cause.
Browsing these environments though is a lot like panning for gold, with me as the keen prospector. There's more heartache than joy, but the odd sparkly nugget of a Beatles mono album or a Big Star single on Stax will more than make up for the mountains of silt and (often literal) dirt that has to be sifted to find them. But now instead of flipping past and junking the junk, I'm going to see if there really is heaven in a grain of dirt (sic) by taking some of these previously flippantly discarded discs home and actually giving them a bit of a listen.
I'm aware that there's going to have to be a degree of subjectivity in choosing what I put up on these pages - after all, one man's shit is another man's cherished Mantovani box set - but in order to ensure it's not entirely whim based or a pander to my inner prejudices, the broad criteria I'll be following in selection are:
- It must be something that catches my eye as I browse,
- It must be something I've never come across before,
- It must be something I can't imagine ever has ever been re-released on CD, and
- It must be something I can't imagine anyone else in the world would want to take home.
And once listened to, I'll sum up my thoughts via these pages. If it turns out to be gold (or even fool's gold; I don't set that high a bar), then it will take it's place alongside the other discs in my collection. If it doesn't, then I'll simply return it to whence it came (don't worry, I'm not going to be so cheap as to ask for a refund) and let it end its days naturally, wherever shit charity shop albums go to die.
No comments:
Post a Comment