REBUYING THE VINYL

Nostalgia sure ain’t what it used to be. It may be an old cliché (as am I...), but most clichés are essentially true and there really isn’t a truer one. In the long-lost days of vinyl, I used to have the most notoriously awful record collection in this bit of the northern hemisphere. It was laughable. It was mockable. It was regularly mocked. And yet, every so often, I get this uncontrollable desire to replace large chunks of it by buying the same records again on CD.

Now I know in this modern age of downloads and iPods and clouds, doing that is somewhat anachronistic, but there you are. I’m still basically an analogue type of guy, even if I am deeply immersed in a digital world. Somehow I still like to have something tangible to hold on to when I go out and buy something, and, for me, a CD still rather fits the bill nicely. Even if, like so many other formats, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find something convenient to actually play the thing on. After all, nowadays you can climb into a hire car and find nothing but sockets marked iPod for plugging in equipment that you may not have, and obviously hire cars represent the future because it’ll be a good few years yet until I can ever afford to buy a brand new car, so mine still (happily) have things like CD players to listen to my less-than-hip-and-happening tracks on.

I still fondly remember taping mono versions of nearly all of my old albums from that dodgy old music centre that only seemed to have one output channel just so that I could play them on the tape deck of every car I had back then and finding myself happily surprised when I finally got one that had a CD player in it, even though it consigned all those tapes to the dusty shoeboxes of history.

Someone once told me that only the very best of people kept their tapes in shoeboxes, and who am I to argue with that?

Now, of course I know that people like the idea of being able to carry around every record that they’ve ever owned in a box the size of a postage stamp (Do you remember those…? They used to be so cheap... Bit of politics there, folks...) and I’m quite happy for them to do so, but I’ve never really seen the appeal. It’s like the whole electronic library thing. I can only listen to one album at a time, when I’m in the mood for it, in much the same way as I can only read one book at a time...

Ah... You see... The argument’s fallen apart already. Sometimes I can have half a dozen books on the go... Mind you, I can only actually sit down and read only one of them at a time, but I’m still trying to resist that gadgety temptation, so you’ll just have to bear with me on this.

Anyway, getting back to the whole nostalgia thing which was supposed to be our topic today, sometimes you just like to fall back on what you know. Some days you just wake up with an old familiar tune bouncing around in your head and you realise that you haven’t heard it for years. Not since, in fact, the the last of your tape decks stopped working and you took all of the turntables to the tip. That’s when you can suddenly find yourself ordering albums that you know you’ve had gathering dust for years just so you can give them a quick listen, remind yourself how familiar they once were, and put them on another, perhaps slightly smaller shelf to gather dust until the next format comes along and you finally decide to bite the bullet because CD players are becoming increasingly difficult to find...

Perhaps new music fails to grab you in the way it once did. Perhaps you just get to a certain age and you think that you’ve heard them all before, in much the same way that the new films all seem to remind you of other, older films you once watched. Perhaps it’s just about trying to recapture your youth, like those people of a certain age who really should know better who go to see middle-aged men who were once in boy bands prance about and go through the old routines.

My main music buying years were the 1980s which nowadays seem mind-bogglingly and surprisingly camp to my world-weary eyeballs. Why could we not see it at the time when we were applying the eyeliner and hairspray? Okay, it’s true that I never personally actually applied any eyeliner (probably something to do with wearing glasses), but I think the point is made. Mind you, nobody at the time seemed to want to admit that George Michael was essentially channelling the “Princess Di” look, in much the same way that many people - especially, it seems in the Midlands - refuse to accept to this day that Freddie Mercury was anything other than 100% heterosexual.

Nowadays it is as clear as crystal that the eighties were totally, outrageously camp as a muddy field during Glastonbury, but back then we thought that there was something over-the-top about the 1970s, so it was quite difficult to judge.

Sometimes I think that revisiting all of those old albums is just about trying to recapture the moment. A long, long time ago, I remember driving home late at night across the Pennines and listening to a radio station which played three tracks back-to-back that so impressed me that I went out the very next day and bought CDs by all three of those artists in an effort to try and “bottle” that very moment, and to this day, those three tracks (by Cat Stevens, Kim Wilde and, er, the aforementioned George Michael) can transport me back to that dark and chilly night driving through that unforgiving moorland.

Ah well. I know that all three of those albums have not been played all that much, and that, as musical choices go, they probably only confirm the genuine naffness and lack of quality that just proves that my CD collection has managed, in the end, to emulate the hilarious content that my vinyl collection once did. Mind you, it’s hardly surprising, I suppose, now that its content is rapidly becoming much the same.

Well, I’m not going to deny that it has its less than fashionable corners. I spent far too many years of my life pretending not to be at all interested in things that I actually adored, and I think that one of the advantages of reaching my current great age is that you can finally accept that you really shouldn’t give a stuff what anyone else thinks and just enjoy the things that make you happy despite what they might think.