This is the record equivalent of a ‘shelfie’. There’s probably three or four hundred albums sitting there – vinyl, proper vinyl. It’s having a bit of a revival these days, a bit of a comeback.
Many moons ago we bought 500 records for $500 as a random job-lot. And yes — most of them are rubbish. We did throw a fair few away. Some were beyond saving; warped, scratched, or just terrible… But some of them turned out to be gems and over time you start to realise it was actually buying the lost to get the special ones. Not because you’d ever listen to all of them (you won’t), or even like all of them (you definitely won’t). It’s not just a collection of ancient audio masterpieces gathering dust, it’s an installation piece too.
I’d never go out and buy this many albums intentionally. I wouldn’t have the patience, or the interest. Still its a wall of sound that mostly never gets played. To be fair there are box sets of classical albums there which can’t be described as ‘rubbish’ – they are just not our taste!
What does get played, though, is the old girl, a 1963 valve stereogram. A Garrard stacking-deck, a buggered radio, along with speakers that need re-coning at great expense to bring some bass back. The lid lifts up like an old school desk. You switch it on, and then… you wait. And wait. It’s like booting up a phone from another century. Nothing happens for ages and then suddenly — there it is – warmed up and ready to sing!
Half the time it sounds scratchy as anything and has a permanent hum. But then sometimes… it actually sounds pretty good, surprisingly good. It’s not because of the condition of the record, rather the style of music you choose to play. This machine loves Bing & Frank – smooth sounds. The natural sounds of valves, wood and old needles. Not HiFi, but RetroFi.
And the smell. No one tells you about the smell old records can have. A proper, dusty, slightly musty, lived-a-life kind of smell. You either love it or you don’t. I’m still deciding.
Every now and then, you pull a record out at random. You’ll hit something like Johnny Mathis and immediately question your life choices. That one quietly goes back without ceremony. No one needs to see that. But then you stumble across something decent or rare one; The Elvis Interviews, Frank Sinatra, The Everly Brothers or The Beach Boys. Proper classics hiding in plain sight. And suddenly it all makes a bit more sense.
As a musician, putting on music from the same era as the machine you’re playing it on changes how you hear it and how you feel it. There’s no point chucking on something from the 80s or 90s — wrong time, wrong place. This thing belongs to its era, and when you match it properly, it just works. And the fact it still works at all… that’s probably the biggest surprise. Every time you switch it on, there’s a small part of you expecting it to give up completely. Just smoke, silence, end of story.
But no, still going after over 50 years! Doubt any iphones would last that long … So yeah — it might look like carefully collated record collection. But really, it’s just a pile of records, a slightly questionable smell, and a very old faithful machine doing its best to keep going.
