PUTTING A NEW SPIN ON VINYL

I am increasingly bemused by the constant heralding of “The Vinyl Revival”. Total bollocks. All this rubbish about ‘It sounds better on vinyl’ and ‘It’s warmer than downloads’. I didn’t believe that when Neil Young used to bang on about it and I don’t believe it now. I grew up through the heyday of vinyl records and bought them because there wasn’t anything else to buy. Apart from large sleeves which were ideal for rolling joints on, in retrospect there wasn’t much to commend them. They warped, they scratched, they wore out with repeated plays, they got dirty and required regular cleaning, they hissed, they popped and the needle stuck half way through unless you piled pennies on top of the stylus. We put up with all of that, not because the flaws added a depth and warmth to the music, but because we had no choice.

Even then there was a high degree of snobbery about the process. It wasn’t about owning vinyl, it was about who had the most expensive set up so that they could hear the pops and crackles in greatest definition. Over the years I came to know people who had spent small fortunes on audio equipment and yes, you did get better frequency definition, but not enough to justify the expenditure: as the outlay grew, the return on the investment was on a diminishing scale. The ultimate was a lovely greek called Zanatos Zanatos, who’s whole flat had become one big piece of audio set-up to service his vinyl. He liked to explain the minute nuances of sound which his vast expenditure had brought him.

My problem was that since I had been about fourteen I had been attending gigs, usually in small clubs, where the noise levels made my ears ring for the rest of the week. By the time I was twenty the top end of my hearing range was already deciding not to discriminate those small nuances which seemed to excite Zan so much.

When the tape fad came and went in the 70s. I heard very little difference between it and vinyl, except that the pops and crackles had been replaced with louder hiss and unintended variable speed as the tape stretched. The godsend was that you could now make and trade mixtapes.

So the rise of CDs in the 80s was a godsend. No, I didn’t find them ‘colder’ than vinyl. Instead I found that I could hear things better. I could skip to particular tracks without having to pick up the stylus, physically move it over the platter and drop it down, hoping for the best. I could listen to long pieces all the way through without having to flip the disc over. My vinyl was soon dispatched to the attic. Where it still rests, together with its turntable, presumably accumulating value. (In fact I know it is – I check the back pages of Record Collector magazine from time to time.)

Now all of my music is dispatched to my lug holes via MP3 and download. I listen to it almost constantly and enjoy it immensely and I have no hankering to go back to vinyl.

Which is why I find the ‘revival’ bemusing. For a while our local Tesco was stocking vinyl. It has stopped now. Looking at the albums it was selling was like rummaging through the boxes at the back of a charity shop: ELO, The Eagles, The Rolling Stones, Elvis Presley. It made me take a second look at the vinyl charts. It was much the same there: Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac. So I took a trip to the only vinyl specialist shop near us. It was the same there and my suspicions were confirmed. It was full of middle-aged men. There wasn’t a single person under fifty.  This wasn’t what a record shop should be. In my teenage years record shops were bursting with kids full of testosterone hunting down obscure pieces of ska and motown, not old fogies whose spare bedroom has become a shrine to The Floyd and who are being shamelessly fleeced by corporate enthusiasm on the back of a misplaced nostalgia. In many ways vinyl has become the craft beer of today.

Oh, I hear you say, but the vinyl revival came about through kids wanting to appear trendy. Well, not kids exactly, hipsters in their 20s and early 30s seeking a way to differentiate their music listening. To them vinyl albums were old school, they gleefully explained, digital might be technically cleaner, but the compression technology in MP3 tends to dull the highs and lows. Vinyl sales had declined steadily following the introduction of CDs in the 1980s, to a low point of only 205,000 world wide sales in 2007. By 2014 the revival had raised that figure to 2,100,000. 2016 saw it reach 3,200,000. To get that into perspective, a format which used to represent 100% of the market now represents 3%, very much on the margins of music sales.

What is more interesting is that recent research has shown that the majority of young people who buy vinyl  admit they don’t actually play it. 50% identified themselves as “collectors”. 7% of those surveyed say they do not even own a turntable. Typical was one student in Manchester who told the researchers: ”I have vinyls in my room but it’s more for decor. I don’t actually play them. It gives me the old-school vibe. That’s what vinyl’s all about.”

Part of the appeal of vinyl for these young people comes down to old fashioned peer pressure. To use the social anthropology clichés, we allow our possessions to define us. What we display in public is used to send social signals about our identities. Making our taste in music visible has historically played an important role in such signalling for young people. Owning a vinyl collection is an important part of that signalling. You don’t need to ever play it; it’s only there to demonstrate that that you are on trend. If you can afford it, the Marantz 6300 sitting on your walnut credenza gives you even greater kudos.

Lets go back to those vinyl charts, the week I looked it was dominated by 60s and 70s groups. The most recent release was a Paul Simon compilation and the ‘newest’ artists were Blur and Oasis, both from the 90s and hardly cutting edge. It was obvious that this heritage stuff, being re-released for the hundredth time, was being targeted at nostalgic blokes trying to recapture their youth. Talking to the guy behind the counter in the record shop, he  confirmed this: “I had a customer the other day who told me he had thrown out all his records a while ago and is now in the process of buying them all back again. It was his 60th birthday and people were buying him his collection again.”

Personally I can’t wait for wax cylinders to make a big comeback, too. That recording of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford doing a rap version of “Mary Had A Little Lamb” has to be listened to again to be believed.

As I said at the beginning, I lived through the vinyl era with those lousy pressings on recycled vinyl that looked like used asphalt, second or third generation master tapes, surface noise, clicks, pops, lousy dynamic range, lousy S/N ratio. It all knocked good quality digital into a cocked hat.  Yes, let’s all go back to the wonderful world of vinyl.