Recording Records

When I was a teenager and first beginning my love affair with music, all I would generally want for Christmas and birthdays was more albums. My mother would roll her eyes at the bands I would reel off and ask two questions:

"What kind of a name is the Psychedelic Furs?"

and

"How many CDs do you need, anyways?"

The answer to the first is that it's a great name. As for the other, I'm not too sure. It occurred to me again a few weeks ago when a friend glanced round my living room, noted the racks of CDs and said "bit of a collector, then?" Now, I never thought myself as such, despite the fact all my albums are ordered first in genre, then in alphabetical and chronological order.

I don't own that many DVDs and my games collection tends to change as I swap older ones for new challenges. My music, however, is constant. The only time I gave away an album (partly in exchange for 'Metal Gear Solid' on Playstation), it troubled me so much I had to buy the album again a few months later (Human League's Greatest Hits, if you want to know).

For the most part, I can tell you where I bought most of them. My copy of Solitude Standing by Suzanne Vega was bought at the branch of MVC (remember them? I still have my loyalty card somewhere) in Bedford while the House of Love's Babe Rainbow was picked up at Amoeba Records in Los Angeles.

Cliched at it sounds to semi-quite from 'High Fidelity', there was a time I could probably place my records in the order I bought them. If I tried to do that now, it would start with Divine Madness (a 14th birthday present, I recall) and end with Listen On: The Best of the Railway Children.

I'm beginning to believe this kind of behaviour is on the wane, as we fully embrace the digital age and we download our music. Not too long ago, we had some kind of event celebrating independent record stores, and we should, but recognise that things are changing and examine how it can help the musician in terms of getting tunes direct to the listener without the costs of packaging and distribution.

That said, I'll miss moments like I had at this record store in Aldershot many years ago, the day before I left town. Purchasing a dusty vinyl copy of The The's Soul Mining, some 60s Merseybeat type record was playing. I enquired to the owner, who informed me the band were called the Gaylords.

After much guffawing, he told me "yeah, and the funny thing was..." before he noted his wife had pulled up in her car and he left without finishing the sentence, leaving me wondering for all eternity.