Thirty-Three and a Third Revolutions per Minute

In 1974, he bought his first LP.

His big sister gave him two pound notes in a card for his birthday. “Buy your own present,” she said. “I haven’t a clue.”  The chosen record was “Desolation Boulevard” by The Sweet and he bought it because it had “Ballroom Blitz” on it. He was 15.

Until then it was always singles, whatever was in the charts. He had amassed a collection of six 7” singles, his most precious possessions, stored in a cardboard box under his bed. Buying an album was a grown up thing to do.

The record shop was crowded with long thin men in their twenties, with long hair, loon jeans, and tight t shirts and denim jackets. Harry’s hair was regulation school length, reaching just to his ears, and flopping over his eyes in a thick fringe. He had his two pounds crumpled tight in his fist and his fist in the deepest part of his trouser pocket. When he found the LP among the racks and handed it to the man behind the counter, along with his money, smoothed out again, he hoped the man wouldn’t laugh. Buying it in Woolworths now seemed like a better idea.

He left the shop immediately and walked home with the LP in its plastic bag under his arm, feeling like a rite of passage had just occurred, akin to losing his virginity, although that was a long way off.

This was the start of a relationship that would outlast the duration of many sexual ones that would run parallel with it.

Harry loved music and he wanted to own what he loved. Each purchase, each album was a portal, a physical connection to the artist in his studio, to the centre of the creative process. When he had the record in his hands, on his turntable, it was tangible. He bought it, loved it, scratched it, cleaned it, spilled beer over it, loaned it out, got it back, never got it back and never forgave the one who took it, always considering it as a piece missing, a gap among the hundreds that lined the room or the cupboard at the top of the stairs, that wall of fine strips facing out, unmistakably vinyl.

He never wanted what was popular; he wanted what was good, music that would last, the kind that was followed with love that generated passion. Over three decades he accumulated. His collection moved with him, from his parent’s home to university, to the first flat and the second.  When he moved towns the boxes were stored with a friend first to avoid the trauma of the moving van. When he married, the collection was transported to the home and the space he had carved out for it. He hoarded, categorised, alphabetised.

Technology changed and as vinyl became rare for a while he switched to CD for new music. It wasn’t the same.

There is a definitive sound to a vinyl recording, warm, real; that crackle as the needle descends to the edge of the black, as it connects with the groove and the sound spills out of the speakers. To listen to an album, to collect and keep is to commit to an artist, to love a band. It is more than listening, it is taking time to absorb, to follow through on the concept and go back to that, over and over again.

People talk about the ritual of playing records. But the mannerisms of the record collector are not about ritual but respect, for the record and the recording. To slip that disc, in its inner sleeve, from its cover and hold it naturally between thumb and fingers, so the sheen on the tracks is not smudged, is a practise that is learned from the first time your brother or sister shouted at you for messing up their records.

“Don’t hold it like that!”

Imagine lying on your bed, bare feet against the wall, LP revolving, volume rising, holding the 12 x12 cover to your face. For the duration of one side you are absorbed, by the studio, the year, the musicians, who wrote it, who sung it, produced by, engineered by, who did the hand claps (the Beatles), what message was magically scratched in the final inner groove,  a clue, an insider’s joke (Porky Prime Cuts).  The art, the lyrics on the inner sleeve - this isn’t just music, it is an education. Vinyl, card, paper, pored over, examined and squeezed of every detail that is stored in your head, under ‘to be kept and brought out at the opportune moment’.

And the LP is a performance in two acts. At the close of side one, you  must rise from your seat or your floor or your back, to turn it over, carefully raising the arm and inverting the precious disc, trying to slot it on the snub of metal at the first attempt and replace the needle before settling back to continue.  It’s possible to get stuck half way, of course. The ‘favourite side’ is never flipped and year’s later side two is a revelation, or a disappointment.  

Play a CD, slide it in and press play, and it becomes background noise over 20 tracks. The brain switches off, in the way a scent becomes invisible to us with time, and we realise that we stopped listening ages ago, and ask “Is that still on?”

Harry always listened, always heard.

He passed away before he could see the low tech record players in record shop windows, the reproductions of old recordings filling racks once again. Vinyl sold in Tesco.

Before he could say ‘I told you so’.

When he died people asked, not how, but why he had spent a lifetime carrying his collection with him, now that the entire contents of the dusty shelved room could have been downloaded onto one mp3 player, one iPod, carried around in a small pocket of a man’s jacket?

They thought of convenience.  They missed the point.