Hi, Brian! It has been a week or so since I actually bought any vinyl. Appreciative applause. The first time I saw a modern LPs was on American movies. They seemed to be part of those rooms. When Richard Cook was alive, I used to find odd things for him and he used to find odd things for me. I thought it was incredibly beautiful.
My ears were trained monophonically and in surround at the same time. I sometimes wish that format had won the day. I deny any urge towards completism, and yet I do get the sweats when I see any gap in a run and I would exchange my grandmother for certain sought-after items. If it were otherwise, I guess some of them might be in better condition? A few show signs of too much, rather than too little love. The American navy and Polaris missiles were based there for 30 years, so there were lots of Americans around when I was growing up.
I learned to play saxophone and to understand jazz in the quite inappropriate company of sailors, though I have to say they were a very strait-laced and conservative bunch of men, who were happy to teach me jazz but horrified by any suggestion I might drink coffee, let alone beer.
We found ourselves united and divided by common language and culture. He had, almost as an afterthought, a small rack of LPs. Avant-garde composition Stockhausen! Vinko Globokar! Mauricio Kagel! The title appealed to me in a literary way. This maybe applies more to rare books than to records, but it does sort of kill the element of pursuit and chase that you can now put a title into a search engine and find out in 1.
I sort of regret that. So maybe, yes, it might stop. Everyone knows the value of everything, or as Oscar Wilde might say, the price of everything, and that diminishes the passion a bit. Do vinyls ever float up in those surroundings? I do obsessively collect spoken word. Years ago, when I met the artists Gilbert and George, they showed me a cabinet full of amazing gay porn that they had bought for a song from an old farmer in the West Country of England.
