Tuesday 6th October

I first saw them on Tomorrows World; an indestructible shiny plastic disc which contained millions of minute pits which could be read by a tiny laser and converted into digital information that would translate into “MUSIC”.  I had grown up with Vinyl, well actually even the heavier and brittle plastic of ‘78s.  Mum and Dad had a Gramophone which played them.  Actually my Nana had a wind-up phonograph but that was never played.  I can’t remember Mum and Dad playing their 78s very often either, maybe they did when we were being babysat at Nana and Grandad’s house.  But I learned about music in the sixties, and there were 45’s and large 12” vinyl albums.  Mum and Dad bought me a reel to reel tape deck and I would tape Top of the Pops each week, and when I could, tape my friend’s Beatles albums.

I got my first record deck in 1969, a Garrard with a separate amp and two speakers and started buying one L.P. each Saturday.  It had a central spindle and you could stack 6 discs up and they would play one after the other, then I would turn the stack over and play the other sides.  I managed to ruin my entire record collection in this way…hahaha.  I soon moved on to cassettes and then the disease started to really take hold.  There were a couple of second-hand record shops in Carnaby Street and I would buy a record for maybe £1, take it home, tape it onto a cassette; next lunchtime I would take it back and exchange it for ten shillings and buy another record.  I have literally thousands of cassettes neatly filed in the garage and I am slowly playing those which still play.

More dangerously I am re-buying records on CD that I once owned on vinyl then taped onto cassette.  Many are of course now deleted or incredibly hard to find, or were maybe originally bought on a whim and I don’t even like anymore.  The disease has a complete hold on me I am afraid, there is no cure – except maybe cutting off my hands.  Even worse it has now progressed to the terminal stage. I am now buying box-sets of my favourite artists, usually featuring five or more original albums, now all on CD and in tiny slip-cases inside the pretty box.  They are often incredibly great value, often under £10 for 5 or more discs.  The stupidity is that I almost always actually own the discs already on cassette and on CD.  So, I now have a growing pile of duplicates, which I cannot quite part with either.

I do realize that I am getting older and chances are that I may actually perish long before I have managed to play all my CDs.  But I am going to give it a damned good try.