Hello vinyl

How it feels to get my record collection back

I ain’t mad at cha!

We were only moving to New York for a year. Or maybe two at the most. So up into the attic went all the old vinyl. Well, not all of it. There was the inevitable drunken purge parties, where I’d play a record then give it away. Or some, I would just give away without even playing. Also, here’s the thing - half the records belonged to Soozy, my previous. But she wasn’t interested in lugging around 10 times her body weight in vinyl every time she moved house. And she had a point. Also, there was now my current wife (yes, that happened) and her collection of dodgy classical records and too many childhood favourites for my liking.

So this displaced, disturbed, mongrel, semi-adopted, half assed record collection sat in my mother-in-law’s friend’s attic in Oxford from 2007 — late 2013.

Anyway, here we are 6 whole years later, we made it back to Britain from Brooklyn. And a few months after that, I discovered a really simple way to connect my old belt drive Sound Lab deck to the JBL Monster speakers attached to my mac. A fairly inexpensive pre-amp and a couple of cables got the old machinery back up and running. Amazing.

So now I have Astrid Guilberto, Van Morrison, half of Mo’ Wax’s total discography, a bunch of mid-90's vocal house and of course the inimitable 2Pac’s I ain’t mad at cha.

And it’s true. Somehow sliding out these big smooth slabs of plastic and setting them down on a spinning plate seems to soothe the soul like no other listening experience in the studio. And this is coming from a regular anti-nostalgic file squashing, playlist making, Spotify streaming, bluetooth Jambox amplifying, iTunes eschewing modernist. Maybe it’s the sound quality, maybe it’s the reverence and the fact I have to stand up to put on a song, maybe I just got old. Who knows? Who cares?

Just keep playing that funky music white boy!