Vinyl Junkie – John Barraclough
I’m pleased to see vinyl back in fashion again even though it never went out of fashion with me. Like most music lovers of my generation I still have treasured and often quite battered records from the 1960’s and 70’s that hold their attraction despite, and perhaps, partly because of the crackles and pops that are as familiar and as nostalgic as the music itself. CDs were originally marketed as being indestructible but I can’t imagine a compact disc surviving the neglect and abuse that records were commonly subjected to and still be playable. The resilience of vinyl must be part of their appeal, but for me they are the only format worth considering for serious listening. I don’t fully understand the technicalities of sound frequencies, but the human ear receives sound in analogue, which must be why records sounds so realistic – as well as the instruments you can hear the acoustics of the room on good vinyl recordings. Maybe there’s process of symbiosis taking place over a lifetime of listening to records that eventually become part of your identity. I suspect my generation felt attached their records in the way people are attached to their mobiles and iPads today, but music in virtual form stored on a device surely can’t endure in people’s affections, or am I missing something?
The vinyl revival has rekindled my music buying. I succumbed to CDs and the odd download like most people, but it was relatively easy to walk past Les Aldrich Music in Muswell Hill until recently when they started stocking vinyl again and now I’m sucked in to browse for long-lost recordings or to replace good music that the CD version does not do justice to. I must have started buying records at Les Aldrich in the early 1970’s when there were plywood listening booths down the left hand side of the shop. I remember Mr. Aldrich taking the same care when handling the latest Tamla Motown singles (which I bought a lot of) as he did with an expensive acoustic guitar (which I couldn’t afford!) I still have my copy of Van Morrison’s Moondance that, even though I haven’t treated it as carefully as Mr. Aldrich would have, it still sounds great forty years on.
I’ve recently bought David Byrne and St Vincent’s Love This Giant and a re-issue of Marvin Gaye’s soundtrack for Trouble Man. They both sound fantastic on vinyl. Trouble Man is a ‘big’ sounding album in every respect, beautifully produced to bring out the dynamics of the bass, drums, keyboards and sax (all played by Marvin apparently) which are not properly captured on CD. The David Byrne/St Vincent album sounds tight and punchy with good sound staging. I also got James Blake’s Overgrown, a small scale set of experimental tracks that doesn’t benefit from the dynamics of a vinyl recording and I think a CD or download would adequately do justice to the limited range of the music.
My favourite vinyl records tend to be jazz combos from the late 1950’s – Saxophone Colossus by Sony Rollins is a fine example, which I noticed in Les Aldrich last week. The sound of the musicians playing off each other on a great quality recording where you can hear every detail of the performance is thrilling. The other genre I particularly like on vinyl is 1970′s soul-funk music – Marvin I’ve already mentioned, but also albums by Curtis Mayfield, War and Bobby Womack are good examples. The sound is made for the format, maybe because they were recorded on 8 tracks with brilliant musicians playing live studio sets just like the jazz recordings, and not relying on remixing to iron out mistakes – these guys were so good they usually had it in one straight take anyway.
It’s a pity that there doesn’t appear to be many new releases of orchestral music so I have to rely on picking up second hand records and on my forty year old collection. It would be wonderful to hear new recordings on vinyl of something majestic and large scale like a Mahler symphony or the Brandenburg Concertos.
About John Barraclough
