W hy my love of music has become a little bit warped

ANYONE of a certain age will remember the excitement and anticipation when they first slid the album out of its sleeve and gently, carefully and precisely put it on the turntable.

Then there was the centre-fold artwork and the lyric sheets.

Buying an LP was a whole cultural experience, a ritual that meant as much to us children of rock ‘n’ roll as the whole Mass thing had been to our parents. Sort of sacred. CDs – practical, neat, and efficient – replaced it overnight, of course, and only nostalgists and Luddites made a fuss.

Then that strange thing happened and what began as a sort of neurotic hobby for faddists and old hippies became mainstream. Vinyl was back. Smitten, I put my old Pioneer rack system back together and dug out those precious LPs I never had the heart to put away. Like ‘Ziggy Stardust’, ‘Rubber Soul’, ‘Harvest’, ‘Abbey Road’, ‘Hunky Dory’, ‘Blood on the Tracks’…

I was astonished about how authentic they sounded. The real deal. I was 17 again.

So I foraged in the attic where the rest of my back catalogue was catacombed, blew the dust of ages off Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’ and, with all the pious concentration of a priest at Offertory, gently laid that stylus down.

Then disaster. The album had warped. All the LPs were wobbly, in fact, and each one sounded more sinister and distorted than the others. Someone who knows everything (that could be any one of my children) was able to tell me with dazzling hindsight that the extremes of temperature in an attic does this. So that was that. But I am still gratified to see that others have persevered, as evidenced from the healthy profits recorded this week by Golden Discs, a retailer that is itself a long player. It put its robust profits down to the revival of vinyl sales. Me? Spotify and chunky headphones these days, I’m afraid. Maximum volume too… that’s one tradition of the 1970s I will never give up on. better and cheerier for it.

But not everyone. There’s always one. Or two.

They ranged across the entire moanometer from the ‘it looks like rain’ types to those who professed, with apocalyptic gravity, that ‘we could do with a drop’.

Then there were those who whined about not being able to sleep at night because of the percolating mercury. Of course, the tossing and turning might just as easily have been down to that feed of pints or the 12-tog duvet.

My favourite, though, was the wet blanket who pronounced in my local shop the other day that, ‘ah, the evenings are beginning to draw in’.

She seemed chuffed that she could spread a little misery where there was none available.

Just proves that for some people it’s always overcast, no matter how hard the summer is trying.