I’m hoping old vinyl collection will be music to someone’s ears

THERE will be music lovers who find what I’m about to do sacrilegious but, having decluttered my stock of clothes, books and photographs, it was time to tackle the vinyl.

So, I’ve put aside 100 LPs that I don’t want and am meeting a second-hand collector who’s interested in taking the lot.

They won’t be going for a song – but money’s not the object of this new stage in my campaign to create less space for memories and more for living.

It’s with some sadness that I’ll be saying goodbye to a large part of my musical heritage – modern classics like the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s (mono version) and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon; disco belters from the likes of Sly and the Family Stone; ska stompers from Madness and the Beat; psychedelic weirdness from Faust and Can; downright weirdness from Dr John and Captain Beefheart; and spinetingling poetry from Joni Mitchell… to name but a few.

But the simple fact is, I no longer play these collections, not in vinyl form at any rate, and haven’t done so for 20, 30 years or more while they’ve been boxed up in the attic.

And it got me to thinking: what’s the point? If I’m not listening to them, why not give someone the opportunity?

The feeling was underlined when, in sorting through my collection, I fished out Suzanne Vega’s Solitude Standing and gave it a spin.

It confirmed that I absolutely love Luka – but that’s the only track I’d keep the album for and, if I was desperate to hear it one day, I could go on Spotify.

See – down with the kids, that’s me.

There’s a growing thirst for music on vinyl, with UK sales up for the 12th year running and accounting for one in eight physical LPs sold in 2019.

But CDs are so much more userfriendly (without any loss of sound quality, to my untrained ear) and I already have CD versions of many of the vinyl discs I’m hoping to offload, although I’ve recently discovered a slight complication: I’m thinking of buying a new car and have noticed that anything made in the last few years doesn’t have a CD player. It’s

The simple fact is, I no longer play these collections, not in vinyl form at any rate, and haven’t done so for 20, 30 years

all streamed from mobile phones now or from plug-in flash drives, so I might have to invest in a disk drive just to copy py CDs on to my laptop, aptop, then copy those files on to a memory stick.

How things have c changed since the d days when I would s set my transistor r radio next to an en enormous reel-toree reel tape recorder and recor record Pick Of The Pops from “Fl “Fluff” Freeman on a Sunday even evening while the oldies watched Songs Of Praise in the other room.