Aidan Smith: From the needle to the groove – a lifetime love of vinyl

After the humiliations of record-buying in his youth, Aidan Smith is intrigued by Sainsbury’s new label

The supermarket had just been informed of its impending death with the announcement that Britain’s biggest food and household goods brands would be dealing direct with shoppers in future. So what did it do?

It looked along the high street, or what was left of the traditional small shops after its long reign of terror, cheap prices, free parking and complimentary coffee.

It peered through a window at a bearded man behind the counter squinting into the middle of a circular piece of black plastic, as if searching for some cryptic message, and, completing this devotional scene, two customers, also male, solemn but happy, as they thumbed through racks of squareshaped cardboard, presumably containing more of the discs. And this is what the supermarket did just 24 hours later: it formed its own record label dedicated to vinyl.

In truth there is probably no connection between the manufacturers of everything from teabags to toilet cleaners plotting to cut supermarkets out of the equation with Sainsbury’s move into the music biz.

But if this is not the last roar of a dinosaur, then it does seem like a particularly callous act. If you’re worried about everyone hating you for killing off the corner shop and the long-standing neighbourhood butcher, then you don’t go after independent record stores.

Everyone loves them or, at the very least, admires how they’ve seen off the giants in their field to enjoy the revival of needle-to-groove music.

But is it such a cruel thing? Like the day I first set foot inside a record shop with a birthday fiver burning a hole in my pocket, to be confronted by a choice between a copy of Roxy Music’s For Your Pleasure on one hand and King Crimson’s Lizards on the other, I can’t quite decide.

Hipsters will hate that vinyl can now be bought from under the same roof as potatoes and binliners. These people have images to maintain (and trousers to roll up). But who cares what they think?

Such is the snobbery surrounding second-generation vinyl that you wonder how many of these records are ever played. If you remember how often discs were bought faulty or how easy they were to damage, you wouldn’t. I’ve re-bought albums on vinyl – having between times purchased eight-track cartridge, cassette, CD and highly expensive, remastered, every-rubbishyouttake, anniversary versions in the digital format – and have simply been too scared. Still, I bet the sound is lovely and crackly and warm.

We cannot be too sniffy about supermarkets selling vinyl. Woolworth’s was a big player in music in the 1960s and 1970s and shifted tonnes of LPS. It specialised in labels such as Pickwick and Hallmark, budget collections of Jim Reeves and the heedrum-hodrum of Caledonia, but also plenty of groovy choons, some of them notefor-note copies recorded by a heroic house-band capable of being easylistening before lunch and punk after it.

I know because one of these compilations, Christmas-themed so naturally the woman on the cover wore a Cossack-style hat with an itsy-bitsy bikini, was my very first album – the one I never admitted to owning while striving for credibility and acceptance among my juniormuso peers.

Sainsbury’s has been selling vinyl for a while but the first records bearing their Own Label imprint are compilations. They’ve been