A MINUTE REVOLUTION

It takes up too much space, but there’s something about it . . . Tymon Smith confesses to a vinyl addiction

Tymon Vinyl-Smith reflects on the nostalgic resurgence of records

IPROMISED myself I wouldn’t do it. I have enough. Money is tight. I spent so much on them last year and anyway, there’s really nowhere to put them any more.

Chances are though that next Saturday, in spite of my attempts at self-discipline, you will find me at Marks Park, hunched over a crate, flicking through the stacks, looking for that one last vinyl LP I knew would find me eventually.

It’s not the longest relationship I’ve ever had but the love affair between me and records is probably the most consistent and complicated of my life. You want to know about me, you only have to look at my record collection. Yes, I’m about to get a little highfidelity on you.

I was born in the last decade of the era when records were the main delivery mechanism for music; when record stores were places full of 12-inch circles of plastic housed in cardboard sleeves; when you could borrow them from public libraries and turntables weren’t hipster accessories but rather practical household items as ubiquitous as iPod docks and smartphones are now. The 331/3 rpm long-playing record was introduced by Columbia Records in 1948 and from the ’60s onwards it revolutionised popular music.

My parents had a mediumsized, eclectic, not particularly curated assortment of LPs in one of those units with a sliding wooden door: Sunday-morning Baroque, classical Saturdayevening South African jazz, midweek nostalgia care of Harry Belafonte and Ella Fitzgerald, and a few reggae and rock records that had followed them from houses they’d lived in before I came along.

I don’t remember a particularly sentimental attachment to these records and by the time I hit adolescence and started listening to music on my own it was all ’90s alternative rock, trip-hop, drum and bass, hip hop and deep house on CDs and cassette tapes. It wasn’t until after high school that something changed and I got the vinyl bug that’s refused to let go ever since.

I can’t remember the first record I bought for myself, perhaps something by the Stones at a fleamarket or a Bob Dylan classic? My sister and I divided most of our parents’ records between us when we left home. In those days, before the resurgence of vinyl’s popularity, buying records was restricted to going to fleamarkets or phoning strange collectors in far-flung suburbs who would open their garages and let you spend a few hours looking through their piles of records.

Slowly a community of people who had never quite let go of the romance of records began to emerge. There would be Saturday markets at vintage stores, or a visit to Cape Town and an obligatory stop at Mabu Vinyl, and my collection of fewer than 100 crept towards 1 000 then mushroomed to 3 000. This was still way short of fabled collections like that of The Roots drummer ?uestlove who has 30 000 stored in a temperaturecontrolled basement in Philadelphia or, closer to home, Gallo archivist Rob Allingham who has 25 000 records. In Sâo Paulo, Brazilian bus magnate Zero Freitas has six million records and counting.

My addiction to the plastic is not helped by my eclecticism. Some collectors have a narrow focus and only collect certain genres or sub-genres, or European pressings, or vinyls that have value as objects because of printing mistakes or other anomalies. These make them valuable in money terms, but useless as a way to listen to music — play your Quarrymen acetate once and it’s worth half of what you paid for it.

For me vinyl is a convenient and cheap means of amassing music in a physical form. Sure, I have hard drives full of MP3s but they don’t compare to holding a record in its sleeve, carefully taking it out, looking for a track and then gingerly placing the needle in the groove. That familiar, warm sound envelopes you and takes you as close as you can come to what it must have felt like to be around when the song was first unleashed on the world.

The problem with eclectic taste is that there is practically no end to the number of records you may amass. If I swivel my head and look at my records now I can see everything from Bartok to the Chemical Brothers somewhere in the lounge, either on the overpacked shelves or in one of the bags in which they recently returned from one or other DJ gig.

I’ve been a DJ at various clubs and events for more than a decade but over the last five years I’ve played almost exclusively on vinyl. This has had an effect on the shape of the record collection and the strength of my arms. It has also coincided with the format’s return to popularity. In the early days before the arrival of reissues in Musica, there was a limit to what you could expect to find on vinyl in South Africa, especially if you were born in the ’80s and were just that bit too young to have started your collection back in the days when they were everywhere. You were far more likely to find Neil Diamond and John Denver records in charity stores than a copy of Tago Mago by Krautrock pioneers Can, or Marquee Moon by Television.

There was the internet, but the euro, dollar and pound prices were beyond the means of a 20something student, although I admit that there were nights when I’d go online and pretend I had the budget to put anything on Discogs or Souljazz Records in my virtual basket.

It wasn’t until I got a full-time job and a credit card that I could actually click on the “proceed to checkout” button and have the experience of coming home to find a cardboard box stamped with the lighting-bolt logo of New York’s DFA Records on my doorstep. I’ve bought records from shops I’ve never walked into in London, New York, France, Denmark, Berlin. Thankfully the recent plunge in the rand has curbed my enthusiasm for latenight online binge shopping.

The increase in popularity of vinyl has broadened rather than narrowed the horizon of the collection — yes, I have all three curated Fela Kuti box sets, but there’s always space for more of just about everything. Afrobeat, Nigerian psych rock, northern soul, ’90s alt rock reissues, early 2000s indie, punk-funk, another roots reggae compilation, a King Tubby dub, the final space jazz recording to end all space jazz recordings — they are all welcome.

In one night’s listening session in Joburg I can enjoy a sonic trip that takes me from the Russian Steppes to Addis Ababa, Peru, Colombia, the Caribbean. On emotional late nights I can remember idyllic moments from childhood, teenage angst, unrequited love, one night stands, the death of friends, the birth of children, high points and low. All contained in these cumbersome, heavy, hard-to-find-space-for grooved circles made from the same material as cheap furniture.

Today record shops are popping up all over the place. With virtually everything once again available on record, and my unshakeable enthusiasm for so many types of music, not to mention the purchases I make because I think they’ll be good for DJ gigs, the owners of these shops smile broadly when they see me coming. It’s almost impossible for me to walk in and leave empty handed.

The thing is, though, that when it comes to records I have almost no buyer’s remorse. I’ve listened at least once to all of the now 5 000-plus discs threatening to one day consume every available