VINYL? YOU CAN’T BEAT IT!
Jacko might have sold the most records, but the album has a life far beyond him, says David Hepworth
WHEN Michael Jackson gathered his team to start making the album Thriller in 1981, his producer Quincy Jones made a speech: “We are here to save the record business,” he said. It was no idle boast. The music industry of the early 1980s was in the doldrums thanks to the decline of disco and the failure of new wave acts to translate into vinyl album sales.
America’s biggest LP of 1982 was the English prog-rock band Asia’s self-titled debut. It sold just two million copies. So Thriller didn’t arrive a moment too soon.
It would go on to sell 33 million copies in the United States alone and remains the biggest-selling album in history.
Like a modern blockbuster movie,thriller was engineered for success. Jackson wanted to release an album whose every song could be a single.
The final nine were ruthlessly chosen from a longlist of hundreds of compositions. Even the title, Thriller, was picked from a list of 200 potential names on the basis that it would look best at the top of the charts.
Its duet with Paul Mccartney – The Girl Is Mine – was included to ensure middle of the road commercial radio play, while Beat It was inspired by the need for a song that sounded like “a black My Sharona” so it would be played by rock radio.
Nothing was left to chance.thriller had to be a blockbuster or it would be nothing at all. At one point, trying no doubt to relieve pressure by damping down expectations, Quincy Jones suggested it might sell two million copies. Jackson was so dismayed by this lack of faith he threatened to cancel the entire album.
In the event, Thriller became the first record to go, in industry parlance, “sixdeep”. That meant more than six huge hit singles were taken from it. Each was suppackage ported by a promotional video that cost slightly more than the one before.
They put Jackson in every living room, turning music into an audio-visual entertainment format.
At the same time something was lost. By the time of Thriller the majority of music was bought on cassette rather than vinyl.
Nobody treasured a cassette. But just a year after its release, the record business was making insane profits from the new, higher-priced CDS.
Thriller may have been the album that saved the record business but in the process it robbed the album of much of its mystique. That mystique was about the format. It was about the vinyl LP.
The LP was invented in 1948 by American record companies who wanted to put an entire piece of classical music on one record. Before that, a classical symphony had to be spread across half a dozen 78s which were kept in leather wallets called “albums”, hence the term we still use today.
For the first two decades, LPS were strictly for grown-ups, jazz fans or squares. That changed with the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967. For the first time, young people bought Sgt Pepper as though it was a hit single.
That’s because they played it like a single. Each track flowed into the next. The title song was repeated near the end. It finished with the mysterious A Day In The Life. Most importantly, it came in a cover that you could spend hours staring at, reading the lyrics from and even playing with.
For the next 15 years the genius of the LP would be to make the music inside seem, if anything, more important than it was.
It came along at a time when young, longhaired people wouldn’t dream of watching TV. A record player was all the home entertainment they needed. All the furniture in their living space pointed to it.
ISHOULD know. I was one of that army who looked at their finances purely in terms of how many LPS it would buy; who would happily spend a Saturday night staring into the middle distance, accompanied by nothing more than a bottle of cider and a copy of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon; who knew what it was like to ask a girl back to your flat to listen to the new Van Morrison LP without risking being laughed at; who spent so long in record shops I was an expert in hundreds of LPS I had never heard but had nonetheless fondled.
When the CD arrived in the mid-80s, that same generation of baby boomers rushed to embrace its chilly perfection. We liked it because it was apparently unbreakable and didn’t pop or click.we revered it because it didn’t have surface noise, despite John Peel pointing out, “life has surface noise”. We ignored the fact that its sound was too bright, that prolonged listening to it made you tired in a way vinyl didn’t.
In those days lots of boomers happily sent their vinyl down to the charity shop. Or worse. If today’s 20-somethings knew exactly what riches some of their parents had taken to the council tip in the 90s they wouldn’t speak to them.
That’s because now there’s nothing the kids seem to desire more. One of my children, having moved into a flat in East London, asked if I had any “spare vinyls”. I asked her why. She said her flatmate had a record player but did not have any “vinyls” to play on it.
Kids who have grown up with all the ease of digital now yearn for something they can hold in their hands and cherish the way their parents once cherished their favourite Lps.will it all come back? I doubt it.
Technology changes the way we consume music and also the way we feel about it. Recorded music used to be hard to find, difficult to afford and easy to damage. Nowadays it’s impossible to avoid, effectively free and impossible to damage because it’s just digital information. Is it any wonder we don’t value it in the same way?
Can you turn back the clock? Well, you can get yourself a nice retro record deck.
You can buy yourself some lovely repackaged vinyl Lps.they’ll cost you a good deal more than they would have cost you back in the day.
That’s why they’re always going on about how much the vinyl market is worth today. It is because the prices went up. The vinyl market is now more like the market for fine wine than the supermarket plonk it was
‘People bought Sgt Pepper like a single’