Bring back the turntable

For me, the day the music died wasn’t when Buddy Holly went down in a plane crash. It was when I invested in a digital sound system for home use.

I have happy memories of listening to records in Brussels as a child. We would play gatefold Beatles LPS, Peter, Paul and Mary, and Alan Freeman’s History of Pop, and sit as if in the Wigmore Hall, silent and rapt, apart from inter-sibling disputes as to whose turn it was to flip the record over.

The Sony Walkman came along in the late 1970s, but it wasn’t until the launch of the ipod that music, and listening to it, became a private passion – and the rot set in.

Since then the buffet of options and permutations – Spotify, Deezer, homestreaming systems, Bose, Bang & Olufsen – is so endless that it militates against listening to music at all.

We used to have a Technics stacked set that could play LPS, CDS, cassettes and the radio. I rashly got rid of it, and persuaded my husband that we needed a Brennan (bought purely on the photograph of Martin Brennan and his claims in the back of Private Eye.)

I believed his soulful eyes and his promise that his machine would revolutionise and simplify my life. Instead, it has brought my listening pleasure to a premature end.

A Brennan is a black box into which you feed your CDS, one by one and by hand. It loads them, so you don’t have thousands of plastic cases cluttering up your house. If you want to play one, you search for the CD – or artist or song – alphabetically on a remote, or you shove it in and press play.

In theory. In practice, I have only ever succeeded in getting the Brennan to work on shuffle, as searching on the remote is a bore; so a heartbreaking passage of Brahms will be succeeded by a disco hit from Lady Gaga.

This is so discordant and stressful that we never play music in London, especially since I have managed to lose the tiny remote control.

It’s all got so infernally complicated, and technical – why give us Teslas when all we want is Land Rover Defenders?

There are encouraging signs that the turntable has come full circle. Just as sales of books are rising and ebooks are falling, vinyl is back in vogue. As a recent report gasped, ‘Nearly two-thirds of 18-24s have bought a real book in the past year.’

Our London house may be quiet, too quiet, until I find the remote (and get a puppy) but at least I can feel smug that, on Exmoor, we never got rid of our turntable or dusty collection of ancient LPS.

As a special treat for visiting children, who have had no experience of what marketers call ‘physical media’ (ie books, records), I will remove an LP from a sleeve, lift the needle, and play them Flanders and Swann or Simon & Garfunkel. It never fails to amaze and delight.

So hey, hey, you, you – get offa your icloud, and join the old-fashioned fun.