Vinyl

Ok, so this came about in the car on the way home. The radio flares up to Florence and the Machine, right in the middle eight of Dog Days and I'm struck by this weird idea about Jefferson Airplane, or maybe Starship, not sure. What I am sure of is that we watched the Cohens' A Serious Man recently and I was struck by the way Somebody to Love fills the film and utterly defines its sense of the time.  That, I thought, is going to be someones Somebody to Love, one day someone is going to equate 'run fast for your father and fast for your mother' with 'when the truth is found to be lies'.  One day it will play at a siginificant moment perhaps in a film, but more probably, and more importantly on someone's internal soundtrack.  I never have incidental, mood or elevator music on my soundtrack, it's all beefy, meaty stuff.  Maybe I'll have Florence playing at a significant moment, maybe I'll run fast for my father from the half way line, round three defenders, beat the goalie and lift the World Cup for Scotland.  No, that would likely be a film. 

Anyway, this is unimportant, a mere foil, because then I started thinking about music and the part it plays, or I think ought to play in our lives, and I'm thinking especially about vinyl.  I was born not long before John Lennon died, my Pa likes the Beatles, but he's more of a Stones kinds of guy.  One of my first music memories however is listening to the Imagine album with my dad, listening to it and feeling that it was somehow important to me that I was on this Earth at the same time as John Lennon, without any good reason at all for it.  The best thing about the experience though was the playing the record itself.  My dad, who seemed so big at the time took this round thing from its sleeve, a round thing with, as I was told then, only two grooves on it- groove: that's enough, isn't it, that very word gets you right there.  Groove.  This round thing made of plastic then went on another flat, round thing.  It began to spin.  Then my Dad gently lowered the stylus- which assured me was made from a real diamond- and a few anticipatory moments of warm fuzz, crackle and hiss gave way to the opening chords of Imagine.  As a child it was truly magic in the same way that watching my Granda bake was: the combination of inedible flour, raw eggs and butter became (seemingly through alchemy) this amazing warm, fluffy cake. 

Tapes and CDs have never captured the moment of suspense that I first encountered with that record.  They are never lovingly cradled in two different types of paper sleeve, deftly handled by the edges and sent to live in their own special box, with their own special cloth.  They fall down the back of the car seat, get dusty, mangled or chewed.  That moment, the one that my father and I shared when we first played an LP together, was etched on me, it was later joined by the time I played the first U2 single ever released (£25 from Preston record market, my Mum declared me mad) and Expecting to Fly (gatefold numbered edition), or maybe these were all part of just one continuous groove.  I'm not a vinyl nerd: if I was I'd have more than two valuable records in my collection, and as it is the rarest thing I own is sadly a CD.  But when I hear Paint it Black playing in my head just before I do something deeply impressive and energetic, the hiss and crackle that precedes Charlie Watts' thumping drums is just, if not more, important. 

While you're thinking about the soundtrack to your life take a handy hint from xkcd and make sure this one never happens to you.