Still in the Shrink

An ongoing project on my eternally unpublished WordPress site is Spinning Right Round — an unlikely attempt to blog my way through my record collection.

Named for Dead or Alive's smash You Spin Me Round (Like a Record),^[1] it was inspired by a Discogs blog post^[2] suggesting a record-collecting New Year's resolution to play every record in a collection at least once.

I've added over 330 records to my Discogs catalogue — above the 200 the site lists as the average collection size,^[3] but modest enough to give them all a whirl within a year.

And why not make a blog of it?

I decided not to review my records. Opining that Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band^[4] is quite a good album, for example, wouldn't add much to the sum of human knowledge.

Instead, I went with personal recollections and reflections — just as insignificant a contribution to human knowledge, but at least a more distinctive take.

As David Hepworth^[5] observes of the original vinyl era, a record collection was so much more than a mere catalogue of consumer items:

No matter how puny a young man's record collection it was also his life story, his diary and a treasure map showing the whereabouts of his often unspoken sensitivities. It was his heart, in fact.^[6]

Blogging about such an intimate assemblage ought to be more compelling than pontificating on the merits of the music!

I started with the soon-abandoned methodical intention of working through my collection in alphabetical order by artist. This approach saw me tearing into my teenage taste with the triptych of AC/DC albums I inherited from my adolescent self.

The project expanded when I spotted the glaring omission of the Antipodean act's 1979 waxing, Highway to Hell,^[7] from my legacy collection. I got straight onto eBay to plug that particular gap.

My records and I reunited following a loft clearance in the mid-2010s. Although I'd been content to leave them unattended in the attic for decades, I couldn't bring myself to part with them again now that they were muddling my living space.

My collection was the bounty of a youth misspent in record shops. This investment made it both precious and, since I last owned a record deck in the 1990s, useless.

It was a choice between selling my collection and resurrecting it.

I bought a Rega P2 turntable plus essential amplification in 2019, and put stylus to groove for the first time in more than two decades.

I'm of the generation (X) that marvelled at the newfangled clarity and absence of background noise offered by CDs, and who came to regard records as the poor relation.

When I lowered the tonearm on my legacy copy of Sgt Pepper, I was surprised to hear it sounded far from shabby. I kept my hard-won records in good shape, so the pops and clicks commonly associated with the format were infrequent.

Involvement in the playing process is part of what drew me back to vinyl. It's hardly musicianship, but there's more art to it than just dropping a CD into a tray or prodding a music streaming app. And the much-maligned surface noise is part of that involvement.

Aside from manufacturing errors, the condition of your collection is your responsibility. Keeping the sound crackle-free is a matter of careful handling and good vinyl hygiene.

To battle the crackle, I invested in a series of progressively more expensive record-cleaning systems. I then found further fulfilment in removing the muck of ages from secondhand albums. Though it was impossible to restore their shop-fresh lustre, it was satisfying to recover long-neglected discs from the dust.

Lacking this element of salvage, new records are comparatively unsatisfying. There's something ersatz about new pressings of old favourites with their try-hard heavyweight vinyl and quality card covers. I prefer the flimsier originals, which were both as I remembered them and sounded no worse.

Some new records, though, have no original equivalent. These include new releases and vinyl reissues of albums from the era when CDs dominated.

The new records allow me to blog about albums beyond the scope of my legacy collection, which I assembled between 1980 and 1987, when I started buying CDs.

I've racked up a subcollection of blog-worthy new releases and reissues that, given my slow blogging progress and preference for secondhand, have stayed firmly in the shrink.

Keeping them sealed preserves them in collectable mint condition, but, like my legacy collection when I didn't own a turntable, they do little more than take up shelf space.

The lesson I've learned from my latter-day collecting is that there's more enjoyment in resurrecting an old record than breaking the seal on a new one. But both are about putting redundant items to use.

By that logic, it would be best to break the Sisyphean loop by deciding that I will never finish the project and publish what I've written to date.

I will.

Right after I write about the records still in the shrink…