“Having grown up in the Seventies and Eighties, vinyl dominated all my formative discovery years of music.”
“The first record I bought with my own pocket money was at a school car boot sale when I was about 8. It was The Eternal Fire of Jimi Hendrix. I don’t believe I knew exactly who Hendrix was at the time, and while I have vivid memories of purchasing it, I have no memories of ever listening to that record. I perhaps was only trying to impress my brother.
See back then, vinyl was an absolute right of passage. You were judged by what you had and one would strike up endless unnecessary conversations just to include what records you had in your collection. Or even more telling, that you knew someone who had a certain record. “Well my brother has the “Forest” 12” by The Cure…try and top that mate!” Perhaps that first purchase was my way of throwing down the gauntlet and letting him know that I too was going to have some vinyl, even some vinyl by artists he didn’t have….quite yet.
I was very fortunate to have this particular brother. He was six years older and absolutely music potty. He still is. The Beatles, Bowie, Alice Cooper, Pink Floyd, T-Rex, The Small Faces, The Kinks, Ramones, The Cure, The Sex Pistols, The Stranglers, and The Clash (to name just a few) were on constant rotation in my first 12 years. I remember how we would sit on the carpet listen to vinyl poring over the artwork and sleeves.
Some of the designs were iconic masterpieces and they meant everything to me. The sleeve design for Alice Cooper’s School’s Out, which actually folded like a school desk, where you could look inside the desk… was so impressionable. It was like entering another world. I vividly remember my brother holding up the Stones’ Sticky Fingers in Sam Goody and showing it to me. We were both speechless, just looking at the real zipper through the plastic wrap.
The packaging and all the liner notes were absolutely critical to the experience of vinyl and Pink Floyd over delivered with posters and postcards when they released Wish You Were Here. The experience of carefully placing a sharp knife in the corner of the sleeve opening to break the plastic wrap, and then carefully pulling away the plastic to reveal the sleeve in all its smelly glory.
Another milestone for me as a young child was being trusted with the needle, and the absolutely terrifying idea that you would SCRATCH one of your brother’s records. I remember my hands trembling like a full-blown alcoholic trying to place the needle with as little noise as possible. Then there were the potential accusations of scratches… and the ongoing forensics to try to prove that it was you who had in fact committed the heinous crime.
Then dawned the era of punk. I have fond memories one hot summer night in the late ’70s when all my family were wildly jumping up and down (pogoing) in the living room to The Stranglers. Of course the record started to skip wildly all over the place jumping between verse and chorus of “London Lady.” I can still see my brother’s face!
For me, vinyl is also inextricably linked with the creation of the mix tape. This was an absolute craft and required considerable needle placement skill to catch a particular track getting all the timing, recording levels, and emotional narrative in place. A really good mix tape also didn’t waste any tape at the end. This required a lot of calculation and trial and error.
My brother and I would happily spend an entire weekend making a masterpiece mix tape for each other from the vinyl we had recently collected since we had last seen each other. By now we lived in separate countries so sending these tapes to each other was very special indeed. Nothing has replaced such a special way to communicate. In many ways the perfect mix tape was a “concept album,” and if one could earn a degree for mastering such a thing, my brother would have several PhDs.
A great one had a musical narrative and it was important to listen to the songs in the order you had painstakingly designed. The mix tape was also a means to introduce someone to just one song from an album you were cherishing. It was a way of expressing what you had collected without giving it all away. They would then have to ask for the rest, showing their hand that they really liked it.
In the mid 1980s I spent a ridiculous amount of time searching for certain vinyl. One particular record was The Damned “Friday the 13th” EP. It was almost mythical to me. I would make train trips into NYC just to spend a day searching for this record. I knew it existed and I would ask at every record shop in the village if they had seen one.
Finally after about a year I found one in Venus Records on St. Marks (long gone now). I must have stopped in there thirty times before they finally had it. It really felt like I had found the Holy Grail. I had “owned” the tracks on a tape for years, but that just wasn’t good enough. I had to have the object. I had to have the 12”.
Vinyl was precious and could be incredibly rare. At about this same time I was also getting into NY Hardcore which was a very DYI scene of only several hundred people on the lower east side. The gigs were all advertised by Xerox handouts and many of the bands did very limited runs of 7”s, hand making all the packaging themselves. This is when I first discovered all the hand scratched messaging that band members would themselves write around the center label. Unlike the mass-produced “matrix messages” that were printed—”wish you werked here?” (B Side of Dark Side). These hardcore short runs were individually scratched in, one at a time. Craft.
These days I confess that my original record collection of ’70s and ’80s Vinyl is sadly stored in boxes in my basement. I do however own a 1936 Wurlitzer Juke Box which sits pride of place in my living room in Brooklyn. It’s a beautiful art deco piece of furniture that stands about 5’ tall. It’s all wood, with a huge round grill speaker and a glass window which displays the area where the 78s play.
The front façade is eerily similar in proportion and design to the first generation iPod, only twenty times bigger. It’s about as close as you can get to a time machine, because when that needle drops on an old Nat King Cole record it immediately transports you back in time. It’s really loud and has this remarkable warm hum about it that is otherworldly. When we have friends over it’s the first thing we show them. People are usually transfixed, shivers up the spine vibes… as their nickel sets the machine in motion to deliver the vintage vinyl.”
—Matthew Bannister
The Beautiful Fear’s debut album One is in stores now and new single “Never Yesterday” arrives on shelves 9th September 2016 via Addictaclique Records.
