Outblinker, The TVD First Date

“I’m 35 now and as a result I come from a generation that had a lot to do with vinyl’s initial decline.”

“For a perpetually bored and restless wean, these were the big, footery black ornaments that I more often associate with being shouted at by over-protective older relatives, who didn’t like my grubby kid-fingers picking them up in ways that were apparently unacceptable. The fact that they couldn’t be set down anywhere for even a second, couldn’t be left in a room which fluctuated by 0.5 degrees of heat and absolutely could not be used to drive my micro-machine across did nothing to bring the two of us closer.

As I saw it, I could throw a cassette at a wall, use them to build a fort manned by LEGO spacemen, or stick pencils through the holes and spin them like a football rattle and nobody gave a damn. Cassettes were approachable and fun. So when vinyl left for college, I can’t say I was particularly moved.

As I entered my teens and began to discover my own taste in music (as opposed to my parents’ ABBA, Cyndi Lauper, and Big Country hand-me-downs) they all suddenly had one thing in common, which was this miraculous, convenient, space-age pocket-mirror format that I didn’t need to drag my ass off a couch to turn over and that could easily skip all the filler in favour of nothing but hits.

CDs were ascendant. Vinyl was a distant memory. Even more so during the false dawn of MiniDiscs, brought to us Britons fleetingly by Reef and skateboarding models, a launch campaign not particularly forthcoming about the fact that the only apparent releases on that format were The Bends, Rage Against The Machine #1, and Blood Sugar Sex Magic.

By the time I was into my teens and sneaking into 18+ shows with older, wiser friends, I was reintroduced to vinyl. Only this time these weren’t the pristine, elaborate, gatefold prog-rock decorations I remembered. These things were thrown inside raw card sleeves, hand-stamped, numbered. Vinyl had apparently run away from home, hit the streets and the bottle and here it was back in my life, jaded, musty, and frequently indifferent about it’s appearance.

All of which I guess goes to make the point that, as a product of the underground and DIY scene (as I very much like to think I am), vinyl has not miraculously returned. Since I really became engaged with music in anything more than a passing capacity, it has been apparent that vinyl was omnipresent on that smaller scale. Indeed essential to their thread-bare touring economy. Long before the absolute sea-change that was e-commerce, I was forced to buy whatever merchandise was available whenever I watched something great and this meant taking my chances on some of the most bizarre 7” covers and ragged-edged LPs I have ever seen.

This growing affinity was aided in no small way by close friends like avid collector Rick Bruce (ex-Turtlehead/Age of Taurus) and the shop Europa Music in Stirling, the one-horse town much of Outblinker grew up in or close to. Against the tide, Europa had amassed an obscenely diverse (and bewilderingly, hilariously poorly catalogued) arsenal of records, the order of which was known only to rainbow-jumpered apparent poly-math and owner Ewan Duncan. In amongst this completely (and refreshingly) uncensored library was everything from early ’90s dance, to classic Motown, to limited edition Iron Maiden, to obscene nazi punk like the Meatshits, to niche jazz and so on, ad infinitum. Entire days could be spent digging through these bottomless crates of archived music and I know those hours played a huge part in the artistic development of both myself and peers like James and Lewis of The Cosmic Dead, whom I’d salute across the racks of kaleidoscopic artwork most Saturdays.

Which brings us to now: “the resurgence of vinyl.” Not only as someone who has long been engaged with the medium but, significantly, as the person most often in charge of designing the artwork for this (and previous) bands, should I not be hailing the return of the king—the large-format, visually-indulgent, ultra-tactile shaman of music’s most captivating, esoteric, and transcendent qualities?

I’m pretty sure the industry would like me to.

But fuck the industry.

You see, here’s the thing. Vinyl is not back with a bang because the public willed it so. The real vinyl enthusiasts never went away. They have persisted, stubbornly scouring car boot sales, charity stores, and the merch tables of touring underground bands (where practices like merch-swapping have long been a reliable staple, ensuring audience exposure to like-minded contemporaries) and by all accounts Pharrell Williams et al couldn’t have given a damn. Until now.

The sudden high-street ubiquity of vinyl is not, in truth, attributable to the indulgent artistic potential of gatefold sleeves nor the ephemeral charm of “analogue warmth.” Not least because the vast majority of the artists now hawking the damn things recorded their music on painfully sterile super-computers, digitally hoovering the static from any ambient microphones, the buzz from any cables, and the nuance from any vocal line. Whilst it is by no means true in every case, there is real irony in the mainstream’s embrace of vinyl. Especially since the bulk of modern mainstream music is so cleanly and precisely assembled that the elusive warmth so many shoppers now use to justify the £20-30+ price-tag is just as easily added by ProTools plug-ins (and frequently quite literally has been) as it is by the dry flakes of human skin and hair accumulating on the stylus.

Maybe, as I say, it’s being 35 and a rapid acceleration towards my seemingly inevitable role as a head-shaking curmudgeon, but are we really to believe that consumer demand drove the ongoing wave of hideously expensive “limited edition” shellac re-pressings of Kylie’s fourth/fifth/sixth album? Give me a break, world. Oh and it’s not lost on me that writing this for The Vinyl District is like compiling a montage of Donald Trump’s best speeches for Salon. So bear with me.

The record industry is a grunting, flailing beast, already mortally wounded by a high-speed broadband arrow to the chest. What we see with vinyl is yet another in a series of clumsy, desperate grasps for revenue. With the price of MP3’s inherently limited by both the ease of their piracy and an unshakable sense of denouement amongst customers who part with hard-earned wages for a whisp of electrons, it’s not hard to see how a grass-roots spurt in vinyl some years back suddenly presented a very real opportunity for the bloated but bleeding major labels to jam their foot in the door and ultimately talk their way into the 12” record party disguised as someone who actually gives a fuck. Would Katy Perry be releasing a picture disc if she could only charge £5 for it? Yeah. Sure she would.

Okay, this all may seem inconsequential and needlessly cynical. “Shut up man! Can’t we just be happy that My Bloody Valentine brought out a remastered version of Loveless on 180g?.” My retort would be, ok, sure. Some great albums are much easier to find now. But there’s another perspective frequently overlooked. You try getting a record pressed any time between November and Record Store Day.

You see, the vinyl plants that were kept afloat by that underground network and those persistent enthusiasts, they quite quickly reassigned their priorities. If Warner-Chappell want 500 different albums on 10,000x swirled double disc by March they damn well get them. The effect of backing up the entire system is not hard to imagine. Thus the logistics of DIY bands having everything in place for an 8 month lead-in are so intensely prohibitive—not least because most of these people have jobs—that coordinating any large scale vinyl release has become a mammoth task for well over half of the calendar. Indeed even the indies that still have relationships with those plants might scoff at this criticism, but I assure you, the bands that are self-releasing certainly don’t. “Back of the queue guys. We might call you again in ten years when the rush dies down and the new plants start closing again.”

Vinyl has been fetishised, sincerely in the beginning by those genuine collectors and fans, but now overwhelmingly by a wider and far more cynical mainstream industry agenda: money. And the people bearing the brunt of that trend are many of the very people who gave it CPR every two weeks for almost all of the 1990s.

So hey, absolutely enjoy throwing yourself headlong into Tool’s latest 8 panel multi-gatefold with 3D glasses or watching Lady Gaga’s blank, emotionless eyes spin 33.3 times a minute right there in front of you. But spare me the celebration. Vinyl, like Wispa chocolate bars and pre-ripped jeans, is back in a big way because there’s money in it and when the money dries up the format will once again slowly warp in the mildewy storerooms of charity shops.

The question is whether, when that day comes you’ll stick by it oh, vinyl lover—or will you be across town as Reef are hauled out of their wheelchairs to perform in-store atop hoverboards, Urban Outfitters’ windows stacked so high with MiniDiscs you can’t see the cash registers overflow, and the PA is turned up just loud enough to drown out the helicopter-like drone of John Peel once more spinning in his grave.”
—Chris Cusack