“When I was eleven, as soon as I’d got my pocket money on a Saturday morning, a trip to Revolution Records was my only goal.”
“It smelt of paper, moth balls, and faded aftershave, some kind of incense, sweat, and joy. Nothing like home, which billowed with my father’s pipe-smoke and cat-hair.
I think there might have been an old-fashioned bell on the door. Inside were rows and rows and rows of alphabetized flip-through-able boxes, packed with all the secerets of adulthood I was yearning to open, understand, experience, things which felt tantalizingly beyond my reach and all the more desirable for it.
I was heavily influenced by the tastes of my 15 and 17 year old siblings who’d come home from boarding school in the holidays with baffling words they’d assumed into their vocabulary as normal such as “acey-modo,” articles of clothing like winkle-pickers, and lace fingerless mitts, and new LPs. New LPs.
I always longed for them to show me. Genesis, Genesis. Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon. Don McLean, American Pie. The Smiths, The World Won’t Listen. The Cure, Boys Don’t Cry. Bryan Adams, Reckless. Don Henley, Building the Perfect Beast. Each one was a new country, a mountain range to explore, songs to work out, noises to unravel and fathom, emotions to evaluate, imitate, investigate. They were the young adults talking to me from across the trenches, telling me how to do it, what to watch out for. I owe them a great debt.
Now, when I pull out some older vinyl all those original emotions come flooding back, and there’s something so awakening, so enlivening about it. There’s a commitment (isn’t there?) to pulling a record out of a sleeve and delicately laying the needle down. It’s not quite the same, scrolling through one’s MP3 database. I don’t know, there’s a touchy-feeliness to it which marries me to the whole process of making music.
I love to hold my wooden guitar in my hands and play. And it’s the same with records. I like to feel something in my hands.”
—Polly Paulusma
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