“Growing up in Melbourne, Australia, I remember around the age of 12 becoming obsessed with my dad’s vinyl collection. My dad had all of his vinyl leaning up against a wall in our front room, hundreds of records just sitting there waiting to be discovered…”
“It was kind of like that scene in Almost Famous. I remember flicking through the covers and seeing all those powerful cover art images…Let it Bleed (The Rolling Stones), Abbey Road (The Beatles), Zeppelin II and IV, Harvest (Neil Young), Aqualung (Jethro Tull), Who’s Next (The Who). We’d listen to Get Yer Ya Yas Out!, full volume over and over again.
I just loved everything about vinyl. It’s the tactile quality, the pops and crackles in the sound, that smell, the liner notes…I like the real thing, I want to listen to a vinyl and hold it in my hand, read who engineered it and where it was recorded…you can’t get that on Spotify (or streaming services).
Buying vinyl is still my obsession and the closest thing I have to a hobby. I always get a buzz going into a record store and spending hours searching through the crates of record. I love collecting records from all different places in the world. There are memories that come along with every purchase.
There are still so many great record stores all over the world whether its Greville Records on Chapel Street or Basement Discs in Melbourne, Antone’s Record Shop in Austin, Texas, or Amoeba in Los Angeles, CA.
To me a great album on vinyl is like watching a great movie, I want to put the needle on the record and listen to that album start to finish, track 1-12. When you start playing a record, it really demands your attention and again that’s something you don’t get with albums in this digital age.
Analog sounds better than digital, there’s nothing like the real thing.”
—Hamish Anderson
