“There’s something about vinyl. There’s something about that crackle and just-slightly-out-of-tune quality to it that gives it a warmth and instant charm that no other format manages to replicate.”
“As a kid, I grew up in a fairly musical family and we had a lot of vinyl. I remember my grandpa having a whole set of Pavarotti records that he would play, mostly at night, on an old oak-set record player that could’ve been stolen straight from the set of Mad Men. That sound of Luciano Pavarotti’s voice bellowing from a record player in the next room as you were falling asleep isn’t something you easily forget, and listening to it now instantly takes me back to being about 5 years old in that house.
At our own place, my parents’ tastes were a bit more modern and my dad had a few Police, R.E.M. and Depeche Mode records that we listened to all the time—as well as my mum’s Cyndi Lauper LPs and a heap of new wave stuff. It was these records that really set my attention to wanting to play what I was hearing. All of it just triggered a sense that this was something I wanted to do, every artist’s sound painted a different picture in my head and I wanted to paint my own.
When I got to high school and could afford to buy my own music, myself and a bunch of friends would take the train to Glasgow and hang around in Fopp and Avalanche for hours, checking out LPs and annoying everybody that worked there. I think the first one I bought with my own money was Ixnay on the Hombré by The Offspring, and I do not regret that one bit.
The thing about vinyl is that it still has the ability to lend a totally different lease on life even to new artists. It’s something wonderfully tactile, long-lasting, and unique in a world that, at times, seems to have otherwise gone the way of digital downloads, fleeting experiences, and uniformity. It feels like regardless of where music ends up, it provides something that can’t be offered by any other medium, it’s a critical part of music—past and present—and I don’t see that changing for the foreseeable future.”
—Ben Singer
