An introduction - my life of record collecting

My name is Gavin Wilson. I am no stranger to the world of blogging, and as such have been running the world's first and longest running guitar blog. As you might guess from that, I am a guitarist and a musician recording under the name of Spurious Transients. Earlier this year I signed a recording contract with nanoBOX records and I am currently engaged in recording my first album. It's always been my ambition to release my own record. Whilst a CD release would be nice, I would really like to have my work released on vinyl.

There's just something about vinyl. As a medium for music it has to be the ultimate. Downloads have no soul - it's like you're just downloading music as software rather than an artefact in its own right. CDs are not a lot better. I don't think the CD ever succeeded as a replacement for the vinyl record, as the propanganda tried to tell us in the 1980s. If anything the CD was a replacement for the audio cassette, complete with plastic boxes, titchy artwork, and even recordability.

Vinyl offered the real musical experience. The covers were works of art in themselves. You had inner sleeves with lyrics and/or other information. Then there was the whole craze for coloured vinyl records, picture discs, shaped discs. Sure, it was all marketing, but it made the vinyl record so much more collectable, so much more tactile as an object, and - damn it - so much more FUN!

I remember first walking into record shops in the late 1970s, soon after the punk explosion, just when mainstream vinyl started getting really interesting. There were records all over the walls, 7" singles and 12" LPs, colour vinyls, picture discs, and racks full of all sorts of records. It was incredible just to browse through them all and drink it all in. I remember when I first discovered the 12" single. The concept of it just blew my mind... it's a single but on a 12" record! I thought the idea was madness to start with, but I soon discovered the potential behind the format. I just loved hanging out in record shops back in those days, they were the coolest places. Come the CD age, all the atmosphere had gone.

I've been collecting records since the later 1970s. In the 1980s I gave in to the lure of the CD - I'd moved away from the family home and it was quite frankly easier to build up a new stereo system with a CD player - it was more for convenience than anything else to start with (which ties in neatly with my cassette analogy). I now have a collection of hundreds of CDs - I've not counted them to be honest, I think there must be way over 1,000 - but more recently I've gone back to buying vinyl records again. I think that came about, ironically, because of the dreaded iPod! I'd been importing all my CDs into iTunes to play on the iPod, and then I turned my attention to vinyl records that I had never re-bought on CD and I started converting those over to MP3s via a turntable with a USB connection. Then I actually started buying a few limited edition vinyl records, playing them once and converting them to MP3s, perhaps burning off a CD copy as well.

But now I'm finding I like to buy most of my new music on vinyl - and I like to listen back to it on vinyl as well rather than digitising it first as I had been doing for the iPod. To my ears I just prefer the sound. Of course, my re-kindled interest has been bolstered by limited edition vinyl-only releases such as those of the excellent Fruits De Mer label.

I think part of the reason I was swayed by CDs in the late 1980s was that in the 1970s and 80s vinyl records were churned out in their thousands, but quality control was very poor. I seemed to be forever taking records back to the shops because they were warped, or they skipped, jumped, or were scratched. Today, vinyl manufacturers seem to have gotten their act together. The best quality virgn vinyl is no longer only reserved for classical music only with "popular" music being pressed on inferior recycled vinyl. We now get decent quality vinyl, better pressings, proper quality control - all no doubt because vinyl is now more "niche" with some titles being pressed in very limited editions from as low as 100 copies up to say 2,000 copies.

So, if you've read through all this rambling, I thank you for your perserverence and patience. On this blog I want to share with you some of my vinyl purchases. I shall review records, and share with you recommendations of cool records that are out there. I'm also going to be dipping into my record collection and looking at some long forgotten gems and a few classics too.

I expect I'll even include the occasional CD too, as much as I'd like to focus on vinyl 100%.

Please stay tuned for more...