I’ve been carting around boxes of vinyl records from flat to flat and house to house since I was a kid. Lots of my records were bought from the plentiful record stores around the East End of London where I grew up and therefore carried half way around the world when we emigrated to New Zealand in 1986.
Recently I found myself thinking that it might be time to finally flick these things on – they take up space on shelves and the turntable never gets used. I’ve become used to lying on the couch lazily choosing music from my entire collection using an iPhone as a remote control. Yup, I thought – time to de-clutter a bit. But me being me, I couldn’t just take them off to a record store or thrift shop – I had to give them one last listen first.
Big mistake. They actually sounded quite good and I found all those memories flooding back – flipping through record bins in High Street record shops, or queuing up outside before they opened to get a highly prized new release. Stuff I haven’t done for a long time.