Cornwall Music

On the record: Have we outlived the record industry

This is a wonderful piece of writing and really struck a chord with me. I still love buying albums and seeking out records shops and CD Fairs. Not easy in Cornwall but Mike really brings back the memory on running Downstairs on Christmas day to see if any of your presents were LPs. Uriah Heep Live from Aunty Betty - fab! Phil

Records Albums LPs

By Michael Sagar Fenton

Related links - Cornwall Record Shops - Record CD Fairs Cornwall - The Play List

Hey, I wonder what’ll be the Christmas number one. Could it be Maria Carey? Or even the famously deceased Elvis Presley? Or someone else.

Its not just age that doesn’t make me not care so passionately. No-one else does either. I never thought I’d would outlive the record business but it seems I already have.

Its Christmas time so lets not wallow for a minute in nostalgia. There’s no downloading. There’s no MTV. There isn’t even radio One. You might see the young lions of pop music magazines, but to see them you’d have to be glued to the BBC light programme for the whole of the short time they played records, or else you’d have to catch the here-and-gone sounds of radio Luxembourg on your tiny tinny transistor radio at night.

The BBC now celebrates oldies of the 1960s as if it invented them, but at the time it didn’t approve of records, although it did allow it’s resident show bands to play a version of the charts hits of the hour, with hilarious if frustrating results. No-one who heard Bernard Herman and the Northern Dance. Orchestra’s version of strawberry fields forever will ever forget it. So the only way to be sure of getting regular fix of the song you craved was to step on down on your local record shop with your six shillings and eight pence (OK 33p, but still serious money) and buy one.

The whole experience was a thrill. The shop keeper often had little love for pop music, so your request was greeting with a perceptible sneer, but then at last it was yours, seven inches of another world, just a few grooves away from an out-of-body experience. Your friends would come over as soon as they heard of your acquisition and you’d play it and play it, turn it over and but up with B-side for a while, and then play it again until someone older threatened you with physical violence.

It wasn’t just a collection of sounds, it was a thing. You could wrap it up and give it to someone. Its sides were black and lustrous, and it had an individual coloured label bearing the company logo There was no greater object of desire. Except perhaps the LP. What a package! Twelve glorious inches full of art work, lyric sheets you could actually read, inserts, photos, and track after track which became so familiar that even the order of songs remained indelible. Every Christmas, with a bit of luck one of the parcels in your pile would be thin., square, flexible, and full of promise.

Music as a thing. The LP was the high watermark After that came the cassette, also a thing in a nasty brittle Perspex package. And then the CD, for which they still haven’t designed a case that doesn’t fall apart after a few plays. And then it’s now, and its now when music comes from the air, a random electronic squirt into something romantic as a packet of sticking plasters. But enough nostalgia. Music as a thing was a brief mode. Not so long ago the only pop charts were for sales of sheet music. Now they are for downloads.

Music isn’t really a thing but a moment, a fluid medium, and as long as you can capture and repeat in the medium doesn’t really matter. Its only people of a certain age-hi-who still miss the unwrapping, the crisp new sleeve, that first anticipatory hiss and rumble as the needle it the groove…

N.B. “True Colours” by Michael Sagar-Fenton, winner of the Holyer An Gof Cornish Novel of the Year award, is on sale at bookshops at £6.99.
mikesagarfenton@btinternet.com Read more about Michael Sagar Fenton

Cornwall Writers

Cornwall Photography

Cornwall Music