Caught in a trap: the male obsession with music

In my last post I mused about the (almost exclusively) male obsession with music, and how those of us of a certain age and disposition spent their formative years preoccupied with the artwork that enveloped album covers back in the day when vinyl was the actual predominant format, as opposed to its more recent revivalist hipster accessory.

Earlier this year, when I interviewed Mark Blake about his excellent Us & Them book about the Hipgnosis design studio, we concluded that another sub-branch of this obsession was the habit of Biro doodling on school bags (and the undersides of many a school desk lid…) the artistically designed logos of bands like Genesis or AC/DC. To the adolescent us, it was A Thing. 

It’s why our middle aged contemporaries still queue outside record shops at five in the morning on Record Store Day to buy the “limited edition” coloured reissue of an album we already own, probably on several formats. Simply because we have to have it.

One of the greatest portrayals of this umbilical relationship with buying, owning and curating music is High Fidelity, Nick Hornby’s readily identifiable 1995 novel about the emotionally stunted 35-year-old owner of an Islington record shop, who processes the trauma of yet another break-up through the weed-depth compilation of a mix tape. 

Hornby’s chief protagonist, Rob Fleming, engages in a seemingly never-ending series of pedantic arguments with his employees, Dick and Barry, on topics such as whether to store albums alphabetically, generically or chronologically.. “The thing that interested me about people like the characters in the book,” Hornby has explained, “is that what they listen to all the time is incredibly emotive and yet they’re very anal about stuff.”

In Stephen Frears’ masterful screen adaptation of the book, Rob is transported to Chicago (and renamed Rob Gordon) with John Cusack in the lead role. In one of many fourth wall-breaking narratives, he establishes the premise of why he owns the record shop, and who it sells to: “I own this store called Championship Vinyl. It’s located in a neighbourhood that attracts the bare minimum of window shoppers. I get by because of the people who make a special effort to shop here - mostly young men - who spend all their time looking for deleted Smiths singles and original, not re-released - underlined - Frank Zappa albums. Fetish properties are not unlike porn. I’d feel guilty taking their money, if I wasn’t...well…kinda one of them.” 

Conversations between Gordon and the awkwardly shy Dick and the acerbic counterweight Barry (memorably played by Jack Black in his first major screen role), faithfully appropriate the level of fanaticism chaps will sink into (sample argument: after Rob has included Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit in one of his top five lists, Barry sarcastically counters: “Oh, that's not obvious enough Rob. How about The Beatles? Or fucking Beethoven? Side One, Track One of the Fifth Symphony! How can someone with no interest in music own a record store?”.

The undisputed companion to High Fidelity’s exploration of masculine musical neuroses is Giles Smith’s 1987 memoir Lost In Music, which is being republished today. It’s an autobiographical account of Smith’s own journey through music, from growing up in Colchester (the same London satellite town that begat Blur), to having somewhat unrequited musical ambitions of his own. It is riotously funny in recalling that journey, and the mania Smith - and I suspect plenty of others - become consumed by.

“This book is the story of that voyage - one man’s journey into the world of rock and then back to his mum’s,” Smith explained in the book. “And at the same time it’s a book about what gets into people when pop gets hold of them. And boy, can pop get a hold. It’s pushy like that. You’ve really got to watch it. You invite pop into your house on a fairly casual basis and the next thing you know it’s telling you what to wear and picking your friends.”

A case in point: I was 17 on 13 July 1985, the date of one of the greatest events in musical history: Live Aid. It was an impressionable time. I had no ambition (well, relatively little…) of becoming a pop star myself, but I was easily influenced. I obsessively bought a pair of white dance shoes from the Pineapple Dance Studios in Covent Garden because Bryan Ferry wore the exact same pair at Live Aid. Ditto, the 12-pleat blue-grey trousers Bowie wore during his set. Likewise the bright yellow shirt George Michael wore during the Wembley finale.

But for ridiculous fanboy obsession, it was Sting who left the most lasting memory on me of that day - wearing a baggy white grandad-collar shirt, untucked, with one arm of a pair of sunglasses casually adorning the outside of the breast pocket. Sting also played an all-black Stratocaster (with a 1970s headstock) that day. I wanted to be him, and hunted high and low for, at least, the shirt and accompanying loose-fit linen trousers. I even bought a bottle of Sun-in to get my hair like Sting’s. Of course, it turned orange.

I wasn’t alone. “I really fancied Sting’s job. Great pay: the best pay,” Smith wrote. “Superb hours too (because what does Sting actually do in the long months between albums and tours? He mucks about, I reckon). Homes in Hampstead and New York and Miami and Los Angeles (Barbra Streisand’s old place, in fact). Not that I wanted to make records that sounded like his, but I was certainly on for the lifestyle. Concerts, fans. Pop music. Pop stardom.“

Smith did eventually break out of his suburban Essex confines in the pursuit of pop stardom, as a keyboard player, the result of concluding that he couldn’t play guitar and would therefore be denied the preening glory that all axemen indulge. “Keyboard players seemed to be people like Tony Banks of Genesis, perhaps the least expressive man in rock, whose idea of a crowd pleasing freak-out is to nod gently to himself,” Smith concludes. He also acknowledges that playing one of those keyboards that you wear like a guitar - Herbie Hancock comes to mind - is no substitute, either. “…it made you look like a keyboard player with a bad case of career envy.”

Eventually he experienced some fame with Cleaners From Venus. “For every Simple Minds there are dozens, even hundreds, of Cleaners From Venuses,” wrote the late John Peel in his review for The Guardian of Lost In Music, “bands which, according to the accountants and promo hit squads, have failed. I know about these failures and I respect them. Some of the best music I have heard has been made by failures. This book could equally well have been, say, the Skip Bifferty Story, the Stackwaddy Story or the Bogshed Story, but these bands had no Giles Smith to record the handful of games with the reserves they played before their free transfer to oblivion.”

John Cusack and Jack Black in High Fidelity
© Touchstone Pictures

Lost In Music describes in glorious detail the foundations of his relationship with music, from the High Fidelity-esque arguments over which ranked higher out of T.Rex or Slade, to standing in vain on a Colchester street corner hoping that Marc Bolan might happen to drive past en route to a music festival in Clacton. We’ve all probably done it. But it is precisely this lack of logical thinking that underpins the male obsession with music, and is the frankly hilarious - if worryingly resonant - thread coursing throughout Lost In Music. It is balanced perfectly between anecdotes of being that fan, to being that fan who wants to really be on stage. “You really want to be a rock star, but then you discover that you’re really just a fan,” Smith recently told David Hepworth and Mark Ellen on their Word In Your Ear podcast. 

In the years since Lost In Music first came out, much has changed. Smith, who has written for Q and Mojo, went on to become a brilliant sports columnist in The Times. The vinyl record has been, gone, and come back again. The album sleeve has lost its great significance as it has been reduced to a thumbnail on a streaming app. That said, Smith told Hepworth and Ellen:  “It’s a golden age to be a fan and a listener. When the book came out [in 1987] it was possible to get excited by the fact you could listen to music on a Walkman. And then not long after the book came out you had the iPod which could contain 40,000 songs. Suddenly you have streaming, which brings you everything all the time. In terms of the hardware you use to consume this stuff, that’s changed but we haven’t. People of our generation still cling to the physical format, but I look at my kids and they own nothing - it’s all on their phones. the fetishism has gone. I envy them, as they travel light!”

Yours truly, in front of his alphabetically ordered record collection

Me too. I still want records on the day they are first released. I will still buy albums I’ve owned several times before. I’ve transitioned from owning vinyl and cassettes to CDs, before buying them all again on vinyl, probably for the tactile excitement that still comes from unsheathing a record for the first time and placing a needle on the intro groove.

Years ago I went through a purge of my CD collection, mainly to accommodate a girlfriend’s request to make my then-home a little less of a man cave. Of the roughly 1200 discs I had at that moment in time (fuelled largely by visits to Tower Records branches in the US in the good times when a pound bought you two dollars or so), I had half professionally ripped onto a hard drive before selling them to a second hand dealer in Amsterdam. 

In his book Smith describes this as a form of purification, but also part and parcel of the awkward selectivity and margin calls that come with owning and listening to records. “When I went to the shelf and took down, say, [Stevie Wonder’s] Innervisions, I was just as importantly electing not to play Jailbreak by Thin Lizzy or Venus And Mars by Wings, or any of those albums that had seemed like a good idea at the time, but whose appeal had dwindled with age or the dawning of good sense. I was able to prize the wheat, because of its contrast with the enormous, patiently accrued pile of old chaff.”

All music fans, to varying degrees, apply this arch subjectivity. At its extreme, exhaustingly so. “Liking both Marvin Gaye and Art Garfunkel is like supporting both the Israelis and the Palestinians,” Rob Gordon informs his estranged girlfriend Laura in High Fidelity. “No, it’s really not,“ she replies. “You know why? Because Marvin Gaye and Art Garfunkel make pop records.” “Made,” he retorts. “Made. Marvin Gaye is dead. His father shot him.” Mansplaining, as much as that comes across (Cusack has acknowledged the masculine toxicity that his character exudes), it does also faithfully capture the inanity that Smith also delves into in Lost In Music, the “emotional librarian” that lies in most men, to quote a Guardian review of the book.

“The book did want to be quite proudly wrong about things, which isn’t often really a strength about rock writing,” Smith said on Word In Your Ear. “I think people like to feel they’re championing a right cause and getting behind the stuff that matters.” Actually, he did. 

Lost In Music is an extraordinary, personal and resonant exploration of the transformative power of music, but also what drives the obsession. For some, that obsession shapes their lives. For others it provides context. Some simply can’t function without music, while others will go to extreme lengths to consume it. That’ll be me, then, someone who once drove for 12 hours on a 900-mile round trip just to buy a Red Hot Chilli Peppers album. You had to be there. You had to be me.

Gone in 60 seconds - Record Store Day comes...and goes

© Simon Poulter 2018

There is something clearly perverse about standing in a queue at seven in the morning for a shop that doesn’t open until 10am, purely to get your hands on some plastic that, probably exists in some other form or another. Actually, let me correct that statement: there is something clearly perverse about sitting on a pavement still stinking of unidentified Friday night detritus, queuing for a shop that doesn’t open for at another two hours at least.

But then buying and owning records is one of those pastimes that teases out the obsessive. Not quite as bad as standing at the end of a Clapham Junction platform all weekend, I grant you, and compared with buying comic books or football stickers, relatively tame. But the return of vinyl record ownership has, I’ll admit, reawoken a certain “fetishism”, to quote a particularly lively Twitter rant the other evening from Danny Baker - arguably Blackheath's leading record collection owner - on the subject of this year’s Record Store Day.

The main source of Baker’s ire was his belief that artists and their labels use RSD cynically to lure in punters to buy limited edition, available-for-one-day-only, copies of records which then get sold on for profit. “Record Store Day is a racket,” he opened with. “Just press up hundreds of copies for these stores you vampires. What's with this stupid treasure hunt? Its [sic] so much less about indy stores than creepy eBay limited editions. Fuck off Record Store Day.”

So, at least we know where he stands on the topic. But he went on: “Having a record only pressed up for Record Store Day is like owning one of those commemorative dinner plates offered in the back of Sunday supplements. ‘To honour Lady Diana, this once in a lifetime...’” And, inevitably, Baker was not done there: “Hey kids! Does Record Store Day raise your awareness of that little shop around the corner that you'd never seen before?  Or is it for a load of old boys to grab cynically limited, but basically worthless, stock for later profit on eBay?”.

© Simon Poulter 2018

On this last point, he may have something. Most of the individuals ahead and behind me in the queue at Greenwich's excellent Casbah Records this morning were men, well into middle age, and clearly the type who take RSD seriously. Whether they were indeed planning to make a fast buck on eBay, I couldn’t tell and wasn’t that bothered to ask.

Record Store Day may, ultimately, be a marketing gimmick, and even if Baker argues that most of those in the queues are discovering their local music emporium for the very first time, that is largely the point. Independent record shops - the intended beneficiaries of the entire exercise - will make more money on this one day than they do in the traditionally impoverished first three months of the year.

However, while the vinyl revival is going great guns (an £88 million business), with LPs continuing to sell relatively well in the face of other physical and digital formats, the humble record shop is still an endangered species, and for that reason alone, Record Store Day is a great way to show support, although consistent, year-round custom would be even better. So, Danny, call me a fetishist if you want, but I’m more than happy to join in the absurdity of dossing on the pavement for three hours in the hope of landing a Bowie album that inevitably will be on sale later in the year as a CD. Because it is about supporting my local record shop, one I actually visit throughout the year.

Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve spent many a happy Saturday afternoon browsing in record shops and, at the age of 50 - cliche as this might sound - I still do. I still enjoy the discovery of new music, just as I enjoy relistening to familiar music on new formats. Vinyl has given me an excuse to hear anew things I’d previously only heard on cassette, or on early-issue, poorly mastered CD. Record Store Day is part of that curation.

There are those - girlfriends and wives, mostly (emitting disdainful grunts as the front door slams at Stupid O'Clock) - who will think of us as suckers, victims of a gimmick designed to entrap the weak-willed desperate to own some obscure reissue purely because it's a) now on coloured vinyl and b) because it will give them an air of Nick Hornbyesque cultural superiority (may I hear quote John Cusack's Rob Gordon, proprietor of Championship Vinyl in the film adaption of High Fidelity: "I get by because of the people who make a special effort to shop here - mostly young men - who spend all their time looking for deleted Smiths singles and original, not rereleased - underlined - Frank Zappa albums. Fetish properties are not unlike porn. I'd feel guilty taking their money, if I wasn't... well... kinda one of them."). These are experiences you don’t get from Spotify.

Record Store Day is a glorious celebration of the absurdity of record buying. The exclusive releases are hardly rare Picassos at Sotheby’s, but that’s not why they’re bought. In fact I'm not entirely sure why they’re bought but, speaking from trouser-emptying experience, there is a distinct, momentary pleasure about buying something unique, taking it home and - yes, here comes the 'tactile vinyl experience trope' - desleeving that new purchase to stick it on the turntable in order to find out what all the fuss was about.

© Simon Poulter 2018

If you do it right, you’ll walk into your local emporium armed with a carefully compiled list in the hope that at least some of it has been stocked (RSD is a tricky business for record shop proprietors, who have to take a punt on what will sell on the day out from the 500 artists releasing albums and singles as part of the programme). Inevitably that means some disappointment, but if you’re prepared to be in that queue early, and have organised your wishlist, you'll usually come away happy. And broke.

Like Christmas Dinner, it’s over in a matter minutes after a lengthy build up. And worth it. This year I walked out of Casbah Records with pretty much what was on my shopping list - including a reissue of Prince's 1999, Bowie's Welcome To The Blackout (Live London 1978), The Who's Kids Are Alright soundtrack and Steven Wilson's RSD exclusive 12" single How Big The Space. A tidy haul. Was any of it essential? No, but again, that wasn't the point. And if you don't understand that, you probably never will.

© Simon Poulter 2018

I love the smell of vinyl in the morning: Record Store Day 2017

There are tales, already, of desperation. Of men - and I'm fairly confident that we're talking exclusively men - camped out on high street pavements at Stupid O'Clock, desperate to be first through the door on this, the tenth annual Record Store Day.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, this is when the most serious of record collectors pile into music shops in the hunt for limited edition vinyl releases put out just for the day, and all part of an initiative to get people shopping for actual music in such independent outlets.

It brings the die-hards out early: my local shop, Greenwich's excellent Casbah Records, had the first punters lining up a full FIVE hours before opening at 10.30am, while Brighton's Resident Music had its queue form at 3am for an 8am opening time. There is a limit, and three in the morning goes way beyond it...

There is, of course, a huge degree of trainspotting about it all (and I don't mean heroin peddling). Most of the music will have been available before, and the profile of many queuing suggest that they might spend the rest of their Saturday at the end of a Clapham Junction platform with notebook, pencil and a pair of binoculars. But all that notwithstanding, Record Store Day is, actually, a bit of fun.

While it will attract the arch music nerds as well as the prospectors looking to grab swag to resell on eBay, there are also plenty who simply enjoy the tactile pleasure of rifling through record racks in a slightly musty-smelling shop in the hope of finding something unique to take home and, you know, play. These, then, are the whom Record Store Day is for. It's easy, in this cynical, corporate world, to assume that the whole thing is a cunning wheeze designed to ink money for the record companies and their artists, but there is a knowing awareness amongst those waiting to get into their local emporia that it's all about the love of music.

It's why I can guarantee that High Fidelity and This Is Spinal Tap will be cultural references for many in today's Record Store Day queues. They'll know all about record shop demagogues and Jazz Odyssey because they understand that music ownership at this level is a subculture, rather than just the acquisition of listening material with which to wallpaper the day.

The rarity factor is important but, I think, so too is the satisfaction of curiosity. There are those of us who have plenty of versions of Pink Floyd's Interstellar Overdrive already, but a previously unreleased recording, on a single-sided single, wouldn't go amiss. It doesn't, actually, matter what you're in the queue for, whether a demo version of The Smiths' The Boy With The Thorn In His Side or a pink vinyl reissue of Aqua's Barbie Girl (no, me neither...). Tastes and interests are disparate: earwigging on conversations this morning outside Casbah I was reassured by the enormous diversity of ambitions - reassured because it meant that I was more likely to get what I wanted. The fascinating and compelling part of Record Store Day is that it brings out every taste, all sharing a common love of music as well as the tactile appreciation of physical music ownership.

© Simon Poulter 2017

As for me, I was about as successful as I could have hoped for: Bowie's Cracked Actor live album, The Who's Quadrophenia on parka-green vinyl, a few Prince singles, the first new The The music for 15 years and an Elbow cover of one of their older tracks. And, yes, that 'new' copy of Interstellar Overdrive.

For old heads like me, Record Store Day has been an encouragement to return to their vinyl libraries, to enjoy the tactile experience of youth in opening up gatefold sleeves and placing needles on grooves, rather than the somewhat impassive process of clicking a mouse. But younger consumers - even teenagers - are also playing a part in the revival of vinyl that saw more than 3.2 million vinyl albums sold in the UK last year, and now account for 15% of the industry’s income from physical formats.

Having been a part of the industrial push for all-things digital back in the 1990s, it might sound strange to be returning to the record deck. But there's a place for all formats - the convenience of digital and the tactile enjoyment and perceivable aural warmth of vinyl. Younger consumers, however, are also appreciating that there is something more that comes from vinyl, that it is not just some on-trend meme they need to sign up for. They're also discovering classics like Fleetwood Mac's Rumours (last year's best selling vinyl release) or The Dark Side Of The Moon for the first time. Healthily, that means they're discovering - through vinyl - that music was once more than a pick-and-mix stream of songs recorded by someone who has won a television talent show. The industry will never see the likes of 1975 (the year, not the band...) when 92 million vinyl LPs were sold in the UK, but for this old head, just knowing that vinyl side of  music consumption is in relatively rude health is a thoroughly pleasing thing.

A touch of High Fidelity with the return of the ex-

© Simon Poulter 2016

I am, obviously, totally biased when I say that the game of the weekend was yesterday's encounter at Stamford Bridge between Chelsea and Manchester, but for different reasons going into it than coming out.

Until 4pm yesterday I was the uneasy mess I often am before big games. It's an irrational neurosis, of course, but games between Chelsea and exalted opposition, or even just important cup ties, have me wound up tighter than a drum. It is - and here comes the first dig at those who think we're all arriviste glory-hunters at the Bridge - the result of years of underachievement, failure and humiliating defeats. Manchester United inflicted a particularly painful one on us at Wembley in 1994, and I've struggled - actually, failed - to let go of it ever since. Caught up in that is the lingering envy stemming from a period when United won everything and had the spending power, it seemed, to buy whomever they wanted. Looking back in cold hindsight, they were simply the best football club in the land with the best manager. It doesn't matter what their finances were like, it's simply what they were. But that period of United's imperiousness cast a long shadow over my relationship with the club as a Chelsea fan. Even when United haven't, actually, been that good (basically, since SAF retired), I have still approached games with them with queasy dread.

Yesterday's game had the added spice of the return of José Mourinho, coupled with a United that had spent generously in the summer, with all pundits, at the start of the season at least, pitting the 2016-17 Premier League season as, essentially, a face-off between the two Manchesters and their coaches. In fact, the return of Mourinho genuinely mattered least for me. Yes, it was like awkwardly encountering an ex-girlfriend with her new beau (which reminds me, I need to rewatch High Fidelity), but like adults you hopefully can move on from that.

The way Mourinho crashed and burned at Chelsea last season, almost taking the club with him through the trapdoor, fumigated any lingering affection for him. Don't get me wrong: I don't wish to sound ungrateful for what he did for Chelsea - truly, he brought about success on a scale I'd previously thought impossible in my lifetime - but last season exposed the toxicity of his personality, the vindictiveness that, when unleashed, undermines the brilliance of his successful football ethos.

Because - and I'll get on to yesterday's game in a moment - all the good, the pride and excitement that Mourinho had built up with Chelsea's Premier League title win in 2014-15, was unravelled in those first four months of last season, when negativity bred further negativity, when players' heads dropped when they should have been lifted by the coach, when the poisonous air around the club over the treatment of Eva Carneiro lingered long after Mourinho and Chelsea parted company again.

This time last year Chelsea were 15th in the league, had lost five, drawn two and won three, had been dumped out of the League Cup (a title they were defending) with Mourinho suspended for allegedly telling referee John Moss: "Wenger was right. You are fucking soft" at West Ham. In the same week, Carneiro served papers on the club for constructive dismissal. In the space of three months, Chelsea had gone from English champions to laughing stock. Halloween has often been the starting point of a nightmare period for Chelsea, usually culminating in a managerial sacking, but by this point last year, the horror had already become unbearable. And Mourinho could be blamed for much, if not all of it.

So, then, yesterday. That Chelsea demolished Manchester United 4-0, providing some, admittedly petty respite for that 1994 embarassment, has nothing to do with Mourinho, revenge or any other misdirected emotion. In fact the real emotion of yesterday's game was more to do with commemorating Matthew Harding, the man whose investment pre-dated that of Roman Abramovich, and whose infectious fandom and largesse saw a club struggling with survival actually stay afloat. You could argue that Harding's money brought renewal to Chelsea that made it more attractive to Abramovich.

Yesterday's win was for Harding. But also for Antonio Conte. Like his compatriot Carlo Ancelotti, Conte has brought a dignified presence to the managership of Chelsea. Yes, it's a little alarming to see him windmilling so frantically on the touchline, but then in his post-match interviews and press conferences you see a gracious, charming and funny man, completely unbound by the neuroses that gnaw so visibly away at Mourinho. Even yesterday he had to drag the spotlight away from his team's moribund display by creating an argument with Conte about nothing (apparently the Portuguese was upset that his rival was trying to get the crowd going when the score was already 4-0 - this from a man who complained that Stamford Bridge was TOO quiet...!).

Removing Mourinho and even Manchester United from the equation, yesterday's game was delightful entertainment for a Chelsea fan. Every player - even David Luiz - did their jobs, and did them well. The wingback/three-man-central-defence system worked a treat, N'Golo Kante is looking terrific in his distribution, tackling and posession, and even Pedro scored. Pedro. After 28 seconds of the opening whistle. Happy days.