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.

2017: that was the (music) year that was

So here it is - a shiny new year. We’ve rung out the old and are already getting on with the new. But to allow one last coquettish glance over the shoulder at 2017, there are a couple of reflections to note: because this was a year that commenced with the hangover of the prior annus horribilis and its morbid stream of departures, from Bowie to Prince to George Michael. We switched, then, from 2016's somewhat grim procession to 2017's irritating insanity, chiefly due to an elderly playboy with candy floss hair arriving at the White House in January and then on a daily - if not hourly - basis displaying all the characteristics of a petulant child in whatever first came to his mind while, clearly, carrying out his morning ablutions.

Thankfully, music intervened to provide a certain feelgood factor. In short, 2017 was a superb year for new music and live performances. Just cast your mind back to an unseasonally sunny June and Glastonbury: 12 months on from the Brexit referendum, a month after both the Manchester Arena bomb and a stuttering British government stuttering further with one of the most pointless general elections in history, three weeks after the London Bridge attack and two weeks after the Grenfell fire, music did its bit to perk up the nation, with Nile Rogers/Chic and the-now ‘Sir’ Barry Gibb cranking out guilty pleasures in the heritage slots, headliners Radiohead and Foo Fighters delivering unabashed crowd-pleasing enormity, and relative newcomers like The xx and Royal Blood proving that engaging live performances on a grand stage are far from over.

Further back, in April, there was a bonanza of consumption as Record Store Day generated treasures such as The The's first new music in an age (and an Elbow cover of one of their older songs), as well as sumptuous vinyl releases from the likes of Prince and T-Rex to make the brutally early start to queuing worthwhile. Throughout the year live music was equally as rich and rewarding for me personally, kicking off with Michele Stoddart in early January performing her beautiful Pieces album in its entirety at Camberwell’s Slaughtered Lamb. Later that month I made acquaintance with the brilliant Peter Bruntnell (and discovered that he's from both my home town and school); I saw Robert Howard, Matt Deighton and Chris Difford deliver a masterclass in songwriting and experienced Squeeze on their home patch for a communion of arguably the UK’s most prolific pop-rock band since The Beatles. And in the summer I celebrated the pure pop joy of Nick Heyward, not once but twice. Indeed, this year has been more about pop than rock for me…though thankfully without succumbing to the Faustian horror of Ed Sheeran and his guitar-looped wallpaper-drivel.

Sheeran, inevitably, features heavily in figures released yesterday by the BPI of how music was consumed in the UK during 2017. The numbers reveal that a total of 135.1 million albums were either streamed, purchased in a physical format, or downloaded - a 9.5% year-on-year rise and the third year of consecutive volume growth. Of significance is that streaming now accounts for over half of the UK's music consumption, with 68.1 billion audio streams served last year through Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer and other services, a 51.5% rise on the previous year.

That said, my acquisition of mostly vinyl albums last year maintained a steady pace, to the extent that I actually ended the year with a pile of unlistened-to records more than a pile of those I had played. Clearly I have personally contributed to the growth of vinyl over the last decade: according to the BPI 4.1 million LPs were bought last year - an increase of 26.8% on 2016. That said, it does remain a niche (and, some might say an expensive one, too) with just one in 10 of all physical purchases made in 2017 being vinyl copies. Even the ageing CD represented just under a third of all formats.

Streaming, however, continues to attract converts. In a New Year blog post, my friend Steven Wilson - whose fifth solo album To The Bone was one of the brightest highlights of the year - wrote about his own, somewhat reluctant adoption of streaming formats: "For years I resisted non-physical distribution of music, I just couldn’t relate to music if it didn’t come as a physical piece of art that I could hold in my hands." He acknowledges, however, that streaming services do act as a 'try-before-you-buy' gateway, pointing out that his own album has been streamed eight million times in the four months since it was released. "While those numbers aren’t going to trouble the likes of Kendrick Lamar," he adds, "they are an indication that there are a lot of people out there beginning to discover and hear my music for the first time", pointing out that they might then go on to buy from his back catalogue, or come and see his live shows.

When it was released, To The Bone made it to number three in the album charts. Not bad for an artist many still have never heard of, and even more impressive when you consider that he was pipped to No.2 by someone called Elvis Presley by a relative handful of copies of a greatest hits package. Ed Sheeran - inevitably - remained at No.1 that week by selling a further 15,000 copies of Divide, a relentless achievement helped in part by grannies buying it at supermarket and petrol station checkouts.

I shouldn't be too critical of Sheeran (though his bland, universal appeal does stagger me...meaning that I will). Thank God for more interesting British pop acts, from Rag’n’Bone Man and Stormzy to Paloma Faith, all making for a very good year. It would be impossible to critique everything that passed through my ears in 2017, but particular mention should be given to the following:

Liam Gallagher - As You Were: Liam's reinvention as the macrobiotic, Hampstead Heath-jogging renaissance man (albeit one still hilariously lobbing Twitter grenades at Frère Noel) coincided with him producing the feelgood album of the year. Yes, it was full of Oasis-like stadium stormers, but wasn't that exactly what we wanted? And even if he had help, As You Were also demonstrated that the songwriting genes in the Gallagher family weren't entirely monopolised by his elder sibling. Speaking of whom...

Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds - Who Built The Moon?: News of a "psychedelic" third solo album from Gallagher proved unfounded. In fact, it took several listens to get any handle on what Who Built The Moon? actually was about. There were traces of Roxy/Sweet/Bolan glam, trademark NG irony, a scissor-playing French vocalist, a flirtation with the sort of Chemical Brothers sound Gallagher had experimented with earlier in his career, and some Britpop whimsy that harked back to prime Oasis. Collectively, and after several listens to be sure, Who Built The Moon? is up there with Liam's product as one of the best of 2017.

LCD Soundsystem - Anerican Dream: James Murphy's declaration that LCD Soundsystem had reached the end in 2011 seemed like a long goodbye when the sumptuous, five-LP live album of that description - The Long Goodbye: LCD Soundsystem Live At Madison Square Garden - made its appearance some years later (and was instantly added to my collection of the greatest live albums ever). So the appearance in 2017 of brand new material from Murphy and his collective, with its conscious and unconscious nods towards Bowie (who'd invited Murphy to work on the Blackstar album but declined citing a lack of worthiness), not to mention Talking Heads, was a surprise. And a welcome one, too. American Dream is a curious cocktail of the obscure and the enlightening, going beyond simply fan pleasing, although fans will be inevitably pleased by the sheer depth of what is dished up. Magnificent.
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Thundercat - Drunk: I’m a lazy music connoisseur: I should have my finger pressed more tightly on the pulse of what’s going on. Indeed, if it wasn’t for a late night visit to the BBC Radio 6 Music Festival in March I might never have come across the splendidly batshit-mad funk of Stephen Bruner - Thundercat - and his mesmerising six-string bass guitar prowess. Drunk pulled all that together into a 23-track album of the weird mixed with the conventional, of Stanley Clark-style jazz funk blended with traces of hip-hop and even FM radio soft rock, courtesy of guest appearances by Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald.

Father John Misty - Pure Comedy: Much is made of Josh Tillman’s wry takes on modern life and his somewhat capricious nature towards fans, rivals and indeed anyone who chooses to take him on, but there is no denying that if, like me, you’re a fan of ‘classic era’ Elton John (Tumbleweed Connection, Madman Across The Water, Honky Chateau et al), FJM’s unmistakably Elton-like vocal delivery is as comforting as a box of Quality Street comprised entirely of the green triangles. And that’s before you come to appreciate the smart lyrics that traverse between bittersweet and humour, while remaining smarter than most others out there. A masterpiece.

Portico Quartet - Art In The Age Of Automation: If every record went on its library classification, Portico Quartet’s four studio albums - including this one - would be hard to file. To some, it’s ambient noodling, to others jazz (“…just a series of mistakes without the 'oops’”, to quote Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnell), and to those more appreciative, clever, engaging electronica which thankfully stays clear of a suburban wine bar’s looped collection of Café del Mar compilations. Art In The Age Of Automation extensively explores over 11 tracks a variety of landscapes and textures, tinkering with the sparse grooves of trip-hop while applying varying thicknesses of layers with an orchestral approach that knows when to be sparing and when to be full on. This was my go-to record in 2017 for commuting or, simply, needing to come down after a more raucous night out on the tiles.

PP Arnold - The Turning Tide: Initiatives like Record Store Day deliver plenty of re-release treasures, but never something which has lain recorded but unreleased for close to half a century. PP Arnold - a former vocalist in the Ike & Tina Turner band and hit maker in her own right (First Cut Is The Deepest and Angel Of The Morning) - dusted off this hidden treasure, which had originally benefitted greatly from the significant involvement of Barry Gibb and the entertainment mogul Robert Stigwood, as well as Eric Clapton, members of his Delaney And Bonnie outfit, Steve Howe (of Yes) and others. The Turning Tide is a fascinating time capsule opened up, representing some of the best freewheeling pop-soul-rock of the late 1960s, including covers of material by Steve Winwood, Van Morrison, and the Glimmer Twins - Jagger and Richards. Bureaucracy, sadly, kept the recordings under lock and key, until Arnold and her manager, Sally Cradock (wife of Ocean Colour Scene/Paul Weller guitarist Steve) started picking at the strands of publishing complexity with an aim of finally getting the recordings released. With further mixing by Cradock's husband at Weller's Black Barn Studio, the resulting album sounds both fresh and a stunning snapshot of the time it was originally recorded, capped by the voice of one of the finest and under-appreciated soul singers ever.

Squeeze - The Knowledge: While not likely to win any prizes for sonic innovation, Squeeze's best album in more than two decades reinforced why, almost 40 years ago, we liked them to begin with: Chris Difford's lyrics, Glenn Tilbrook's uncannily accessible melodies. Wrapped up in an album loosely about the London they love (with specific reference to the south-east London of their youth - and my current dwelling), Squeeze produced a delightful compendium of observations about modern British life, from the state of the NHS to the ageing population, even including an edgy account of child abuse in youth football. National treasures, with a back catalogue - not just the singles - deserving of serious re-indulgence.

Paul Weller - A Kind Revolution: Arguably competing only with Neil Young for the shere rapidity of his output, Weller's umpteenth solo album since 1990 also set the tone for the summer of 2017. A Kind Revolution is chock-full of solid Weller ear-pleasers, although The Cranes Are Back must rank up there with You Do Something To Me for sheer soulful delightfulness.

Nick Heyward - Woodland Echoes: Weller's album may have set the tone for last summer, but the August release of Nick Heyward's first album in 18 years and only his seventh solo effort, proved to be one of the sunniest moments of the year, being a collection of pure bottled delight. That was, of course, the schtick of Haircut 100, back in the early 80s, but the precedents were good when, in the spring, Gary Crowley started playing the double-A side single Baby Blue Sky/Mountaintop, hinting at some breezy latent Britop to come, such as Perfect Sunday Sun, Beautiful Morning and Love Is The Key By The Sea. I saw Heyward live twice last year and on both occasions was left wondering how long it would be before he would be offered one of the feelgood spots at Glastonbury, such was the utterly infectious good time his canon delivers.

Elbow - Little Fictions: The release, just before Christmas, of Elbow's Best Of compilation, featuring their gorgeous cover of The Beatles' Golden Slumbers, gave timely reminder of the Mancunian quartet's status as arguably Britain’s favourite band. And with good reason: for all the festival singalong/wavealong favourites like One Day Like This and Mirrorball, Elbow have successfully retained enough indie credibility to save them from persecution by those curmudgeons who eschew such popular fare. In that respect, Elbow are like few other acts with such popularity (yes, you Sheeran), in producing vivid, layered (some might even say 'prog') rock, with instrumental curiosity and the genuine warmth of Guy Garvey's persona. Little Fictions is the album (their seventh) where you felt that Elbow were fully comfortable in their skins, kicking off with a sense of wellbeing as Magnificent (She Says) struck a resonant keynote of upbeat goodness, along with the lovely Gentle Storm, with its understated chords and unashamed, plaintive refrain "Fall in love with me - every day". From almost anyone else this might be schmaltz, but it sits amongst a collection embracing themes as varied as relationships, post-Brexit national isolation and Fleet Street's vampiric tendencies. As I wrote on Little Fictions' release, it's easy to declare a band's latest album their best, until you play it back in comparison with the previous work. And even though its six predecessors are mostly excellent, it was hard not to consider this Elbow's best yet.

Record Store Day - Christmas for musos

There are, as we slip gracefully into Record Store Day 2016, curmudgeons abroad who knock this friendly, enthusiastic celebration of recorded music as a cynical marketing excercise, but then what marketing excercise isn't cynical? 

If, as is argued in some quarters, Record Store Day is just a Hallmark festival, then so be it. Good on those who participate, from the thousands of independent record shops in every continent who take part, to the hundreds of thousands of punters, giddy like children on Christmas Eve, queuing at the crack of dawn to get their hands on that Bowie picture disc of The Man Who Sold The World, or The Doors' Live At The Aquarius Theatre Vol. 1 on blue vinyl, two of the many rarities and special editions on offer at this year's Record Store Day. 

RSD isn't just about selling records on the pretext of a promotional event, it's a celebration of what makes buying, collecting, browsing, touching, debating, obsessing and, yes, listening to music part of a collective cultural experience the world over. And if the world's beleaguered independent record shops - the churches I worshipped in as a teenager, who introduced me to the enjoyment of music curation - can get a helping hand by staging special RSD events, with live music and face painting for the kids, then more power to them. Picking up a Top 10 album while you're out doing the weekly shop in Sainsbury's may be convenient, but it's no substitute for the Saturday afternoon I know I still love to spend in a proper record shop flicking through the racks, drooling over lavish box sets, holding up the album artwork and declaring excitedly, "oh yes!".

Anything that gets people into actual record shops, buying music in its physical form and adding to that row of spines, be they CDs or vinyl, is fine. And in the end, it doesn't matter whether today you buy something or nothing, one, ten or fifty, it's all about getting involved.

Now, I know what you're thinking: isn't this all a bit flogging a dead horse? Last week the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry reported that revenues from digital music exceeded physical formats for the first time, accounting for 45% of the total in 2015. There is no escaping the fact that physical music sales are falling: just like kids preferring the PlayStation and Xbox to Airfix models and Hornby trains, buying records and CDs music is a declining business, impacted by other trends. 

I'm as guilty as anyone: I will buy albums on iTunes for the convenience of immediately listening to them on the morning they come out. It's the same impatience that would have me scampering to New Malden's MJM Records as a teen on the day that a vital album came out. I'm sure there's a psychological explanation for it. 

At least now, with new releases coming out on Fridays, I can curb my loins for a day and descend upon my current emporium of choic, the palace of the recorded disc that is Gibert Joseph here in Paris's Boulevard Saint-Michel. And at least I'm paying for my music. I'm one of those contrarians who actually think artists should get paid the right amount for what they do. It's their talent, their artistic endeavor, so why should they get paid the bare minimum for letting us access it?

Buying music has sustained me in the way others collect books or embrace cinema. It got me through teenage, it got me my first job, and it has taken me thusfar to my fifth decade as the one constant in my life. It is true, then, as one particularly curmudgeonly music journalist tweeted today, that we won't need a special day once a year to go out and buy records. But if it creates some fun and drives a bit of passion about music, then what's the harm? If it creates curiosity amongst the current generation of teenagers - as, thankfully, I know it does, then more power to it.