Vinyl

OK. Well, I want to talk about vinyl. Why? Well, I'm sat here, which you can't see, but I'm sat here holding a new record. Everyone's just laughed at me because I still buy vinyl records. Not very often, but if I can get them, I buy them. Everyone laughs 'cause, 'Oh, you've got CDs, we've got MP3s, we've got this, we've got that, we download. Why do you still buy vinyl?' Well, one reason is the sound. If you've got a good record player, nothing, but nothing, sounds as good as vinyl. MP3s have got this awful, tinny, strangulated sound where, kind of, the bass, the space is missing. So I'm kind of sat here, waving my vinyl record at the microphone. I'll have to wait a while to play it 'cause I don't have a record player. But there you go – when I hear it, it will be worth it.

I've always bought records and I really like music. All my early records were in vinyl and one of the things that I like when I get them out the boxes at home is there's a thing there. There's a big picture, you can look at it, you open it out.

You download something, it's, it's come and gone. I think for a lot of people now music isn't as special as it was, say, when I was younger, which was quite a long time ago. So, people in the 60s, in the 70s, in the 80s, music was just really special. You'd go to the shop and you'd have to save up to buy your records because they were quite expensive, so you didn't download hundreds and hundreds of tracks one after the other. You'd maybe buy, from school, we'd save dinner money or do little jobs. And then maybe once a month you could, kind of, go into town, find a good record shop – one that would let you listen to the records – you'd listen to two or three records in the shop, have a think, have a talk with the shop assistant and then you'd make your purchase. 

It was really exciting. You'd get this … maybe I need to explain, because, for younger people, you got this big vinyl record which is about 12 inches across, so you had a big thing to look at, and when you got it home, open up, and there was bits inside it, pictures to look at, little bits of information on the cover, which were like little messages from another world. It was just really special, which … I('ve) got lots of downloads, I've got CDs, but the music's still great but, they're not special any more. It's like they've just become … it's just another product. I think, for most people, it's just another product.