Taking records around to friends' houses was a regular thing for us and for our generation, probably. And it was a way to hear new albums or singles. I doubt it happens in any way anymore since communal experiences seem to have been replaced with individualism.
It meant that we were a generation that often first heard records together in someone’s bedroom. There was always one lad who had money who got the record and we all taped that. I vividly remember we discovered early Pink Floyd through the Relics (wasn’t that cheap?) album and Krautrock through Kraan Live.
It was a great way to expand your horizons. It wasn’t like having something recommended to you because of a previous purchase, sometimes it was something by someone you’d never heard of.
I don’t know if you did this but we always sat on the floor in between the speakers and were silent through each side, often reading the sleeve notes. Looking back it was like a prayer meeting and the record was a holy relic. No wonder kids who didn’t share our enthusiasm thought we were odd and took the mick furiously, mistaking it for some gay boys gathering. We just liked music and liked the identity it gave us as musical pseudo intellectuals. I think if we had film of those days we’d be some shade of unbearable.
Although we were thought severely uncool by people who mistook their own attitude for being cool when really they just didn’t understand us. And I think they suspected we knew something they didn’t.
Looking back, for a kid like me, whose home life was sub-optimal (not that I realised that until later) the meetings were a kind of surrogate family where you could talk without being criticised and everyone knew how important they were. A sort of safe space. This was the extent of our musical nerding and why rock music, in its broadest definition, has kept me company for my whole life.
I realised early on that records would never let me down and could be relied on. And like any kid from a flaky background, they acted as a surrogate parent, looking after and advising me, even if that advice involved taking drugs and being some shade of feral.
We stopped doing it when we were about 17, meetings had adjourned to the pub and booze became my next best friend but I look back on those evenings spent when I was 13, 14, 15 with huge fondness and they expanded my knowledge enormously in a way nothing else did.
