I’ve spent some time wondering about record collecting. Why I'm afflicted with the collecting bug when others aren’t, wondering what the roots of it were. It started slowly in 1973 to 1975 with Xmas gifts of Meddle and my brother’s copy of Ommadawn, plus a few singles. It really got going in earnest in 1976. By 1977 and having my first part-time job as a Pools Collector providing me with a good bit of pocket money, it all went on second hand records and beer.
I’m certainly not alone in having a difficult home life in the 70s. But the fact that it drove me to drink from the age of 16 is perhaps less common. I was sitting alone in pubs, reading school books while necking pints of Stones Best Bitter. I revised for my O levels in the pub. That’s not normal, is it? I thought nothing of it at the time, I must say. And I maintain it made life much better than it otherwise would have been, though obviously not ideal.
As you might imagine, it all left me wide open to be influenced in all ways by rock n roll and is why I developed a giant rock brain. I had nothing else other than albums, drink and books in my life. So it’s ironic that 50 years later I’m still trading off those years of learning when the NME Book of Rock was my set text.
It occurs to me now, though not at the time, that all the musicians I looked up to were only 5, 10 or at most 15 years older than me at the time. Older brothers and sisters effectively. Yet they seemed so distant to me, almost mythic, their records, holy relics.
If things had been different and life had been better, I often wonder if I’d have fallen into the culture of rock music quite as hard, which in turn makes me realise the importance of music in supporting you through tricky times, perhaps especially when the lyrics of bands like Pink Floyd or Black Sabbath seem so apposite.
And rather tragically, I did see all the bands as sort of friends who were sympathetic to my situation. They felt on my side, which is a bit ridiculous but I was a teenager, in my defence and looking for something I could rely on.
I now realise that what I thought of as just a hobby, turned quite quickly into an all pervasive obsession that engulfed my life to the exclusion of almost anything else. Even at college, apart from work for my English and History degree (and I didn’t bother reading any book all the way though) I did little else apart from hunt for and buy records and go to gigs. I only managed to break the spiral of buying large amounts of records when in late 82 we moved to a remote croft north of Inverness and I just was a long way from any records.
At that point, the mania had lasted six years and the last three were especially intense. You hear of alcoholics saying they can’t have even one drink without totally relapsing, I was a bit like that for a while. Even so, the record acquiring itch has always just been below the surface, waiting to re-emerge. And re-emerge it does from time to time. Like when I bought 78 albums at a record fair in Edinburgh. When I find a good seam of records it's like I’m mainlining a drug. It’s really odd.
Most collectors I know share this addict attitude to it, managing greater or lesser discipline from time to time. They also understand that as important as the music is, it’s just having them that’s the important thing. That is strange but not to record collectors. I have hundreds of records, maybe thousands, that I’ve never actually played. That I could is the crucial thing.
I suppose it’s a relatively harmless compulsion compared to many but it doesn’t seem to be showing any signs of it leaving me., so whatever turned me onto it 50 years ago, must’ve gone deep.
