Looking Through LP's

Looking through lps. They remind you if times girlfriends events locations. CDs can't do as well and mp3s don't at all.

Sunshine Superman by Donovan was the very first record I bought, it was what was known in those days as a 45, which for those of you who have forgotten or perhaps never knew, was the speed it was played at on record players, 45 revolutions per minute. That was October 1966, when England was basking in the glory of a Football World Cup win and I mean winning the whole competition not just one game during the competition. I used to play it on an old Phillips player, that looked like a large wooden side cabinet, with the middle section of the top lifting up to reveal the record deck.

You see I can still remember that first record and the player I played it on and I can even remember individual times when I played that record way back in 1966.

Then there was Paul McCartney's LP called Ram, again an Lp was a long play record, that was played at 33 revolutions per minute and contained maybe 40 minutes of music. It was the summer of 1971, school was out and I was spending four months living on a farm, right on a beach in Pembrokeshire, in Wales. I had a little battery powered record player that looked a lot like a black attache briefcase and when you lifted the lid two speakers could be detached and placed apart, the bottom of the case was the actual record deck. I bought the LP from a little shop in the local town Haverfordwest, the shop was in a small side road between the river and the main shopping street. I then walked back to the farm, about 12 miles. On rainy days I would play Ram in my room and on sunny days I would entertain one of the local Pugh girls, whose father was a vet and the family lived in a rather grand house about a mile inland from the beach along a narrow twisty lane with grass banks and hedges almost forming a tunnel in places. I would enthral then with my LP and magic briefcase on the rocks at low tide, soon we all knew every word of every track on the LP.

But the old 45's and LP's were to have their day and along came something called a CD, or compact disc. These things were small shinny disc's that contained about 60 minutes of digital music. In 1985 I was living in a rather nice little semi detached house in one of two very nice roads in an area of Birmingham called Kings Heath. The road was Hollie Lucas Road and was named after one of the two children of Joseph Lucas, whose estate owned the road and the one connected to it, which named after their other child. Joseph Lucas was one of Birmingham's pioneers in the car industry, in particular he became famous for automotive electric's. There was hardly a car made in the UK that did not have Lucas lights, or Lucas dashboard instruments, they had a large factory in an area of Birmingham called Newtown. The factory, Lucas's and indeed the British car making industry has long since disappeared. Back to CD's, I moved in, in April 1985 and after some decorating and frantic furniture buying the house was more or less how I wanted it and so I bought myself a Toshiba CD player. It was a long thin dark grey plastic object and when you pressed a button a lid on the top popped open so you could place the CD inside. The very first CD I bought was by an Irish group called Clannad and the Cd was called In A Life Time. The title track featured not only Clannad but Bono, U2's lead singer. I wasn't a particular fan of Clannad, but it was widely thought at that time that their music was perfect for CD's and demonstrated the clarity of digital music, so I just had to have it and it was and it did.

Cd's were the new kids on the block they revolutionised the music industry, but just like the old records they killed off, they too were about to meet their fate as along came MP3's and downloading over the internet. Like CD's and no doubt the old records before, MP3's and downloading revolutionised the music industry. Indeed it has taken it by the neck and shaken it to within a digital beat of its life. The recording industry has struggle to keep a grasp of their own industry with people illegally downloading music left, right and centre. This revolution unlike the ones before has been rapid, certainly too rapid for the record industry to put their normal strangle hold on things.

But the real difference in the MP3 revolution is that I have absolutely no idea which was the first track I downloaded, or where I was when I did it, or what made me do it. You see MP3's have no soul, they do not connect you to times and places, its just wham bam thank you mam. That is sad, when we look back on our lives music will play a large role in it, not just because for some strange reason you were a Belieber, but that music is the key that unlocks memories, good, bad and sad. MP3's are the way forward and I welcome them with open arms, but I can't help feeling they come at a great cost, a cost we shall only realise in years to come when we look back.