The Rules of Engagement

I own a lot of LPs* 1537 of them to be precise – well actually 1540 of them now, it has taken me a week to get going. Not a freakish amount, there are people out there with more but no-one I know has. So why do I do this? Why do I trawl ebay, second-hand shop and the Internet compulsively looking for this vinyl?

I like music is the flippant answer and for a more normal sized collection, say 200 LPs that would work fine. However that doesn’t work for me. I can pick up an LP and know that I played it a week ago, however some haven’t been played for a decade, or two and some, I am embarrassed to say may never have been played properly at all. Some LPs I have may never get played again. Why? It’s nonsense. No man needs that many. So why do I crave vinyl the way I do?

I have a plan then, to visit the heart of this obsession and to listen to each and every LP in my collection, in no particular order (I’m not sure I’d make it past The Art of Noise, if I tried it alphabetically…); As a 40 year old family man with, sadly, limited listening time this may take me a while.

Some rules – facts

1. I have to listen to the LP itself ( digital doesn’t count) in all its inconvenient non-portability.
2. I also have lots of singles, but for the sake of my, relative, sanity I’m ignoring those for now!
3. I haven’t counted double LPs as 2, triples as 3 etc ( although I used to to make my collection seem bigger when I was a teenager )
4. The book ‘High Fidelity’ has not made this blog pointless, I don’t like it and it still doesn’t really give any proper answers.
5. Unlike some chaps I know I never got rid of all my crap, uncool records, so brace yourself.

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* and 12″s, about 150 of them. I’m just trying to keep it simple by exclusively using the term LP.