ABOUT THIS BLOG

What records are featured on this blog?
This blog is an online journal of all the records I acquire…whether I buy them, trade them or have them given to me. If a record comes into my possession, it goes on the blog.
This blog does not exist to “review” records in the traditional sense. However, if you are in a band or have a label and want your records to feature here, then feel free to send them over. If featuring your records here might help you sales and thus help keep vinyl alive, I’m all for that. But it’s not the main purpose of this blog.

Why do I do this blog?
Well, quite simply, because I spend most of my spare time listening to, buying ,and reading about records. And one evening back in February 2008, I was reading some blog about something or other and I wondered to myself how easy it would be to do a blog. So I google’d “blog hosting” and then ended up setting one up there and then just to answer my own stupid question. I managed to set up a blog and make my first post within about half an hour. After that I just carried on posting.
The reason I still do it is to keep an online diary of everything I pick up. It’s already proved interesting for me to look back over the last couple of years. But also, I now feel I’m part of some small online collecting community. I wasn’t the first to set up a record collecting blog, but I know that a few other people have started their own after reading mine, so now there are a few similar blogs out there. I’ve now “met” (mainly virtually) & traded with a few fellow collectors, and I’ve made a couple of good friends in the process. And you know how it is - everyone needs fellow nerds to chat to from time to time.

Why do I collect records?
I’m part of a generation that grew up paying for music. As crazy as it may sound these days, I grew up buying music from shops, and (even worse) I’m old enough to remember a world before Compact Discs!
When I was about 13 years old and just starting to develop an interest in music, there were only two formats to choose from – record or cassette. I opted for cassette as my format of choice, mainly because I had a little cassette Walkman, and I liked the novelty of listening to music wherever I fancied.
However, it all changed when I hit 17. Mainly through watching skateboard videos, I started to get more into independent music, as did my friends. They started buying records, and I would end up taping the stuff I wanted for myself. But in early 1992 I moved to the other end of the country, and suddenly didn’t have friends that I could tape stuff from. So I started buying records for myself.
Things changed even more when I bought some crappy 7” single from a local shop, only to find that it was pressed on green vinyl. This was the first piece of colour vinyl I had seen or owned, and I loved it. Up to that point in my life vinyl had always been black, so seeing something green seemed weird and also very cool. Around this time, Nirvana had appeared on the scene, and because of them, Sub Pop records and their bands started getting a lot of attention. This was when I started to understand the concept of different pressings and vinyl colours, and is when I also I started to really go out of my way to try to find certain records on specific colours. I guess that, without realising it, I became a collector… although it would be a few years before I would actually start describing myself as a record collector.
So anyway, fast forward to today and collecting records is a habit that I just can't seem to get out of. As the years have rolled on, it is one of the few aspects of my life that has remained constant. Most people seem to grow out of listening to and buying music when they get older. But not me. I still listen to music constantly, and I still buy records. There have been times when I have tried to analyse why I still pay for records when I could download songs for free, and I why I chase certain records for years only to file them away in boxes or on shelves. But overall, with the benefit of age & experience, I realise that I don't need to understand it. The fact that I still enjoy music & collecting records is all the justification I need to carry on.