I turned 69 years old this week, which is a sort of nothing, in-between age to be.
You’re not quite old, but you’re through the flatlands of thirty- and forty-something, you’ve climbed the grassy knoll of middle age, and now you’re golf-carting down the other side at a terrifying speed.
At the weekend, just before I reached the Valley of Death, I slammed on the brakes and blew the dust off my vinyl records to bring back the glory days just one more time.
It was then I realised there were gaping holes in my collection.
All my Pink Floyd, Hawkwind, Jethro Tull, Deep Purple and Black Sabbath were gone. So were Cream, The Who, Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer.
Thankfully, my Bob Dylan, Beatles and James Bond themes were intact.
I slapped my head and remembered how, as a student in the ’70s, I would sell off bits of my record collection to pay for beer, pointy boots and the occasional cheese sandwich.
Decisions on which records to sell and which to keep were made on what, I thought, was hip at any particular ’70s moment.
When punk arrived in the mid-’70s, it was a chance to clean out the accumulating dust of the bloated gas giants mentioned above. So they went to the record buyers, and in came street-level garage bands like The Sex Pistols, The Buzzcocks, The Clash, The Ramones and The Stranglers.
Fifty years later, there are a few regrets. But strangely not for the music, which is now entirely available on streaming services. No, the things I most regret are the missing memories.
Each vinyl album contained not only the music but colourised postcards of sitting in a hay barn with long gone friends and watching the dawn come up with Hawkwind on the turntable or using brooms and garden spades as guitars and cardboard boxes as drums while jumping around in a garage with school friends to Pink Floyd’s A Saucerful of Secrets.
Last weekend’s Big Vinyl Dig at the GV Hotel in Shepparton made me realise just how potent a physical album cover and vinyl record is as a talisman for channelling memory.
I could only last 45 minutes before my memory bank was full and my wallet was empty.
Over a five-hour period, there must have been hundreds of people feverishly flicking through carefully labelled boxes of records, proving that despite the age of digital streaming, the physicality of vinyl is alive and booming. There were fathers and sons, young women in jeans and leather, millennials in black, middle-aged ladies in denim and wistful old grandads like me with fading hats and watery eyes — all of us chasing the music and the memories.
There were serious audiophiles, collectors jabbering with astonishment at the find of a decade, and others just wandering around in a daze. One poor bloke I came across just stood and scratched his head, saying, “I’m overwhelmed”.
I managed to limit myself to two purchases — Hawkwind’s In Search of Space and The Velvet Underground’s Andy Warhol ‘Banana’ album. They were both victims of my vicious 1970s culling method, but now I wanted to climb back inside the time machine to live the teenage dream just once more.
I didn’t play them straight away. I just read the covers and flipped the vinyl around in my aged-spotted hands. I waited until I was 69 and then put Hawkwind’s Master of The Universe on the turntable. This was going to be magisterial, a thundering animal cry for creative freedom in response to the timidity of bourgeois life.
Out of the speakers came the immortal words:
I am the centre of this universe
The wind of time is blowing through me
And it’s all moving relative to me,
It’s all a figment of my mind . . .
They were accompanied by the blips and droning wails of an early Moog synthesiser, a tin guitar played with a chisel and a snare drum and tambourine straight out of my school friends’ garage. It sounded like a tiny Gandalf trapped in a biscuit tin. Was the 16-year-old me really moved to heart-swelling awe by this tinny drone?
The truth was the vinyl record still had the power of transportation.
It just took me to a new destination: Seniorsville.
John Lewis is a former journalist at The News.