Black is the colour of my true love's record collection

So as I was saying the other week on this esteemed blog, I recently splashed the cash (£30 of it) on 30 "indie" singles. Seven-inch singles from (mostly) small labels, stuff released during the 2000s and 2010s. I was making the - extremely good! - point that this music (broadly construed of course) seems to have fallen out of fashion, possibly through neglect by music critics. Anyway, another matter now arises. As I continue ploughing through this little treasure trove of records I'm struck by the proliferation of coloured vinyl. Of these 30 sold-gold hit singles, no fewer than eight are in groovy shades.

Three colours white (etc)

Quite nice, I must admit. So is this a lot? Eight out of 30? It's all very non-scientific (a bit like most of the government's coronavirus policy for the past eight months, ha ha), but it seems like quite a few to me. It's definitely a new thing for your humble blogger anyway. Up until now I've been a sort of Henry Ford of the record-acquisition world: any colour as long as it was black. In fact, rather incredibly, I reckon these eight coloured-vinyl records have - at one fell swoop -  doubled in number the entire amount of coloured vinyl I now own. Yeah, I'm finally letting a bit of colour into my drab monochrome life ... Still, if it's true that there's generally more coloured vinyl around now, why might that be? As ever, it's surely going to be about marketing and money. I didn't know until I checked, but apparently coloured vinyl has been in existence since at least 1908, making various appearances on numerous record labels, invariably as an inducement to get the punters (duh) to buy records. And it's now, all these years on, still very clearly a thing. As you would certainly know if you've ever been unfortunate enough to stray onto sites such as this, the coloured-vinyl section of HMV's online shop (where deeply undesirable albums like the Rolling Stones live in Atlantic City and New Jersey will cost you a mere £64.99, but don't fret because it's on blue and orange vinyl). Yes, it's depressing. It really is. But ... whatever, that's the music industry. This interesting blog from the Discogs site (no strangers to selling a few records themselves) observes that our old friend Record Store Day is partly responsible for cranking up the modern marketing machine over coloured vinyl re-issues, but also - unfortunately - that fans are sometimes so completely under the spell of their favourite artists that they'll buy just about anything by them in any case. Here are are 10,000 versions of your favourite Beatles album, all on very slightly different splatter-paint vinyl. £100 each? Do you want to buy them? Oh, yes please! Thank you for making them available for us ... 

The Discogs piece also discusses the sound quality of coloured vinyl versus trad black. Basically it seems to be like this: modern coloured vinyl (fine), older coloured vinyl (sometimes not so fine), picture discs (always somewhat ropey, and even now not great), while clear vinyl is slightly dodgy and so is glow-in-the-dark vinyl (gulp). Right, no more glow-in-the-dark records for me. So coloured vinyl: surprise surprise, it's chiefly about making money. Same as it ever was. On the other hand, I won't deny that there is sometimes something quite attractive about a jazzy non-black record. And perhaps even splatter vinyl (which I instinctively recoiled from at first) is quite pleasing seen in a certain way - eg on this site ("showcase of over 2,500 coloured vinyl, picture discs, collector items & special pressings"). I will also grant, by the way, that some of the coloured-vinyl records in that stash of singles I bought the other day are probably closer to aesthetically-driven labours of love from small bands with small budgets than the rather vile cynicism behind the big re-issues.   Overall though, I think I can take or leave this minor obsession with turning steadfast coal-black into dazzling rainbow colours. True, I sometimes associate certain lurid colours (lime green, flesh pink, electric blue) with the pleasing colour palette of punk and new wave - a point made in Lavinia Greenlaw's The Importance Of Music To Girls. Poly Styrene's clothing, the Sex Pistols album cover, quite a bit of the design and iconography of punk. It was all part of a colour-inflected confrontational approach which still jumps out at you - all a big part of punk's visual aesthetic.  

Anyway, just time for a quick anecdote. When I was 14 a friend from my street very sweetly offered to sell me his "spare" copy of Squeeze's newly-released Cool For Cats. Brilliant, I thought, I really like that record. So I immediately went back home to get several week's worth of my meagre pocket money and gratefully bought it. Forty or fifty pence was duly handed over. Only, what did I later discover? This kind friend had heard that Cool For Cats had been issued in a new pink-vinyl edition (presumably a record company effort to bump it up a few places higher in the charts) and so had gone back to the record shop to get the exciting pink version and therefore wanted to offload his boring black vinyl copy onto somebody, anybody, a willing sucker, me. Duped again! Nevertheless, dupe that I am I've still got that Squeeze record and I still like it. It's in a colourful bright-pink picture sleeve but the record is a deep, deep vision of solid-black grooves. Black and beautiful! Black, lovely black. There's nothing to beat it. Yes, when all is said and done black is still the colour of my true love's ... record collection. Her hair? I can't remember...