Plastic records in plastic sleeves - a plastic punk writes

So, major news from the home front - all my 7" records have now been treated to glossy new plastic outer sleeves. Five hundred sleeves have been purchased. As a certain US president would say - big news. Big, big news. Also, I've splashed out on a few hundred white paper covers - bye bye those horrible old cardboard ones or the tatty, stained paper ones. No more black or horrible cream ones either. We're going all-white, like those collections you see from people who've got about a thousand reggae singles - formidably anonymous, many of the labels scratched out as well. So what, you may ask? So WHAT! Why should I care about this idiot's shitty bunch of singles, his mediocre Blondie records or dozens of disco songs he probably hardly ever plays? Tread softly, dear reader, for you tread on my ... vinyl dreams.

Vinyl dreams of are made of this

Well, you should care! Because, for one thing, lurking within this modest collection of (mostly) ancient music is a tiny inner core of records I've had since my shy teenage years - Ruts, Stiff Little Fingers, Sham 69, Skids, stuff like that. Yeah, well, maybe you're not overly fascinated by this. But ... slightly more interestingly, there's the whole business of how and why people set about preserving their music. For the entire time I've had records (40 years) I've either been unconscious of any proper sense of wanting to do this or - later on - positively resistant to it. Somehow, the idea that you would spend money on things like sleeves seemed over-indulgent. Not er, very punk, not cool. No, spending money on the paraphernalia and outer-casings of records rather than the actual things themselves seemed showy and inauthentic. "Plastic punks" was once the put-down and surely this is what they did - covered their second-rate records (XTC not Wire, Sigue Sigue Sputnik not the Fall) in plastic sleeves. Showed them off to their mates. Saw them more as icons of status than as genuinely exciting and important music. Well, now I'm joining them. My UK Subs-era punk and new wave, my reggae (mostly cast-offs from a reggae-collecting friend), my disco and funk (a coupla hundred), my random charity shop purchases, the odd direct-from-the-band-at-a-gig acquisition - they're all now lovingly encased in 450-gauge, 112.5-micron polythene and, if they don't have a picture or record label sleeve, they're also snugly nestling inside snowy-white poly-lined anti-static paper covers. C'est magnifique, non? Hmm. I'm not even that especially interested in vinyl, going years deliberately not buying it, so why have I done it? Why does anyone do it? Partly, I think, it's something to do with what I was saying in a recent blog - that the near-miraculous survival powers of vinyl seems to require some kind of recognition. A bit of respect. They've already survived decades of haphazard possession, maybe it's time to er, look after them. Plus, I must admit, I quite like the idea of a complete overhaul - with all of them going into equally-new sleeves. Now, like all the best "collections", their uniformity is part of their appeal. Feathery soft plastic for feathery soft minds ...

I could be happy or in distress: the romance of record sleeves

It's a sort of pathology, this obsession with collections, with order, with the overall scheme. Next I'll be devising ever more complicated filing arrangements for my nicely-sleeved records - by colour, by record label, by catalogue number. Or maybe it should be according to the chronological order in which I bought/acquired them, painstakingly reconstructed via some impossibly-difficult process of historical retrieval. Ah! I know! I'll replicate what that person who avidly collects all the godawful Now That's What I Call Music series does. He doesn't even take the shrink-wrap packaging off them. Buys multiple copies of each edition and just stores them in his loft. Now that's what I call collecting ...