Vinylrichie’s Weblog

Crikey. Isn’t January interesting? Some days in this wet, bleak northern hemisphere the sun doesn’t seem to rise at all and if it does it buggers off after five hours ‘work’ before plunging us back into the cloying and interminable darkness. Another er, positive is the fact that work is just as bleak too. There is nothing happening at all as it would appear that no one has any money to spend on second hand records having spent it on calenders, bath salts and perfumes such as Calvin Klein’s ‘Depression’ in the festive shopping free for all. Let’s not forget that January is also the top month for couples to divorce which can be expensive, but at least that means in February I’ll be getting lots of  ex-husbands’ record collections in from newly seperated women so they can make room for more shoes/cushions.

What can I do to make the money roll in? I did suggest to the proprietor that we double as an internet cafe. We have at least four stained mugs, a kettle and a computer so it’s all there ready to be utilised. The only problem is that I’ll have nothing to do as the PC will be commandeered by some geek who wants to play online ’World of Warcraft’ with some fat, socially inept B.O soaked man on the other side of the planet for seven hours. Only having one PC is quite a drawback and not having anything near proper catering facilities is detrimental to my fabulous idea too (the kettle is in the same spider and grime infested kitchenette room as the slightly wobbly toilet – it’s very grim as well as excruciatingly chilly). So there was my one half-baked idea thwarted and I don’t have any others at all due to lack of motivation/caring/lack of brain cells through substance abuse.

People tell me that we should get a website ‘built’ and list everything we have in stock. I find it hard to believe that people will trawl through page after page of Carpenters singles but they could be right, after all the web is frequented by total lunatics (marvellously and precisely illustrated by this: http://www.carrotmuseum.co.uk/ for example) but it isn’t my decision. We do sell on the net but only list things that we can’t seem to shift in store (that’s a lot then) or valuable items. It’s highly lucrative and massively, unsurprisingly irritating. The main reason is that the public are capable of extreme fussiness – how many more emails am I going to have to reply to that insist on a full refund for their CD because the jewel case has a hairline crack caused by our careless postal service? Suggesting that it is cheaper for them to buy another case in their local record shop for about twenty pence rather than send it back for eighty pence never seems to work. Each to their own.

But thank God (TM) for the internet. In my youth we only had Ceefax and Teletext (this may confuse my foreign reader(s) – Google it) which was the eighties equivalent of the web but the porn looked very disappointing (cor, look at the green blocks on that!) I would surely go bonkers, sorry, more bonkers without it to keep me company on the those long days with few real people to connect with. Pressing F5 all day to see if anyone has sent me a message on Facebook is ever so fulfilling and makes the time crawl by that little bit faster and I go home with the warm glow of fulfillment at the end of the day. Sometimes, like you, I look for jobs on my PC whilst being paid (negligably) to do so. This is an excercise in confusion and bewilderment for me as I have no idea what the job descriptions mean in 99% of the listings. Let this be a warning to younger people: don’t stay in the same job for 12 years or you will be left behind and estranged from the processes of change, a bit like going to prison I should imagine, but at least you’ll get sex there. I don’t think I’m likely to survive if I get released back into the wild, I’ll probably be unable to move more than ten yards away from my place of captivity and will die of exposure scratching at the door of the shop forlornly whilst sobbing. So for heaven’s sake buy a CD of something from me or you will be responsible for my untimely, cruelly slow death. Or if you can point me to a job description that I may understand that would be better.

Right, I’m off now as I have a lot of F5 pressing to catch up on and there’s only three hours and thirty two minutes left to do it in now. Must crack on.

 The dawning of a brand new year heralds much soul searching amongst us humans. New starts are announced, self improvement goals are declared and, more importantly, easter eggs hit the shelves to tempt those new year dieters back into the trap of scoffing and self loathing where they belong. Thankfully diets aren’t something I have to worry about as I have the metabolism of a hyperactive shrew on amphetamines, so that leaves me free to worry about all sorts of other things including how the music industry is irrevocably altered for the worse each year and that, once again, I may be out of work very soon and will have to join the ranks of mobile phone sales people (although I’d have to have spikier, greasier hair and buy an even cheaper suit than the one I own already.)

It’s only the 8th of January and already the first bit of depressing news has reached me. The news is that HMV have decided to stop selling 7″ singles to (get this) ‘make room for more modern technology’. I think they seem to have forgotten a vital detail in their decision: if you are a record store you usually stock records. So now they have a section devoted to memory sticks and bloody i-pods. With each passing day I begin to hate the i-pod/MP3 thing even more and wish to return to the days of cassette singles, ‘Nice Price’ LPs and video tapes. This really doesn’t bode well for my technological future as I’m only(only?) 32 and there are bound to be more breakthroughs for me to lag behind with in the very near future whilst I deny their existence and continue to cling on to my ‘Walkman’ tightly. (At least you can replace the sodding batteries with those.)

But what of this brand new age? What is in store for us? I predict that in the future you will be able to have a microchip which holds all 900,000 Bob Dylan albums inserted in your buttocks with a syringe. I suppose it’ll be a bit like micro chipping a dog. Now, instead of doing that fiddling thing that everyone does with the all-too-clever twirly dial thing on the fascia of an i-pod whilst walking into people, all one will have to do is squeeze said buttocks together and think of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ and it will pipe the music betwixt arse and earhole. The one draw back is that you’ll look even more vacant than usual or if you are singing along you’ll look more demented than those you see talking to themselves in the street only to realise later that they have one of those silly bluetooth things stuffed in their ear to make them look important/space age just so they can keep their hands free to hold frappacinos and lifestyle magazines.

I’m sure a fair few of you are more enthusiastic about new technology than I. (I’m sure most of you are actually more enthusiastic about everything.) I sometimes wonder if in  a past life I spent my time hunched over parchment illuminated by the sulphur glow of candlelight, scratching away with my quill bemoaning the invention of pens and other devil’s tools before nipping off to the apothecary to get my scrofula sorted. A lot of ‘advances’ are totally pointless though. Take Blu-Ray DVDs for instance. We’ve only just managed to replace our VHS tapes with DVDs and now they want us to replace our DVDs with newer, shinier versions of DVDs - in funkier cases and for £30 a pop. Imagine the disappointment on the face of techno lovers when they get their new copy of Blu-Ray ‘Independence Day’ home and discover that it’s still shit, but just clearer shit. Still, as Kevin Costner knows ‘if you build it they will come’. He was talking stupidly about dead baseball players but in this context I’m talking about the anoraks that wait for these new formats to emerge so they can swiftly max their credit cards, only for the price to plummet 12 months later to a level even your goldfish can afford (but won’t buy because it’s not that stupid…plus goldfish can’t go shopping. Yet. You’ll have to wait for the i-goldfish or something.)

So to sum up: old stuff – yay! New stuff: Boo shucks. I’m off to buy a word processor now, all this glowing screen thing is freaking me out. Until, next time. Happy New Year by the way.

 Old people. There are a lot of them about, you may have seen them hanging around in shopping centres congregating around seats sucking mints and saying ‘Ohhh yes, dear, I know dear’ to each other loudly before toddling off to dawdle in the street to stop you getting anywhere fast. (But they move bloody fast when they want to, oh yes. There isn’t anything more disconcerting than seeing a decrepit oldie with a stick moving faster than you. This I see a lot.)

Pensioners (I feel mean already) are so predictable that it can be an exercise in extreme annoyance to deal with them. This is because I have to have the same conversation with each of them, usually twice: once at normal volume and then at SHOUTING level as they seldom hear me over the gangster rap I like to play to them. Why do I find them irritating? You may have noticed I find ALL people irritating but they take the (slightly stale rich tea) biscuit. Mainly this is due to the fact that any music released after 1974 is ‘modern rubbish’. The last LP or cassette (CDs DO NOT EXIST) they bought would’ve been a Leo Sayer album but they didn’t listen to it much because it was too challenging. Therefore they went back to listening to Glenn Miller, the ‘Oklahoma!’ soundtrack or a Richard Clayderman compilation on MFP. Eventually their record player’s stylus would’ve died never to be replaced. Their record collection (usually numbering about 12 LPs) then redundantly sits beneath their all in one stereo radiogram for the next 25 years before they have a brainstorm and decide to sell them as they saw on the telly that all old records are worth a fortune. By this time they can barely lift a soiled handkerchief so they will telephone the shop to find out how many thousands of pounds they will get for a complete set of Mantovani LPs. The conversation will go as thus:

‘Hello? Hello? Do you collect records?’

‘Do I collect records? I take it you mean does the shop buy used records? Yes, we do.’

‘I’ve got some old ones. There are some big ones and small ones.’

‘What sort of music?’ I ask, knowing full well what is about to take place.

At this point I can stop listening and go and make a cuppa. They generally don’t know what they’ve got as they haven’t looked at them for years. One thing is for sure, they will mention the Beatles. It is a little known statute that every british household must have at least one Beatles record, preferably really scratched, written on and replete with stained/crinkled cover. Then I have to explain that they were the biggest selling band on the planet and just because they’ve heard of them and heard some bastard saying how valuable they are doesn’t mean anything. They think I’m lying as the bloke on the telly said it was true. To cut this short I’ll ask them to bring the bloody thing in with the rest of their records for me to yawn at. Great. What I need is another copy of ‘With the Beatles’ to add to the other 40 I have, the only difference being that the scratches are in different places….

Rather conveniently as I was churning out my waffle above, the door opened and I was presented with a couple of bags of records from an old couple. Lo and behold I have had my stereotypical attitude fortified with the contents of said bags. The bag (which I got lumbered with because they wouldn’t take them away again) contained: Geoff Love’s Christmas LP, The new sounds of Liberace, the Stars salute Sinatra (featuring performances by a stella group of crinkly or now dead warblers like Shirley Bassey, Harry Secombe and Frankie Vaughan), The Big Ben Hawaiian Band, Perry Como’s 40 Greatest Hits (forty?!), the (ubiquitous) Sound of Music soundtrack, Mrs Mills Party Favourites….I give up. There are more but you’re probably just as bored as me.  It really is difficult to tell these pensioners that their records are only appreciated by the very nearly dead. For some unknown reason they must think that hoards of twenty year olds queue by the shop door each morning frantically jostling each other to get in first to snap up that copy of ‘This Is….Val Doonican’.

I can’t wait to see if this will be the case in decades to come. When I get old I like to think that record shops (should we miraculously survive the interminable march of ‘progress’) will be turning their noses up at Metallica’s black album for being too easy listening and the new generation of kids will laugh at us for listening to Radiohead (that old rubbish.) My dad is a great indication of who I’m likely to turn into. Only the other day he was sitting talking to a family relative lauding ‘proper music’ like Brian Poole and the Tremeloes as I sat shaking my head fully aware that I’ll be doing exactly the same to my nieces and nephew in twenty years. ‘You call this music?’ I will sneer. ‘In my day we had proper bands like ‘Muse’ and ‘Interpol’, none of this noise…’