grumpyf1

Streaming? Er... I watched an episode of Top of the Pops from 1986 earlier. At the time it was originally broadcast, I was 18. Yes, I am that old. At that point in my life, I’d grown up absolutely loving music. TOTP was one of my essential sources of the all important new songs and chart placings, along with Radio 1’s Top 40 show. I was buying lots of vinyl. Recording lots of cassettes. Things were fantastic. But I was just getting the first inkling that there were new styles, bands and artists appearing that – and this was quite a shock to me – I wasn’t particularly enthralled by. Why? Well, up to that point I’d assumed my love of all types of music would be everlasting. To discover otherwise was a bit of shock. Still, the years rolled by and there was still a lot of great music around. True, Rave/House never did anything for me, and most Rap doesn’t float my boat. Sections of the 1990s were rubbish, from my point of view. I was buying lots of CDs. And still recording tapes...

I may be the wrong side of a decade behind the rest of the country, but the time has come for me to make a painfully difficult decision. Should I retire my record collection? In case there are any young personages reading an actual newspaper (which is pretty unlikely, when you think about it), firstly: Yo! Wassup? Fo’ shizzle! Innit. Secondly: A ‘record’ is a hard copy of an mp3, made out of fragile, easily damageable, black plasticky stuff, called ‘vinyl’. Considering they usually held a maximum of around 12 songs, they were ridiculously large, and needed a small diamond placed on their surface, whilst being rotated, to get the sound out. I know. Incredible, isn’t it? My record collection takes up the space of a fridge, but still contains less than 1500 songs. It’s also quite hard to take ELO’s epic ‘Out Of The Blue’ out with me when I go walking, not least because I don’t have an extension lead that long for the record player. Since the invention of the Compact Disc (itself...