Days of Vinyl and Poses

O dear o lor', this took me back - in fact I remember listening in just such an intent manner to just that Bowie album when it came out (I went off Bowie subsequently). In those days, listening in rapt silence to an entire vinyl album - often at punishing volume - was de rigueur. The 12" vinyl was an all but sacred object - its very scratches and hisses came, with repeated listenings, to be cherished. Furthermore the cover doubled as 'iconic' artwork and handy surface for joint-rolling (these listening sessions were routinely fuelled by dope and sometimes, more riskily, by acid or other hallucinogens - Captain Beefheart not recommended). Often we vinyl worshippers were giving mediocrity vastly more focused attention than it deserved, and always the dance element of the music was scrupulously ignored, the 'cool' thing being to sit totally still without so much as a tapping toe to acknowledge the presence of rhythm - head banging was considered thoroughly naff. And yet, drug-soused though we might have been, we were intently listening, experiencing the music (and the words) with an intenstiy that is much harder to achieve in these days when whatever music you might want is instantly available and the technology makes it so much easier to flit from track to track and artist to artist than to settle down with one big piece of work and really get to know it. I am most definitely not tempted to join them, but these vinyl devotees - retroprogressive heroes - are doing a good job, showing that there is another, more immersive and focused way to engage with the music. And of course they're so young they're only just finding this out for themselves - they weren't there, enduring the soul-sapping experience of being stuck in a room full of silent dopeheads with Dark Side of the Moon droning on and on and on. Ah those dear dead days...