Buying vinyl
Yesterday, I mentioned that I’d set up a borrowed turntable. The next step, of course, was to buy some vinyl. I haven’t had a turntable of my own since I was a very small child and had a plastic, two-part turntable on which I played the hits from Disney films, so I needed to go out and start a collection. My brother kindly started me off by giving me the excellent album ‘Riot on an Empty Street’ by the Kings of Convenience on vinyl for my birthday. As a newly-recorded album, this was rich and detailed, and the warmth and presence of the medium showed off the delicate vocals and intricate acoustic guitar playing to their best advantage. This was an excellent start.
I headed out to Birmingham’s finest second-hand record shops in search of bargains. There are several good shops, which all have slightly different markets, but my favourite by far was [The Diskery][3], the very place where Steve Winwood used to buy American R&B albums. They have a huge selection in all kinds of genres, their stock seems to generally be in excellent condition, and they are very reasonably priced. After much shuffling through the £1 bin and ‘general rock’ sections, I came away with four discs for a grand total of £11. Another advantage of vinyl is that you can get a lot of music for your money if you stick to second-hand, non-collectable discs.
If you promise not to laugh, here are my choices:
[3]: http://uk.multimap.com/map/browse.cgi?pc=B5%206QB&title=The%20Diskery&scale=25000 “Map showing the location of The Diskery”
