Vinyl(s)

In the beginning was the vinyl. 

Well, not quite at the dawn of recorded music. Originally, from the 1880s onwards, there were perforated paper rolls for pianolas, wax cylinders for phonographs, flat and brittle shellac discs for gramophones and even magnetic reel-to-reel for tape-recorders. In fact vinyl records, made from polyvinyl chloride (or PVC), didn't make their appearance on the scene until the 1940s, sixty years into the process.

The durable two-sided discs contained analogue recordings in a continuous groove and were played on the turntable of a device with a valve amplifier and one or more speakers. The records came in two varieties: 7-inch "singles" playing at 45 rpm (revolutions per minute) and 12-inch "long players" (aka LPs) spinning at 33rpm. They were nicknamed variously discs, frisbees, hot biscuits, hot wax, liquorice pizzas, platters, slabs, and spinners. 

Then since the golden age of vinyl records (1950s to 1980s) look what else has come along. First of all cassette tapes, CDs, minidiscs and  i-Pods and then the recording angels went truly ethereal with the arrival of digital streaming services such as Napster and Spotify.

Some of you whippersnappers won't even have possessed a record-player or a vinyl disc, maybe not even CDs. I had my hand luggage searched at Manchester airport last summer and the security lady took great delight in holding up my Sony Walkman CD player and asking her youthful colleagues "Does anybody know what this is?" Few did, much indulgent amusement at my expense.

Nowadays music has blue teeth and Alexa as DJ. But those of us of an age regret selling our record collections back in the 1990s, or boxing them up in the loft for want of anything to play them on anymore. I bought my first vinyl in the early 1960s (starting with The Beatles) and then sold hundreds of LPs thirty years later because CDs were more compact and versatile. 

I only hung on to a few LP records that I thought would never get reissued on CD, and then over the last decade I've been buying some of my old favourites on vinyl again as the format has been making a (somewhat expensive) comeback. I now have my favourite fifty albums of all time, many in pristine 180g vinyl, because you really can't beat the organic sound quality of a record played on a good hi-fi system.

However, for a few decades sales of vinyl records plummeted from their millions per annum to a few hundred thousand, mostly on specialist labels and for club DJs who kept the vinyl culture going into the new millennium with their twin decks and their 12" grooves. So it's DJing I'm going to focus on today.

state of the art DJ twin-deck rig

The first documented use of the term disc jockey (DJ) is from 1941, no great surprise that it was coincident with the arrival of vinyl records. From the Second World War onwards, through the birth of rock & roll as a phenomenon, radio presenters who played records over the air started to become celebrities in their own right, building their fan base, commenting on the music they liked, having the pulling power to make songs 'hits'.

In America, the likes of Alan Freed, Bill Randle, Dick Clark, Murray the K and Wolfman Jack became cult figures. Randle brought Elvis Presley to the attention of the nation in the 1950s, and Murray the K did the same for The Beatles a decade later.

In the UK we had Brian Matthews and Alan Freeman on the BBC, Kid Jensen, Jimmy Saville and Johnny Walker on Radio Luxembourg and then a raft of DJs who would eventually become household names as pirate radio stations proliferated in the 1960s with Dave Cash, Dave Lee Travis, Emperor Rosko, John Peel, Keith Skues, Kenny Everett, Simon Dee, Tony Blackburn  and many more. (By the way, if you haven't seen the brilliant Richard Curtis movie 'The Boat That Rocked', remedy that soonest please, you won't be disappointed.) 

Radio Caroline DJ about to play the latest 'hot biscuit'

As well as radio DJs (whether terrestrial or piratical), the 1960s also gave rise to an enduring breed of vinyl spinning disk jockeys at clubs, dancehalls and discotheques up and down the country, They were often more than comperes and spinners of vinyl. Many were influencers and trend-setters, creating or promoting a dance craze here, a whole scene there... in no particular order or chronology, mod, goth, Motown, hip-hop, bluebeat, psychedelia, northern soul, grime, acid house, hi-NRG, electronica, reggae, new romantic, techno, ambient, jungle, ska, Eurobeat, whatever people wanted dance the night away to.

I can name-check a few movers and shakers if you like. Jeff Dexter in London basically turned the country onto the twist, before becoming the regular DJ at Middle Earth in the mid-sixties. Ian Levine and Rob Winstanley curated Northern Soul at places like the Twisted Wheel and Wigan Casino in the 1970s. Dave Haslam was the top DJ at Manchester's Haçienda during that city's Madchester era of the 1980s. Eddie Richards, godfather of 'house' music, was the main man at Camden Palace from the 1980s onwards. Annie Mac was a favourite spinner at Creamfields in more recent years. 

Then there are high profile DJs you've probably heard of by cultural osmosis, like Big Youth, Calvin Harris, Carl Cox, Fatboy Slim, Paul Oakenfold and Pete Tong, and beyond them a plethora you've certainly never heard of who go by funny aliases like Bro Safari, Deadmau5, Eiffel 65, Green Velvet, Jack Beats, Jillionaire, Lisa Lashes, NERVO, Sharkey, Totempole and Weird Genius.

I was once tempted by an offer to host a music show on local radio here in the jewel of the north. I thought about it for a while, the opportunity to turn people on to the range of music I like. I'd got as far as choosing an alias, Stanley Park, and a name for the show which would go out on Friday nights as Stanley Park's Midnight Works. But then I figured I'd be permanently tired with everything else I try to do - and anyway it turned out that the radio station doesn't have turntables and vinyl anymore, it's all digital now, WAV and FLAC and MP3 files plucked from the ether. So I got off that particular cloud.

While researching for this piece, I came across the song 'Last Night A DJ Saved My Life', a cheesy disco dance hit in the early 1980s for New York group Indeep. Rolling Stone magazine declared it to be "one of the greatest songs ever written about being a girl, listening to the radio, or any combination of the two" (lol) and Billboard reckons it's in the top fifty best dance tunes ever. I watched the video. It's two girls singing and a DJ playing the backing track on vinyl on a deck. The protagonists sing "if it wasn't for the music, I don't know what I'd do, yeah" and the DJ's response is "There's not a problem that I can't fix, 'Cause I can do it in the mix." What a hero.

I also stumbled upon the fact that a playful tweak of the title has given rise to a T-shirt very popular with clubbers (as pictured below) and I was momentarily diverted by the thought of perhaps writing a short story that would do justice to the title 'Last Night A DJ Shaved My Wife', something along the lines of a feisty midwife whose husband has walked out on her and three young children, so she becomes a sought-after DJ in a local nightclub at week-ends while delivering babies by day. How does that work as a treatment?

de rigeur saucy clubbing T-shirt "LAST NIGHT A DJ SHAVED MY WIFE"

I didn't go there in the end (not enough hours in the Saturday), but I did want to write a poem about the power of DJing, that shamanistic leading of the musical tribe into revel and rave. It's not the first time I've written on the topic. Check out this blog from six Januarys ago, which includes a poem featuring DJ Sky High (aka the Detonator) in Radio Big Bang.

As background (though one should never explain a poem), in 1927 psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who never visited Liverpool, claimed to have had a dream about the city saying “I found myself in a dirty, sooty city. It was night, and winter, and dark, and raining. I was in Liverpool. With a number of Swiss—say half a dozen. I walked through the dark streets... we found a broad square dimly illuminated by street lights, into which many streets converged. The various quarters of the city were arranged radially around the square. In the centre was a round pool, and in the middle of it a small island. While everything round about was obscured by rain, fog, smoke and dimly lit darkness, the little island blazed with sunlight. I had a vision of unearthly beauty, and that is why I was able to live at all. Liverpool is the “pool of life.” The “liver,” according to an old view, is the seat of life, that which makes to live.”. A local poet in the 1970s reckoned that Jung and his dream friends had arrived at the Cavern in Matthew Street.

The poem is truly a work-in-progress, to be continued obviously (at some point) but never mind that. So move the furniture out of the way, put on your black vinyl shoes and dance to the groove of...

Scouse House

A dream of a darkened cavern - the sound, the lights,

lights and sound of happy humanity bouncing round

bobbing and spinning at the bidding of  DJ Jungman.

Girls in short PVC dresses, lads all in black vinyl macs

sway as one to the rhythm of the shaman, undulating

in a primordial soup of collective euphoria,  gyrating

and hydrating, spinning and bobbing in trancelike joy

hydrating, gyrating to the rhythms of 12 inch grooves,

this musical amoeba in the grip of the power of DJing.*

To be continued...

(*pronounced "jing" with a silent d, not "deejaying", and evocative of magic as in Djinn or Genie.)

Thanks for reading, pop pickers! S ;-)

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For The Record

Those of us who were teenagers when music was played on vinyl records, probably regard that as a golden era for music production. It isn’t only the vinyl which is iconic, but the creative and beautifully illustrated sleeves which the records were housed in are also evocative.

For most people, if into music, there are particular groups or records which are associated with moments and times in their lives. That sound and visual impact of vinyl creates a double impression on the memory. Increasingly of course they are becoming popular again as people regain enthusiasm for this form of music.

My favourite contemporary rock group of all- time is Barclay James Harvest and of course I had all their LP’s and associate memories with them and also memories of seeing them live and live again reformed a few years ago.

One particular funny memory I also have is of liking the group Sparks and of getting their album in Liverpool. My parents thought upon looking at the duo (Ron and Russell Mael) that they were rather subversive and not appropriate for me to listen to. However, that only had the effect of making me want to listen even more and waiting until they were out to do so!

For the record I resolved never to do that to my children when they chose their own music to listen to and have endured as patiently as I possibly can, endless music and talk about Taylor Swift as a result.

My experiences in listening to records from childhood also led to a few themes for poems and I conclude my blog with one such poem.

On Record

We pushed the lid down so it fitted tightly,
clipped the needle arm into its cradle
and carried it in like a kid’s coffin.

We were stuck on the steps as it was heavy.
I could hear dad say; ‘It can’t rest in here,
leave it, then put it back in its place.’

Inside, we clashed on where to put it,
but with only one socket it had to be
against the TV set and up the wall.

Pulling the plug on tact, we were told
in no uncertain words to grow up. Pop
music’s not suitable for young minds.

Wouldn’t Handel be more appropriate?
We simply uncoiled each lead, plugged
the speakers in and faced the music.

Thanks for reading and I hope it ‘sparks’ your musical memories, vinyl records or otherwise.

David Wilkinson

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Altered States - "Turn on, tune in, drop out"

The effects of an over-indulgence of Bacardi and coke in my youth shaped my almost tee-total lifestyle.  I should have known better.  Being a licensee’s daughter, I’d seen enough of the downside of having too much to drink in other people.  The strange feelings I had in my head, referred to as ‘being merry’ was no enjoyment.  It was a scary, altered state of mind that made me feel horrible.  The experience taught me to be wary of alcohol and anything else likely to mess with my thought process.

When I was a young teenager, just getting into the Moody Blues, progressive rock, Rolling Stones and later Beatles stuff, it was cool to know who Timothy Leary was.  I thought he was a named character in a Moody Blues song. When I found out that he really existed, I understood him to be a psychedelic guru who opened people’s minds to another level, to see things in a different way and hear music beyond the sounds coming through the speakers from the vinyl. I didn’t know how he did it. I was happily naïve.

LSD – lysergic acid diethylamide – a hallucinogenic drug which Timothy Leary, actually a clinical psychologist, considered to be useful in psychiatry therapy. It was a known recreational drug in those heady, hippy times of the ‘60s and some of the songs from the musicians of the day sound like they were enhanced by something and the lyrics made no sense, well, not to me, but I loved them anyway and still do, in my un-altered state.

 

 

 

Nice to be Here

 

Nice to be here, hope you agree
Lying in the sun
Lovely weather, must climb a tree
The show has just begun

 

All the leaves start swaying to the breeze that's playing
On a thousand violins
And the bees are humming to a frog sat strumming
On a guitar with only one string

 

I can see them, they can't see me
I feel out of sight
I can see them, they can't see me
Much to my delight

 

And it seems worth noting water rats were boating
As a lark began to sing
The sounds kept coming, with Jack Rabbit loudly drumming
On the side of a biscuit tin

 

I can see them, they can't see me
I feel out of sight
I can see them, they can't see me
Much to my delight

 

Silver minnows were devising water ballet so surprising
A mouse played a daffodil
A mole came up blinking underneath an owl who's thinking
How he came to be sat on a hill

 

I can see them they can't see me
I feel out of sight
I can see them, they can't see me
Much to my delight

 

I know you won't believe me, but I'm certain that I did see
A mouse playing daffodil
All the band was really jumping, with Jack Rabbit in there thumping
I found that I couldn't sit still

 

I just had to make it with them 'cause they played my kind of rhythm

 

Ray Thomas  (1941 – 2018)

 

 

Thanks for reading, Pam xx

 

 

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