Why I Decided To Sell (A Really Huge Chunk Of) My Record Collection

I took a formidable wedge of my record collection to a vinyl dealer friend in Gloucestershire this week. It was a chaotic week containing many unexpected tasks so I didn’t get around to counting exactly how many records there were. 600? 700? Something like that. What I do know is they filled virtually most of the inside of a VW Polo. I suspect, as our next house move looms, and I ask myself more honest questions related to my listening habits, the precise number of days I probably have left on the planet, the cost of rent and removal companies and my priorities in life, there will be more. Perhaps even a frighteningly large number more.

A very newspaper editor way exists to frame this, which is something along the lines of ‘AUTHOR FLOGS LIFETIME’S LABOUR OF LOVE AFTER FAILING TO RECEIVE EARNINGS FROM PUBLISHER AND GETTING KICKED OUT OF HOUSE BY LANDLADY’. But this isn’t a newspaper - thank goodness - and to dwell too hard on that angle would be disingenuous of me, or an oversimplification, at the very least. Yes, my decision to sell lots of my beloved records has undoubtedly been nudged on by my ex-publisher Unbound’s failure to pay me the £20,000-plus they owe me, and the recent, sudden news that my partner and I have to leave our house much sooner than we thought we’d have to, but I’ve been locked in a boxer’s clinch with existential questions about material objects for several years, and something probably had to give at some point. There is, in short, only so many times you can move house before you look at the heavy boxes of things you have carted around over hundreds of miles of terrain and, though seeing the love in some of those boxes, ask yourself whether that love is still worth the stress it has caused you. Since my next move will be my 26th, perhaps the exact answer to the question of what “so many times” means is “25”.

I bought my first two albums from a now forgotten record shop in Nottingham called Revolver, in May 1982, on my 7th birthday, accompanied by my dad: Rio by Duran Duran and Lexicon Of Love by ABC. I regretted neither purchase, but it’s the still brilliant Lexicon - essentially, a bloke who lived up just the road from me and his mates experimenting joyfully with the surprising idea of Scott Walker fronting Chic - which has best faced up to time’s tough questions. Much later, when I became a music journalist, I eventually sold many of the CDs I’d been sent by record companies and spent the money on old LPs. My collection has fluctuated in weight over the years, and I’ve always thought of myself as being quite brutal with it, and tried my best to be honest in terms of questions related to what I want to own and what I feel I ought to own. But taste expands exponentially with age and unbridled enthusiasm. More records lead only to more records, spanning more genres. If you spend as much time in record shops as I do, and you swap recommendations with as many record nerds as I do, you can limit your record collection to the absolute cream of the crop and still have a collection of a size that brings full-grown, burly men who work for removal companies to the verge of tears.

My record collection is me. A record collection can represent the story of a life, and, when it’s bigger, the representation becomes more nuanced and unique. Nobody else has a collection of around 2500 LPs which contains the exact same 2500 LPs - well, ok, perhaps more like 1800 since Tuesday - mine does. I used to joke, before I’d written three novels, “Well, y’know, if I never get around to writing that psychedelic fiction I desperately want to, at least people will say of me, when I die, ‘That guy had a fucking good record collection’.” But why does it matter? Why do I need these records here? The plain fact of owning the records I own does not make me a superior human being, and, despite what I am sometimes lulled into believing, my original pressing of SF Sorrow by The Pretty Things or the second Kathy Smith LP or the fourteen James Brown albums I own are not bona fide parts of my body in daily use.

I vastly prefer the sound of vinyl, played through fifty-year-old hi-fi equipment, to that of digitised music, but that’s not the only explanation for why the records I have in my house are in my house. There are, without doubt, dozens, if not hundreds of these records I stare at, right now, which I will never play again. But who knows for sure? I just might. Also, they represent a chronicle of a very specific, thought-out chiselling and foraging: 43 years of it, to be exact. So many forgotten dusty places, so many exploratory missions. I think it’s perhaps my writer’s sensibility which makes me feel the heartbreak of dispensing with that chronicle more acutely. It can feel, at worst, like losing a major chunk of a manuscript, which you will never quite get back in its original form. I know, because I actually did that once, and it hurts.

We’re in the midst of a large cull of all kinds of our possessions at the moment: we’ll undoubtedly be moving to a smaller building and travelling light has never been more appealing. But as we evaluate art, lamps, plantpots, chairs, we find ourselves largely in agreement. “Oh no, NO way is that going, even if we end up living in a small dripping cave at the bottom of a ravine.” “We can live without that, can’t we? It’s nice, but it’s not special." The process is simple. It gets a bit tougher where books are concerned and certain collections of certain jacket designs and imprints are going to lead to a lot of pained deliberations. Aside from that, it’s relatively simple for me: if it’s a book I’ve read which I found unforgettable, it stays. But if I merely liked it, I have decided I can loosen my grip. If I’ve been intending to read it for two years, but never quite been pulled to, I’m also now happy for it to go. But the fact that reading a book is a commitment of days, maybe weeks, makes the decision-making a little easier than it is with records. Albums generally take around 45 minutes to listen to. What if I suddenly feel DESPERATE to hear something I’ve sold? Also, there are many I’ll never find again, or, if I do, will only be available for quadruple the price I bought them for.

But is my record collection me after all? Herein can perhaps be found the big lie: the one that stops us reaching for the machete of authenticity and instead tentatively clipping around the edges with what we think is a pair of shears with the phrase “keep it real” etched into their metal. You go out of your way to edit and mould everything into a representation of yourself when, in fact, representation is intrinsically elusive: there’s always a record you’re quietly and surprisingly going off, behind your own back, or some previously off-putting album whose merits have, out of nowhere, finally clicked for you. This will keep happening, forever, undoubtedly, and your inner curator’s best attempts to keep up will be futile. I made the mistake of thinking my taste was set in stone ten, even twenty, years ago. But there’s a load of LPs I loved then that I’ve since let go of without a moment’s hesitation. It makes sense, when you consider that during that period the cells in my body have completely regenerated at least once.

Maybe I miss some of those old cells. But I’m at peace with not having them any more. I suspect - ok, hope - it will be the same with this latest batch of records.

A cell is not an arm, or a foot, or an eye, or even a gallbladder.

Maybe the “overwhelmed by records” part of my life is over, and that’s totally fine.

Haven’t decided yet if I’m selling that Mr Fox LP yet: it’s brilliant and far-out and weird but the proceeds from it will buy me a full tank of petrol. Also finding it very hard to part with soul and funk: the chunk on the left behind The Rainy Daze LP (goodbye) is staying.

I have had several conversations with fellow record nerds who have been wrestling with similar questions recently. No doubt some of it is age-related: we’re nearly all in that 45-55 band that tends to prompt trenchant analysis of one’s relationship with stuff in a way that the first half of life doesn’t. For me, there’s an extra, rogue factor, complicating everything further: the role of 1960s psych rock and jazz archivist and midcentury book and art rummager does not sit calmly with the role of inveterate relocator. This latter vocation - if mostly by accident - shows no sign yet of going away. My partner and I will almost certainly have to move twice more in the next year. So I’m sure a lot of the unburdened feeling I got when I dropped those LPs off with Sean at Klangtone Records in Stroud on Tuesday is about that. And while my brain has a way of conveniently forgetting the hell of a house move and convincing itself everything wasn’t so bad after all, somewhere deep in its folds it still knows the ugly truth.

What it boils down is a battle between the two sides of myself: Side A who seems to think that owning two first pressings of Mass In F Minor by The Electric Prunes (one for emergencies) is no less important than eating five eighty gram portions of fruit and veg per day, and Side B who increasingly just wants everything to be as non-stressful and spacious and loose and calm as possible, because non-stressful and spacious and loose and calm means more opportunities to write and read and maintain better health. It always used to be a battle Side A won. The big change I can feel right now is Side B getting the better of him. Side B reminds Side A that he was only ever going to be a custodian of these records anyway, in the grand scheme. Side B reminds Side A what a good feeling it is when you hear from someone you have passed a record onto that they are getting pleasure from its songs. Side B thinks side A is, despite his good points and impeccable hunting skills, getting lost in a self-conning venality, and is willing to sacrifice some of the better things in life, such as creativity and a healthy pace of life, for materialistic completist’s lust. Side B is, it appears, no longer going to stand for that. Side A, beginning to bow to Side B’s increasing assertiveness, bravery and logic, maybe feels better about losing the argument than he once might have, knowing that three novels are written, and the records no longer stand as a totemic placeholder for what those novels were going to represent. Many records have gone. Many more probably must follow them to new homes. But nobody can take away a novel you have written and published (even though it could be argued that in my case somebody kind of tried to, recently).

The physical fact of having something in your house that formed a tiny bit of the writer you are or the person you are does not, just by being there, continue to make you that writer or that person.

The physical fact of no longer having something in your house that formed a tiny bit of the writer you are will not stop you being the writer you are, or the writer you want to be.

In fact, there’s a possibility that its absence might assist what you had somehow come to believe it would hinder.

Once you fully and rationally address that, and what you really want out of life, at this precise moment, the choice gets significantly more straightforward.

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You can listen to me talking about what’s happened with Unbound on the latest episode of BBC Radio 4’s You And Yours here (starts just over 19 mins in).

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