Russell Brown is a freelance journalist based in Auckland.
OPINION: The first time I bought a record with my own money was in 1974. When I say money, I mean the gift voucher I got at Dad’s work Christmas party, but the value was real. I knew immediately what I wanted because I’d seen it on TV.
That was the year Space Waltz had burst through the family-friendly fields of the TV talent quest New Faces to play Out on the Street. Alastair Riddell, blazingly androgynous, widened his eyes and mugged the camera so effectively that it was easy to ignore the fact that the rest of the band looked like ordinary chaps. The judges were bemused and every young person in the country was electrified. “This was a culture-shock moment in the extreme,” author Ian Chapman would write years later. “Truly, things would never be the same.”
I don’t have my original copy, but I’m glad I picked up a replacement before the collectors caught on. The same seven-inch single, with its standard EMI label and plain-paper sleeve, sold for $47.70 on the record catalogue site Discogs a while ago. The odd sum indicates that it was priced in a foreign currency.
Foreign collectors have decreed that other artefacts of my childhood fetch a price too. 20 Solid Gold Hits, from 1971, featuring the Mike Curb Congregation’s Burning Bridges, might sell for $30. But the real money, the collectors have deemed, is at the other end of the series, when it had lost the zeitgeist. A copy of 20 Solid Gold Hits Vol 36, featuring Tears for Fears and Blancmange, can be found in Australia for $265 – a price you will definitely not be offered if you take a copy into Auckland’s Real Groovy Records.
The records of my late teens, which I have managed to keep, represent another step up. Copies of The Pin Group’s Ambivalence, the first release on Flying Nun Records in 1981, change hands for as much as $2500. These records have scarcity built in, not only because most were released in small numbers, but because each is unique.
You own not just a record but a sleeve individually screen-printed by the band’s friend Ronnie van Hout.
There is a resonance in objects. The Crown Lynn plates in the cupboard, utilitarian in their time, seem to shine a little more after you’ve seen them painted by hand in the revelatory documentary Crown Lynn: A Māori Story. Those screen-printed sleeves tell the story of the way kids at the Christchurch School of Art picked up an old-fashioned printing technique scorned by their tutors and made it something new and visceral.
Records themselves have personalities. Two discs might carry the same song, but one might be lighter or heavier, louder or softer, than the other.
“Digging”, the record fancier’s term for rifling through stacks of old discs, evokes the idea of buried treasure. It’s addictive.
I once had to conclude a dig for weird old disco records in the basement of a store in New York because I realised my hands were not only black with the dirt of several decades, but also bleeding. I did emerge with a chunky pressing of Barry White’s It’s Ecstasy When You Lie Down Next to Me so blood was not shed in vain.
New vinyl records are heavy, dressed in elegant sleeves and usually remastered to sound better than ever.
They’re also horrifyingly expensive. But they still have a materiality that will always be denied to the compact disc, which is just a format for something that is everywhere now – digitally encoded music.
Space Waltz, by the way, have just released their second album 48 years after the first. I am a little disappointed it’s not on vinyl.
