To Put Away Childish Things #10

A brief history of music in the home.

Musical boxes. Wax cylinders. Vinyl records (assorted sizes). Cassette tape. Compact discs. Downloads.

Assuming this blog survives posterity (and given the nature of the internet you could be reading it twenty years after I've written and forgotten it) there is every chance that only music historians will have any idea what some of those things are. Many, if not most, people of what I now feel entitled to call "the younger generation" get their music by download, a system in which what you purchase has no physical reality beyond a compressed bit pattern buried in the i-pod or computer.

It was not always thus.

Back in my day we bought big round black plastic things called "records" and played them on a thing called a "record player".  I confess that while I don't download I do have most of my music now on the later Compact Disc format. I do however still have the capability of playing my old records as I have a record player in my rather too bulky music system. I rarely use it. 

Over the years we had quite a few different record players but the only one I get at all nostagic about is the first one I can remember. I'm not sure where we got it from. It must have been after I was five years old as before that I lived in a house that had no electricity, only gas, but I think it was second hand even then. It was a radiogram, a long wooden cabinet with two doors which had a record player in one side, a radio in the other, a speaker in the middle and space to store records below the working parts. It was a trully hideous piece of furniture but it had character. Well more character than an invisible, intangible download track anyway.

Part of the reason I recall it is that I can remember a lot of the weird record collection that we had accompanying it. There were a couple of LPs, a dozen or so singles and about twenty 78s.

Now if there is anyone under, say, thirty reading this I expect I've lost you. Just for your benefit then, LPs were twelve inch discs that played at 33 and 1/3 revolutions per minute, singles were seven inch discs that played at 45 rpm and 78s were ten inch discs that, unsurprisingly, played at 78 rpm.

I said it was a weird selection and so it was. The singles were mainly by Cliff Richard but also included the Move's Night of Fear, the LPs were a recording of South Pacific and a couple that I forget and the 78s featured such classics as several Charlie Kunz piano melodies, Hang Down Your Head Tom Dooley, There's A Yellow Rose In Texas and Last Train To San Fernando.

Sometime in the seventies my mother, without telling us she was going to do it, gave the whole collection away to one of my cousins and the radiogram was unceremoniously broken up and burned. What happened to the records after that I really have no idea. They were mostly rubbish and even if I still had them now I'd struggle to find anything to play the 78s on but, as I've been writing this, I've discovered that, even though I can't recall who the artists were, I can sing ALL the lyrics to Yellow Rose and Tom Dooley and the chorus to Last Train. That's what childhood brainwashing can do for you.

Nobody in their right mind, not even me, would claim that a piece of furniture that fills half your room, has a valve radio that gets hot enough to warm you on cold winter nights and a record player that makes more noise than the records it plays, and looks totally hideous is a more convenient system than downloads but I liked it better. I wish we still had it. I wish we still had all those records.

Then again, I wish that a lot of things were how they were when I was a child. That's what nostalgia is all about.