It seems that the observation I made in my first post about the rate at which the size of my collection has increased continues to be true. When I started blogging in August last year, I had 381 albums. I just noticed that this has increased to 402 as of today. Given what's on my "wanted" list, this number will have increased again by the blogs' anniversary.
Showing posts with label collection. Show all posts
Showing posts with label collection. Show all posts
Sunday, 23 June 2013
Tuesday, 18 September 2012
Musical (Wheel)chairs
It goes without saying that music can be powerfully evocative. The who, the where, the when etc of the listening experience all add to our attachments to a particular songs, album or artists.
In my case the fondest and most powerful memories I have of listening to music revolve around my early to mid teens at school with my mates.
My entire school career was spent at a "special" school for kids with disabilities. I started there at the age of four and left at seventeen. It was one of the least "special" places I've ever had the misfortune to find myself in! Basically it was a residential school forty or so miles from my home town, that I attended from Sunday to Friday.
The only thing that made it bearable and compensated for things like the separation from family and local community, the teachers who, in our view, were only there because they were too crap to be employed in a "normal" school and the, with hindsight, "Just enough to perform" standard of education, (it wasn't until a left school and compared the educational attainment of my non disabled peers that I developed a deep sense of anger and unfairness about the schooling of kids with disabilities that remains a big concern even now) were the friendships I had .
One of the problems of "living" in two places is the issue of how you cart your music collection between one place and another. For most of us the solution was to have everything on cassette rather than vinyl, at this point we were all in buying albums rather than singles which might have been easier to carry, although one guy did have a portable record player for his collection which consisted exclusively of Elvis records. However the next consideration is choosing which albums to take. I think I had a cassette case that held 20 cassettes but even at this time I hadmore than that in my collection. So at the beginning of every term I sat with my collection and tried to decide which tapes to take with me and keep at school, I seem to remember keeping the player and tapes at school rather than cart them back and forth every week, and which tapes I'd play at home at the weekends. Generally, I took my favourites as I spent more time at school than at home.
The handy thing about the cassette players for us was that they were small enough to be tucked down the sides of the chairs, this was slightly before combined radio/cassettes came on the scene, which allowed us to push around the grounds of the school while we listened to the music (we considered the possibility of developing a personal music player that people could use to listen to their music via headphones but didn't think it would catch on !!)This happened a lot since the school didn't seem keen on us actually going out into the local community an integrating with the local kids, even as we got older! The other thing was that all the chairs were identical NHS issue ones and, in order to differentiate who's chair was whos, until we customised them with stickers etc, we had our full names painted in white on the back, so on the rare occasions we did go out, we'd get some smart arse shouting your name all over the place!
So we spent hours after lessons pushing around the school taking it in turns to play various albums. I was a huge AC/DC fan so I'd play Back in Black or Highway to Hell before someone else would play Whitesnake's Come and Get It or Saxon's Wheels of Steel, a strangely popular choice amongst us! Another favourite, usually played on the first bus journey back to school after the holidays, when we hadn't seen each other for the most part, was Thin Lizzy's The Boys Are Back in Town.
There is a flip side to this of course. One of my earliest music/school related memories relates to my very earliest days in the infants/reception class. In the evening the care staff (weirdly referred to as House Mothers) would put records on before we went to bed. Most of these were compilation albums like the old Top of The Pops Albums ( One day someone will do a PHD on the importance of "Top of the Pops" to "institutional" settings). Sadly this practice has left me with an abiding hatred of the Beatles "Michelle" which I seem to remember being played over and over again!!!
In my case the fondest and most powerful memories I have of listening to music revolve around my early to mid teens at school with my mates.
My entire school career was spent at a "special" school for kids with disabilities. I started there at the age of four and left at seventeen. It was one of the least "special" places I've ever had the misfortune to find myself in! Basically it was a residential school forty or so miles from my home town, that I attended from Sunday to Friday.
The only thing that made it bearable and compensated for things like the separation from family and local community, the teachers who, in our view, were only there because they were too crap to be employed in a "normal" school and the, with hindsight, "Just enough to perform" standard of education, (it wasn't until a left school and compared the educational attainment of my non disabled peers that I developed a deep sense of anger and unfairness about the schooling of kids with disabilities that remains a big concern even now) were the friendships I had .
One of the problems of "living" in two places is the issue of how you cart your music collection between one place and another. For most of us the solution was to have everything on cassette rather than vinyl, at this point we were all in buying albums rather than singles which might have been easier to carry, although one guy did have a portable record player for his collection which consisted exclusively of Elvis records. However the next consideration is choosing which albums to take. I think I had a cassette case that held 20 cassettes but even at this time I hadmore than that in my collection. So at the beginning of every term I sat with my collection and tried to decide which tapes to take with me and keep at school, I seem to remember keeping the player and tapes at school rather than cart them back and forth every week, and which tapes I'd play at home at the weekends. Generally, I took my favourites as I spent more time at school than at home.
The handy thing about the cassette players for us was that they were small enough to be tucked down the sides of the chairs, this was slightly before combined radio/cassettes came on the scene, which allowed us to push around the grounds of the school while we listened to the music (we considered the possibility of developing a personal music player that people could use to listen to their music via headphones but didn't think it would catch on !!)This happened a lot since the school didn't seem keen on us actually going out into the local community an integrating with the local kids, even as we got older! The other thing was that all the chairs were identical NHS issue ones and, in order to differentiate who's chair was whos, until we customised them with stickers etc, we had our full names painted in white on the back, so on the rare occasions we did go out, we'd get some smart arse shouting your name all over the place!
So we spent hours after lessons pushing around the school taking it in turns to play various albums. I was a huge AC/DC fan so I'd play Back in Black or Highway to Hell before someone else would play Whitesnake's Come and Get It or Saxon's Wheels of Steel, a strangely popular choice amongst us! Another favourite, usually played on the first bus journey back to school after the holidays, when we hadn't seen each other for the most part, was Thin Lizzy's The Boys Are Back in Town.
There is a flip side to this of course. One of my earliest music/school related memories relates to my very earliest days in the infants/reception class. In the evening the care staff (weirdly referred to as House Mothers) would put records on before we went to bed. Most of these were compilation albums like the old Top of The Pops Albums ( One day someone will do a PHD on the importance of "Top of the Pops" to "institutional" settings). Sadly this practice has left me with an abiding hatred of the Beatles "Michelle" which I seem to remember being played over and over again!!!
Friday, 17 August 2012
INTRODUCTION
Right then, lets get started. It seems that everyone these days has a blog except me and I've been feeling a little left out.
However, there doesn't seem to be any point in having a blog unless you have something to write about, yes? So, what to Write about? Well the one interest/passion that I've carried with me since an early age is music. Sadly I never had the ear or sense of rhythm to actually play anything worth while, having attempted guitar, piano, harmonica (I even blew a trumpet once!). So I've had to sustain myself by just listening and wishing horrible things on those can play an instrument. But since I'm not a journalist I'm in no position to just blindly write stuff so I'm going to write about my music collection or at least a specific part of it.
Essentially, I'm going to use this blog as an excuse to reacquaint or even acquaint (no I don't think that's a word either!) myself with that part of my collection that has existed or come into my possession purely since the advent of digital downloading. Most of the albums have been downloaded, always legally, by myself but a few have been given to me by friends which have then been transferred onto computer Mp3 player
I feel the need to do this because, despite the fact that the rate at which I've acquired my music has increase significantly since I began downloading ( out of a total collection of 381 albums, I've acquired 137 since I began downloading in 2008) I feel that, with a few exceptions, I don't know or love these albums in the same way that I do the albums I had on other media, mainly CD and before that, for reasons that I might write about at a later date, cassette tape.
As I get used to doing this blog, I may also use it to examine why this might be. Is it just because I'm a middle aged man who's got stuck in his ways but has delusions that he's still got his finger on the pulse? Is it because it's seems so much easier to get hold of the music now than it did before and this has led to some sort of attitude that things are more "Throw away" and, therefore less valuable or, aligned to this, has the ease of acquisition just meant that I've acquired too much stuff in too short a space of time to allow me to get to know most of this latest stuff? There is also the possibility that my previous collections got "weeded" of the crap stuff as I progressed from cassette to CD to download and what's left has given me rose tinted spectacles about the pre-download stuff. This is conceivable since I have either lost, swapped, mangled up or chosen not to transfer or replace various bits of my collection over the years.
Basically what I intend to do is listen to an album, hopefully at least one a week, and then write about my reactions to it. I don't know whether this needs saying but any thing I write should, in no way, be considered a review. It's just a way of getting me to listen to stuff and and develop a greater connection to them or to realise that it was a mistake t buy the album in the first place and it's just a waste of space on my ipod.!
Anyway, this is the start.
However, there doesn't seem to be any point in having a blog unless you have something to write about, yes? So, what to Write about? Well the one interest/passion that I've carried with me since an early age is music. Sadly I never had the ear or sense of rhythm to actually play anything worth while, having attempted guitar, piano, harmonica (I even blew a trumpet once!). So I've had to sustain myself by just listening and wishing horrible things on those can play an instrument. But since I'm not a journalist I'm in no position to just blindly write stuff so I'm going to write about my music collection or at least a specific part of it.
Essentially, I'm going to use this blog as an excuse to reacquaint or even acquaint (no I don't think that's a word either!) myself with that part of my collection that has existed or come into my possession purely since the advent of digital downloading. Most of the albums have been downloaded, always legally, by myself but a few have been given to me by friends which have then been transferred onto computer Mp3 player
I feel the need to do this because, despite the fact that the rate at which I've acquired my music has increase significantly since I began downloading ( out of a total collection of 381 albums, I've acquired 137 since I began downloading in 2008) I feel that, with a few exceptions, I don't know or love these albums in the same way that I do the albums I had on other media, mainly CD and before that, for reasons that I might write about at a later date, cassette tape.
As I get used to doing this blog, I may also use it to examine why this might be. Is it just because I'm a middle aged man who's got stuck in his ways but has delusions that he's still got his finger on the pulse? Is it because it's seems so much easier to get hold of the music now than it did before and this has led to some sort of attitude that things are more "Throw away" and, therefore less valuable or, aligned to this, has the ease of acquisition just meant that I've acquired too much stuff in too short a space of time to allow me to get to know most of this latest stuff? There is also the possibility that my previous collections got "weeded" of the crap stuff as I progressed from cassette to CD to download and what's left has given me rose tinted spectacles about the pre-download stuff. This is conceivable since I have either lost, swapped, mangled up or chosen not to transfer or replace various bits of my collection over the years.
Basically what I intend to do is listen to an album, hopefully at least one a week, and then write about my reactions to it. I don't know whether this needs saying but any thing I write should, in no way, be considered a review. It's just a way of getting me to listen to stuff and and develop a greater connection to them or to realise that it was a mistake t buy the album in the first place and it's just a waste of space on my ipod.!
Anyway, this is the start.
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