Serfs Up! – Fat White Family

BY NEAL MARTIN | APRIL 29, 2019

I have fallen head-over-heels in love with an old friend. Her name is vinyl. We broke up when my trusty Rega turntable broke down and my vast collection of vinyl instantly became redundant, like VHS videos and handwritten letters. Their grooves fell silent. I moved on and embarked upon a new relationship with downloading and streaming, kidding myself that a horizonless music vista brought fulfilment. Yay! I could listen to my entire vinyl library without the hassle of physically removing the disc from its sleeve, everything available at the click of a mouse. My 2,000-odd vinyl records were no more than mementos of growing up, like dog-eared photographs you keep but never look at and clothes you no longer wear.

But I promised myself I would never sell any of them and predicted that their biggest threat would come from girlfriends and most dangerous of all, the woman foolish enough to marry me. This is how it always unfolds...

You meet and begin courting. At the beginning she ignores the shelves heaving with dusty vinyl. They are part and parcel of her new beau, part of his charm, one of his quirks. It’s what silly boys my age did: buy stupid amounts of records. Cute. Once that honeymoon period is over and you cohabit, those immortal words are uttered for the first time...

“Darling, when are you going to get rid of all those records? They take up so much room.”

You pick out a random disc. Wow, you remember buying that Smiths’ twelve-inch at Our Price one drizzly Saturday, recall playing it a hundred times over the weekend. Memories, eh? You slide it back into safety. Then you move home and that is when they are most imperilled, the morning that you laboriously pack them into countless cardboard boxes and pull a muscle lugging them down from the attic. You forgot how much they weighed, the space they occupy.