In a patterned room

Once upon a time I used to write for an online music magazine. I never professed to claim that I wrote well, but I was told that my articles were of quality. Those days were of great personal growth and it also broadened my musical horizons quite a bit, as I had to listen to loads of stuff I'd never even heard of before. There were also the gigs that I went to and then wrote about, and I'm thinking that maybe those were my favourite pieces of writing I did for the magazine. Highlights, for sure, were the White Lies, Lloyd Cole and Kid Congo Powers gigs - those were immensely fun and rewarding to write about.
Eventually, though, time and other factors started to weigh down on me and I had to step away from the magazine. It wasn't an easy decision, and certainly not one that I took lightly, and to this day it still pains me that I couldn't have done more.

But music, as always, remained with me. I couln't ever walk away from it, else my very sanity would be in jeopardy. Reading, listening to music, spending time with my son - these are the things that keep me sane still. And once upon a time I collected music, too. Vinyl I started having in the 80's, CD's I started collecting in the early 90's, and given time, I amassed quite the collection. I wouldn't say it was very eclectic - for the longest time I basically only bought any kind of heavy music I fancied, and it wouldn't be until the very late 90's or early 00's that my tastes started veering towards other sonic landscapes. I loved collecting, and even though my vinyl collection took a backseat to my CD collection, I had a nice little bunch of records, plenty of The Smiths and Depeche Mode singles, loads of Iron Maiden, Queensryche, as well as god knows what by now.

The 00's were cruel to me, I find, in terms of music. That was when I started to not enjoy the heavier things anymore - though I still loved (and still love) everything from before. And I grew so apart from everything I had, that, coupled with the advent of digital media, I made the decision to get rid of - at the very least - my CD collection. One day I woke up and I really didn't want row upon row upon row of CDs I no longer listened to anymore. And you'd find there some EPs that are quite rare these days, special Japanese editions that cost me an arm and a leg, multiple limited editions of the same record - I'm looking at you, Cradle of Filth - deleted singles, you name it. My collection numbered in well over three thousand, and I wanted it gone. And gone indeed it was, and fairly soon. I had a guy from a local record store come to my house and appraise it and the number he offered me was so ridiculous that I accepted it anyway. I had no love for it anymore. And so, save for some that I had set aside out of sentimental reasons, my CD collection was gone.

The vinyl I kept, but come 2013 I would be selling it as well. This is not a happy story, and I won't go into much detail about it here, but suffice to say that in late 2013 I found myself broke, broken, hopeless, jobless, mirthless, slowly dying inside. Between May of that year and May of 2014 I barely left my room. And one day I gave into despair and sold my record collection. Again, I sold it for a fraction of what it'd cost me, and it grieves me greatly that I was so weak at the time, so weak that I couldn't fight my demons. Too weak to leash my black dog.

There and then I decided that I would not collect ever again. I'd had it. I'd literally had it and gave it up.
Ah, but fate makes fools of us all, doesn't it? I can't really recall what record it was that I first bought this time round. Maybe it was The National's 'Trouble will find me', but it might have also been Sinistro's 'Semente' at a gig I attended and thought why the hell not?
And so I got the bug again back in 2016 and started collecting once more. It's funny, because of my current collection I have so little of what I had on my previous one. To be fair, maybe I had outgrown some bands, or maybe they never felt like a priority anymore. I still have a list of the records I used to have, and if I'm honest out of that list there are only a handful that I would really want, but as luck would have it, they are the ones that are now crazy expensive on Discogs. To think that records I once had now go for the very high hundreds - *cough cough* She Wants Revenge *cough cough* - galls me.

But slowly and surely I've been rebuilding, not quite what I once had, but what I want. And for some reason that now completely escapes me, some years ago I started showcasing my records on an almost daily basis on my Instagram profile and my goal with this blog is to complement my posts there with maybe an anecdote or an incidental story connecting me to the particular song or band I chose for that day. It also gives me the opportunity to write again and to fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds' worth of distance run, to quote one of my favourite poems ever, Rudyard Kipling's 'If'.

I hope that I can keep up. It would indeed be a great thing for me.

Drop me a line, if you're so inclined.

All the best, and stay safe.