Can the vinyl revival break out from the niche market again?
STEVIE ‘G’ Grainger has been buying records since he was 12. “I remember selling a Man United jersey to a guy in school, and I bought records with the cash. I love United; but, let’s face it, the jersey would no longer fit, but I still have the records,” says the Cork DJ.
This infatuation with records has been resurgent in recent years. In the US, last year, vinyl had its best year since 1991, with a sales increase of 50%, to 9m units. In the UK and Ireland, records returned to the high-street with a vengeance. Last year, HMV’s vinyl album sales rose 400%. Tower Records, which claims to have the largest vinyl selection in the country, had a sales increase of 50%, and Golden Discs, which began selling vinyl in just one shop last year, has since extended it to five.
But these figures can be misleading: The US numbers represent only 3.6% of album sales, while in the UK and Ireland vinyl accounts for less than 3% of the market. But the idea of a vinyl revival is difficult to ignore. Why does Grainger think there’s been a return to records?
“It was always there,” he says. “The DJs and other enthusiasts kept it alive. It’s still niche and fashions change, but sonically and aesthetically it’s beautiful. But it will never be more than a niche anymore — there aren’t enough record-pressing plants, for a start. And the world has changed.”
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PRESSING ISSUES
Grainger is right about the pressing plants — no new vinyl presses have been manufactured since 1982. Plugd Records has been running in Cork since 2001, first on Washington St, having taken over from the beloved Comet Records, before moving to its current home in the Triskel Arts Centre.
Albert Twomey has been working there since 2007, and says its clientele is a mixture of young and old, and includes customers who have been coming in since day one. “Obviously, some had families or moved away in the meantime,” Twomey says, “but we do get a lot of repeat custom from people, as well. We also get younger folks coming in now, checking out old classics, like Slint, which got reissued last year, and we’ve got new releases, like Sleater-Kinney, which are creating a big buzz.”
A spokesman for Golden Discs echoed the sentiment that records continue to be hugely important to music stores. “Anywhere we’ve restocked vinyl has had a great response from the public. In some instances, people have come in and bought one of the record players we stock and a stack of their favourite albums, restarting a collection that they had moved to digital years ago.”
Elaine Howley, of Cork band Altered Hours, is among the recent converts to vinyl. “It was a new way of listening to music to me. Before that, I had mostly listened to music alone. I liked the vinyl, mostly because we listened to music in a group and talked about songs and sounds and looked at the artwork. The whole thing became an occasion,” she says.
It’s an idea shared by Barry Lennon, who runs the year-old Seven Quarters club-night in Dublin, where attendees receive a bespoke 7” featuring two new Irish artists. “People want something more tangible than a folder full of MP3s and WAVs. It’s nice, the whole ceremony involved in putting a vinyl on and sitting down and listening to it while scanning through the artwork,” he says. “There’s something personal and important about vinyl”.
If Howley and Lennon are the new breed of record collectors, Phil Hope is among the golden oldies, having been amassing records for more than 40 years (The Sweet’s single ‘Block Buster’ was his first purchase). A DJ at the northern soul club-night, Under a Plastic Cloud, which takes place every month at Gulpd cafe in the Triskel Arts Centre, he remembers when records were the dominant format, and that they first came under threat in the 1980s. “I was working for Virgin Megastores, so I did begin to think that vinyl had had its day as the main format, not because it was outdated or even unwanted, but because the major record companies had decided that CD was going to be the way they delivered music,” Hope says.
GOLDEN OLDIES
Justin O’Donnell has been running the Cork-based Hobo Collective for four years.
“The idea was to have a full day/night of music that was also an open record fair. Anyone was welcome to come and sell records free of charge. We wanted it to be a relaxing day, where vinyl lovers could get together to buy, sell, trade, talk about, and maybe dance to, some good records,” he says.
Does O’Donnell buy into the idea of a vinyl revival? “I want to buy in to it! There are definitely more people buying records, and it’s not just DJs and audiophiles, like it used to be. Casual listeners are starting to realise they like having something physical and collectible. They like the big artwork or how they look on the shelf.”
EXPENSIVE TASTES
However, there is a caveat to the ‘vinyl revival’: O’Donnell says the material used to make records is more expensive, “which has a knock-on effect for the consumer, but there are definitely certain labels that are taking advantage of the vinyl trend. It’s pretty common to see new albums priced at over €30. That wasn’t the case five years ago.”
Expansive re-releases, like albums by Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, fall into this category (and rock is by far the most popular genre on vinyl), while special editions of new releases can cost €45 and over. And sometimes these deluxe releases go overboard and backfire: Sub Pop recently ran into “manufacturing errors” with Father John Misty’s ‘limited-edition, deluxe, 2XLP alternate-cover version on tricolor vinyl in a dioramic, meta-musical funtime gatefold jacket’.
Sub Pop said: “In short, the extra, bulging thickness of the pop-up art in the Father John Misty jacket creates a lump that, when the LPs are sealed and packed, pushes into the LPs, causing the vinyl to warp and making that handsome, painstakingly and expensively produced jacket an elaborate record-destroying device.”
But the future does seem bright for vinyl, as well as for record lovers young and old. Andy Walsh runs one of Ireland’s newest record stores, Little Gem, at no 5, Cavendish Rd, Dublin. So, as the freshest of record store owners, Walsh, of all people, must buy into the idea of a vinyl revival?
“I think that records will last forever. The revival has been great and appears to be growing, but it’s the people that love it most that have kept it going all this time and I can’t see that ever changing.”
Corrie’s got a new kid on the block
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