I've Always Been a Music Nerd

An obsession or a healthy interest - you decide

My teeth are better, I’m a lot older and I don’t carry a trident otherwise, this remarkably like me —Cropped from an image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay. Oh, and my hair is no longer dark.

I thought everyone spent hours hunting through record and charity stores for vinyl and CD albums.

I was certain everyone has their shelves at home crammed with physical discs and allocates specific corners of the house for specific artists’ discs — I currently have a Bruce Springsteen corner, a Beatles plus Beatles solo corner and a Paul Weller corner.

And I assumed everyone kept their vinyl records and record decks when CDs arrived on the scene. Why wouldn’t you?

I passionately believed every young man put rock music above girlfriends, eating, or sleeping. After all, it makes perfect sense because it’s rock music. I once had a girlfriend who accused me of loving Bruce Springsteen more than her and stormed out when I started to think about it and how to answer her.

I also imagined everyone wants at least four guitars, two pianos, six harmonicas, and a ukulele and is actively considering acquiring a banjo. Maybe a mandolin. Probably another guitar, too, now I think about it.

I sold one piano though and it still hurts but it was an upright and kept needing tuning.

And I thought everyone knew that streaming was only for your earphones in the gym and checking out new stuff before buying the album on vinyl or CD. Oh, and doesn’t everyone listen to the whole album as an integrated piece of art, not just individual tracks? And doesn’t everyone think greatest hits albums don’t count as albums?

Then I met up with an old friend of mine called Dave a couple of years ago and realised maybe not everyone is like me after all.

As teenagers, we went to North London College; it’s just off the Holloway Road in what was then a very dodgy area but is now gentrified. It’s close to Pentonville and Holloway prisons, so you get the idea of how it was. Still is in parts.

These were the pre-CD days, and Dave reminded me how he would leave me in the local record store after college finished for the day. The store specialised in new and secondhand singles and albums. Dave would get bored waiting for me to meticulously go through the entire stock looking for anything that took my fancy so he’d go to the pub and then return to pick me up when the store closed for the evening to go back to the pub.