The Long-Player Goodbye: How vinyl changed the world - Hardcover

It seems unfair to blame The Waterboys. Or more precisely, The Waterboys' 1988 folk rock album Fisherman's Blues. But if reasons or excuses are required for why I came to write this book, it's where I am usually forced to start. To be honest, I never especially cared for Fisherman's Blues when it was released. And I can't say I like it that much now either. But over the course of one summer a couple of years ago I heard it nearly every day. Often several times in a row. This was not some perverse exercise in aural masochism. It was merely that in the park near my home, I'd invariably encounter two men who appeared to spend every afternoon downing cans of frighteningly strong lager and tirelessly listening over and over again to Fisherman's Blues on a small stereo-cassette player.

I formed elaborate theories about why they might be doing this. I liked to imagine that they were amnesiacs trapped in 1988, that they woke each morning and fell upon Fisherman's Blues almost as if it were a previously unexplored island. The pair would then duly embark on a sonic expedition to fully acquaint themselves with this strange new musical landscape. But having mapped every contour, they'd arise the following sun-up, their minds utterly blank, and to do it all over again. And again, and again.

The most likely reason, of course, as to why they played this album constantly was that it was the only one they had. But at a point when most people (myself included) were starting to carry thousands of tracks on their iPods and phones, this idea, the notion of having the one album began to nag at me. I started to mull over just how quickly we've all got used to having so much music, so easily to hand. I grew up obsessed with music. I have devoted years to trawling the record shops and lavished hours on the LPs that I bought with any spare cash I had. But even as I type these words, Wifi-ed to the web, I feel ever so slightly mocked knowing that the whole musical canon is only a mouse click or two away. To anyone suckled on downloading and used to snacking on an array of tunes, the thought of listening to one album in its entirety - let alone sequentially - could appear anachronistic and positively quaint.

I began, though, to consider how equally radical the long-playing vinyl record was when it was created in 1948. Before the LP, discs lasted around four minutes, shattered if dropped and wore out after only seventy or so plays. So what today might appear limiting had once been a real liberation. And yet sixty years of astonishing changes on, the LP and what it bequeathed to us - the concept of the album as a linear whole - endures. Just about.

The more I delved into it, the more obvious it became to me, that the LP really had revolutionized the way music was produced, packaged, marketed, sold, purchased, listened to and performed. Setting down a few thoughts, initially what I found myself wanting to convey was simply how exciting it must have been when there was literally everything to play for and folks were still taking note of these new fangled sleeves.

But rather than getting lost in the music, I was also keen to tell a much broader social story; LPs do not exist in isolation - they need consumers as much as producers, after all. The result is then, I guess, an unashamedly rhapsodic and highly partial tour of the life and times of the LP. One that celebrates the days when we listened with pleasure to our albums all the way through - even if that was only because there was bugger all else to do and flipping between songs was trickier... Or because we were bombed out of our minds on frighteningly strong lager in a park.