Nice Enough To eat

I remember reading somewhere that if you own two hundred LPs, you already own a hundred LPs that you will never again listen to in their entirety. Now how much does that sentence date me?

Let's start the forensics: "LPs". Who knows what "LPs" are nowadays (and I'll excuse all readers of Record Collector Magazine and Mojo)? OK, let's talk about "albums" then. When I was... oh Lor' - I almost wrote "When I was a boy" there. Forgive me. Once upon a time, an artist released a collection of tracks in a single unit - probably ran to about 20 minutes a side*, maybe three quarters of an hour's entertainment once you had put the first side on, used the sleeve to (*ahem*) "skin up" on, found something to assuage the sudden hunger that seemed to onset just as the needle hit the runout groove, turned the LP over, giggled as the needle missed the vinyl and you grooved to 3 minutes of sapphire-on-rubber white noise, finally found the edge of side two, and let for face melt during the second half of the band's latest opus. There's a reason why Sergeant Pepper's second side is more wonky than side one. They knew you would be off your mash by the time you got to hear it. They knew it, and so they played to it.

Nowadays - maybe even for about the past fifteen years - no-one, but no-blimming-one, has ever bought a CD, stuck it on, and played it from one end to the other. They are all an hour long at least, you can't roll a funny fag on the jewel case, and they are full of filler. We stick 'em on our iPlod, rip 'em to our PCs and we don't even notice if Monkey Media never shuffles half the tracks onto our speakers. What a waste. A waste of time, a waste of plastic, and a waste of artistes' talents. Make music as expensive as it was in the Sixties, when an album cost the equivalent of about thirtyfive of your modern quids. Limit the bands to thirtyfive minutes, and then we'll see some Rock'n'Roll Darwinism. A quid a minute, that'd sort out the music scene.

That being said...
Just picked up Strangely Strange But Oddly Normal, An Island Anthology 1967-1972 in Harrow Library's Summer Sale. £1.50. This stuff just takes me back to the days when a guy in a greatcoat would sell you a "quid deal" which turned out to be half an Oxo cube wrapped in tin foil.

Maaaaan, Oxo cube crumbled into the contents of a Park Drive - now that was some trip.

And if any of that makes any sense to you, welcome to your fifties. I shall return to the subject of no-longer-listened-to LPs before too very long.

As soon as this beefstock buzz wears off...

* I actually own a Buddy Holly LP which barely makes ten minutes a side.