Introduction Mojo, one of Britain’s biggest-selling music magazines, decided that 2011’s trend of the year was ‘the vinyl revival’ (Aston and Eccleston 2012: 50). To start 2012 the BBC radio station 6 Music declared that its New Year’s Day would be ‘all vinyl’ (‘Vinyl Set to Make Radio Comeback for One Day Only’ 2011). Mojo and 6 Music were responding to an upturn in the sound carrier’s fortunes. Although vinyl lost its status as Britain’s leading albums format as long ago as 1985 and thus looked set for a permanent decline, sales of vinyl LPs rose year on year by 43.7 per cent in 2011.1 In the US the success of the format was better still: sales of vinyl LPs increased by over 1 million in the same year (Halliday 2012). And yet this wasn’t the first of vinyl’s revivals. British sales of 45 rpm, 7″ singles rose by 260 per cent between 2003 and 2006, and a more prolonged growth period was experienced by the 12″ single: here the British market produced more records in 2002 than it did in 1996. Crucial to vinyl’s successes is the fact that both old and new repertoire is issued on this format. Equally important is the fact that it is not just people who grew up with vinyl who are buying these records. Although a report issued in 2008 claimed that one in five 18-to-24-year-olds has no knowledge of analogue record players, there are many among this age group who are buying vinyl discs (‘Fantastic Gadgets of the Future’ 2008). According to HMV, Britain’s last high- street record store chain, ‘Teenagers and students’ constituted the ‘main market’ for vinyl singles during the 2000s (Tomkins 2008). In addition, it has been reported that the market for turntables is ‘in rude health’ (Pell 2007), reflected by the fact that John Lewis began re-stocking this product in 2011. There are different ways of looking at these vinyl returns. On the one hand, they are remarkable. There have been many other sound recording formats – cylinders, shellac discs, tape cassettes, compact discs, mini discs, and so on – but vinyl is alone in reversing sales trends in this manner. On the other hand, it should be noted that sales of the format are minor. In 2006 combined sales of 7″ and 12″ singles accounted for just 3.4 per cent of the UK singles market, and in 2011 vinyl LPs made up only 0.3 per cent of British album sales. But then again, it is arguable that these lowly sales figures only render vinyl’s survival more impressive. Vinyl receives attention out of all proportion to its market performance. In the twenty-first century it has been the subject of numerous articles in the music press and daily newspapers, including editorials in Music Week and the Guardian 1 Unless otherwise stated, all figures for music sales, trade deliveries and the price of recordings within the UK are derived from British Phonographic Industry statistics (<http:// www.bpi.co.uk/>). 2 VINYL: A HistoRY OF THE ANALOGUE RECORD (Talbot 2007: 20; ‘Vinyl Solution’ 2005; ‘In Praise Of … Vinyl Records’ 2007). It has been the common subject of questionnaires: ‘which format do you prefer: vinyl, CD or MP3?’, now often reduced to just ‘vinyl or MP3?’ (Hanman 2006; Roberts, J. 2008: 5). For many it is vinyl rather than the CD that has been more effective at offering an alternative and a complement to the digital download. Adam Woods of Music Week has stated, ‘it is easy to believe that the format could thrive even as the CD begins to lose ground to the Internet’ (2004: 15). The Financial Times has commented that ‘the 7 in single is fast becoming the last tangible format for the single release’ (Tomkins 2008). A similar view can even be heard at major record companies. Lyor Cohen, the CEO of Recorded Music for the Warner Music Group, stated in 2011 that ‘vinyl will definitely outlast CDs because of the resonance, the sound; the quality is closest to the way the artist wants you to hear it’ (Lindvall 2011). The digital file is the first incorporeal recording format; it receives its representation by means of its player or the interface on a computer screen. There remains a need to visualize individual songs or album collections. Here it is the vinyl record that has been turned to. While the CD is routinely ignored, vinyl imagery has proliferated. This tendency can be seen in advertising (T-Mobile, Sky and Yellow Pages have each used vinyl in TV commercials since 2005) and it can be seen in fine art (in 2010 Duke University gathered artistic responses to the format in the exhibition The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl). Musicians, too, are more likely to sing about vinyl than they are about the CD (in recent years it has been referenced by Corinne Bailey Rae in ‘Put Your Records On’ and Keane in ‘Perfect Symmetry’). In addition, digital technologies have attempted to mimic vinyl. In 2009 FreeStyleGames released the game DJ Hero, which features a digital reproduction of a vinyl record’s grooves. Playlist Player launched a hi-fi system in 2010 that plays MP3s as though they are vinyl discs: its plan is to turn ‘digital playlists into physical objects that you can touch, treasure, drop, lose or spill beer on’ (<http:// www.martinskelly.co.uk/PlaylistPlayer>). In 2011 the AirVinyl app was made available for Apple’s iPad, a product that aims to ‘recreate the ambience, warmth and experience of vinyl recordings, transforming your MP3 and digital collection into your record collection bringing back all the warmth of analogue harmonics’ (<http://www.itunes.apple.com/>). Why is it that we can’t let go of the vinyl record? This book is part of this phenomenon but it is also an attempt to explain it. Its purpose is threefold: to tell the history of the vinyl record, to explore the format’s entwined relationship with music, and to address the reasons for its lasting appeal. To examine these strands I take an anatomical approach. The vinyl record has distinct auditory, visual and tactile qualities, and one way they can be delineated is by breaking the record down into its component parts. The first chapter addresses the groove and its ability to make sound visible, touchable and mortal. The second chapter traces the triumph of the disc format over the cylinder and with it the ascendancy of professional over amateur recording. The third chapter is concerned with the label, detailing the INTRODUCTION 3 consequences of labelling practices for record companies, music genres and record collectors. The fourth chapter is concerned with vinyl itself, examining changing perceptions as this plastic product moved from being considered a mass-produced good to a luxury item. The fifth chapter details the evolution of the LP record, looking at its development for classical music, its adoption by other genres, and the characteristics that have helped to define ‘the best albums of all time’. The sixth chapter concerns the 45 rpm single, tracing the ways in which the jukebox and the radio helped to shape the format, and looking at the reasons why the 7″ single came to be associated with particular genres of popular music. The seventh chapter looks at the peculiarities of b-sides and 12″ singles, the aspects of the vinyl record that most obviously brought forth new forms of music. Finally, the project, like the vinyl record itself, is wrapped up with the sleeve, an item that has interpreted and affected the music that it enshrouds. Within this structure the route taken is broadly historical (only the b-side and sleeve appear out of turn). This reveals an anomaly: vinyl arrives quite late in the story. Although ‘vinyl’ is the favoured name at present, ‘disc’ and ‘record’ have also been used to describe the subject of this book. The three terms have been used interchangeably but they have different origins: the first describes a material, the next a shape and the last is the result of an action that has taken place. Each of these factors is important in the history of the format and each term has come to the fore as that particular factor has been prioritized, but none of them encompasses the whole tale. ‘Vinyl’ is not always appropriate. Whereas the favour that the format enjoys is partially attributable to the material from which it is made, many of the characteristics that relate to it – the groove, the label, the shape, the b-side and the sleeve - were in existence before vinyl was developed, and are necessarily examined in this work. ‘Disc’ also has its faults. While a lineage of shared characteristics can be traced back through vinyl, shellac and earlier discs, the compact disc is a radically different format. In fact, it was partially in response to the arrival of the CD that the term ‘vinyl’ came to be more regularly used for the product it replaced. ‘Record’, on the other hand, encompasses all analogue discs and it is not commonly used in reference to the compact disc. But not all records are discs. The term was originally used to describe cylinders as well, and was used as such by Thomas Edison in his original sound recording patent of 1877. The diversity of this vinyl/disc/record is one of the keys to its popularity. In taking an anatomical approach I aim to reveal how important each of these facets has been.