Stand on the floor at the EMI pressing plant in Hayes, Middlesex — and close
your eyes. If the sound is familiar it might have something to do with
halfremembered episodes of Ivor the Engine. The rhythmic clunk and
hiss of a steam engine is exactly the same as the one made by the pressing
plant currently spitting out Franz Ferdinand albums at a rate of one every
20 seconds. Open your eyes again and a second wave of déjà vu takes hold.
You’ve gone, à la Play School, through the arched window
and into a Britain where things are actually made on factory floors.
In his office the plant manager Roy Matthews sits beside a platter of
appropriately retro treats: fondant fancies, Chelsea buns and jam doughnuts.
The 7in single is 60 this month, but Matthews has laid on the treats because
he too has a birthday this week.
I ask if he remembers the first record to spin at 45rpm. “I did know, but it
doesn’t come to mind,” he says. (It was Texarkana Baby by
the country singer Eddy Arnold, pressed on green vinyl in line with RCA’s
early plan to colour-code singles according to genre.)
If Matthews has the air of a man perpetually poised on the brink of laughter,
it’s hardly surprising. In 2009 there’s finally something to laugh about.
Eight years ago, in line with the rest of the industry, EMI sold the
pressing plant and all the equipment inside it. Matthews’s final job for his
old label was to give a guided tour to the property developers who had
bought the premises. Had the new owners not fallen in love with the idea of
owning a pressing plant and continued to keep it going, Matthews would have
retired a long time ago.
Now it’s Portalspace — the company managed by Matthews — to whom EMI comes
when it wants to manage the increasing demand for vinyl runs of current
albums. Twenty thousand copies of Coldplay’s Viva La Vida were
pressed here. Similar quantities of an imminent Genesis box set are whizzing
through the plant. The numbers in themselves don’t rival the 1.5 million
records that once came out of here every week but, in an industry that was
already depressed before the current recession, vinyl specialists are
ebullient. As Duane Davis – the co-owner of the enormous Wax Trax record
store in Denver, Colorado — explains: “There’s a feeling that vinyl sales
have finally found their floor, and it turns out that the floor isn’t as low
as many had feared it would be”.
In fact, Davis reports that in 2008 vinyl sales in Wax Trax were up for the
first time in ten years. “We’re seeing a pattern with music fans in their
twenties that wasn’t necessarily there before.”
A “typical scenario”, as he describes it, involves a young music fan wandering
over to the new vinyl section and purchasing the latest Animal Collective
album, say. “Once he’s in there,” Davis continues, “he might see an album by
Miles Davis, one that is freely available on CD. But what you have here is
someone who is deliberately setting himself apart as a connoisseur. It’s a
badge of honour.”
Isn’t this what some people might characterise as snobbishness? Matthews
doesn’t think so. Having joined the pressing plant as an apprentice in 1959,
he has found himself on both sides of the analogue/digital divide.
Sheepishly, he admits that he spent much of the early Eighties banging the
drum for the technology pioneered by Philips that, a few years later, saw
music fans throwing out their old vinyl to herald the new digital dawn.
“I actually brought the first CD back to EMI from Philips in Holland,”
Matthews smiles. “The first reaction from the people at EMI was that these
were rubbish, but I wasn’t convinced. What happened was that the classical
fraternity seized upon the CD for the absence of clicks and pops. Of course,
with classical music that sort of clarity matters. But with rock’n’roll,
what you respond to is a presence, a warmth. For a few years people seemed
unable to see the wood for the trees — or hear the music for the new clarity
that came with it.”
There’s something reassuring in the fact that newer technologies simply don’t
know how to make certain recordings sound any better outside the black
plastic grooves from which they first sprang. The guitar on a scratchy old
vinyl copy of the Four Seasons’ Let’s Hang On, for
example, is thrillingly predatory compared with its emasculated digital
doppelgänger.
In Old Rare New — an excellent new anthology of writing celebrating the
independent record shop — Cat Power’s description of her mother’s old Otis
Redding bootleg accords with my 7in live version of Redding’s Shake:
“balls-out, rad-ass, loud soul perfection” indeed.
Even if Matthews sometimes has occasion to doubt what five decades in the
Hayes pressing plant have taught him, he cites the example of his
19-year-old daughter and her friends, who “collect 7in singles like trading
cards”. Even if the CD album has a few years left in it yet, the 7in
suddenly seems in far more buoyant spirits than the unloved, uneconomical,
uncollectable CD single.
Vinyl isn’t cheap for a new young band – pressing 500 singles costs around
£900 — but it does seem to reach a more evangelical constituency. It stands
to reason. Someone who acquires their music merely by clicking on a weblink
is less likely to get evangelical about it than someone who ambles over to
the racks of, say, Phonica in the West End of London and blind-tests some
interesting-looking curios on one of the ten decks recessed within the
shop’s long wooden counter. Florence & the Machine released two 7in singles
before winning a Brit Award in the Critics’ Choice category. For a format
long since given its death rites, it’s amazing to hear the Phonica website
manager Sam Relleen talk about artists such as DJ Harvey shifting up to 300
vinyl copies in a weekend.
What emerges here is not so much a story about a resurgent format, but rather
a format that has found a loyal, discerning constituency that will sustain
it indefinitely. Just as some people prefer to buy their cheese from Neal’s
Yard rather than Tesco, there are people who see their passion for music
mirrored in the service they get from vinyl specialists such as Rough Trade
and Phonica. In the words of Davis at Wax Trax: “Vinyl sales have
stabilised, but there’s no telling when CDs will bottom out. In 20 years
they might come to be regarded by people just as eight-track cartridges are
now.”
Over in the North London suburb of Palmers Green, Derek Burbidge, the owner of
Record Detective Agency — an impeccably messy cubbyhole specialising in
Fifties and Sixties vinyl — offers tea and attempts to put into words why
the format refuses to die. “When I was a kid, growing up after the war,
there was nothing electric in my house other than this record player. Even
the fridge ran on gas. It was so incredibly modern.”
He reaches across to the red Fifties Dansette record player on which customers
can still try out prospective purchases. “The other day one customer came in
with his son. The boy picked up a Rolling Stones album and said: ‘What are
these?’ And the dad said: ‘Um, that’s, big
software. Which of course it is. But at the same time, the reason I’m here
is that it’s so much more than that.”
Old Rare New: The Independent Record Shop is published by Black Dog
