Posted on timeslive.co.za, By Harry Wallop, 25 February, 2016
Image by: BLOG.HOOKERFURNITURE.COM
The hotly anticipated HBO television series Vinyl launched on DStv last week.
It’s a collaboration between the director Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger and promises to do to the music industry what Mad Men did for advertising: celebrate the larger-than-life characters and fetishise the design aesthetic of the era.
Set in New York in 1973, it highlights an era when the music, the clothes, the drugs and the violence all seemed more visceral than today’s anaemic world of boybands and record labels run by accountants.
But the thing that helped define the feel of that period was the vinyl record, with its hiss, crackle and rich sound.
While the gangsters, loud guitars and massive lapels in the show seem from another age, vinyl itself is enjoying a remarkable comeback.
The vinyl revival is now so mainstream that some international retail giants are going to stock the format in their supermarkets.
And some subsidiary products have sprung up around the vinyl revival. If you hunt around e-commerce sites like Etsy and Not on the High Street, some of the most popular storage products are shelving units, boxes and cases for records – many of them displaying the covers as prominently as possible.
And lots of people are choosing to listen to music on record players, prominently displayed too. The most popular entry-level record player on the market currently is the Crosley, whose models evoke the feel of 1960s portable players.
Technics, the hi-fi giant that produced affordable turntables in the 1960s, will be reissuing its SL-1200 deck, which, according to DJs and audiophiles alike, is a near-perfect player.
Increasingly, vinyl and record players are being used to furnish a room, with LP collections coming out of dusty lofts to fill the empty walls that would once have been lined with books.
