‘I bought one for my nine-year-old daughter’
I was delighted when my eldest daughter, who is nine, asked for a record player for Christmas. It wasn’t to do with any great residual love for vinyl on my part, although I do have a weird notion that the actual act of having to put a record or a CD on might make you listen more closely to music than more modern, convenient alternatives. Perhaps you are more likely to play something all the way through if taking it off and putting something else on involves at least a fraction more effort than pressing your finger on a screen. But I am keen to instil in her the idea that music is something you pay for, rather than something that magically materialises because Dad’s got a family subscription to a streaming service.
So I liked the idea of her saving up her pocket money to buy “vinyls”, as the young people persist in calling them: she seemed more likely to spend money on something tangible, rather than a download. In addition, anything that serves to confine my eldest daughter’s taste in music to her bedroom is money well spent, as far as I am concerned. I am proud of the fact that she has her own tastes: I have never tried to influence what she likes. Still, the less I have to endure the disheartening oeuvre of Meghan Trainor and her current passion, an apparently interminable parade of drippy, solipsistic singer-songwriter berks – one of whom actually appears to have written a song whinging about, of all things, taking a pill in Ibiza – the better.
While I agree that anyone who spends 30 quid on a new vinyl album, then plays it on a turntable that doesn’t cost much more than that is completely nuts, a Crosley seemed ideal as nine-year-old girl’s first record player. They are colourful and immediately appealing: they look like fun, in a way that hi-fi equipment seldom does. They don’t need setting up: you just plug it in and it plays. I wasn’t bothered by the dire presentiments about the Crosley’s sound quality. I have really fond memories of my first record player, and that was thoroughly knackered, one of those ancient all-in-one players that stacked singles up on a giant spindle. It must have sounded awful, but I don’t remember how it sounded, because I was a kid, not a middle-aged hi-fi buff: I just remember the music. Later, my mate had a terrible Amstrad midi system that played everything too fast. He regarded this not as a blight that impaired his enjoyment of his record collection, but something of a bonus: if he taped you the Stone Roses’s album, it would fit on one side of a C90, not cut off before the end of I Am the Resurrection.
As it turned out, the problem with the whole enterprise was that none of the music my daughter likes is actually available on vinyl, something neither of us had bothered to check. I’d mistakenly assumed that record labels still stuck singles out on 7in – I had even envisaged a rather thrilling world of limited-edition coloured-vinyl singles and picture discs – but it turns out the much-touted vinyl revival hasn’t reached the arena of top 40 pop. I bought her a load of secondhand pop singles that I thought might appeal, but she doesn’t want to play Buffalo Stance by Neneh Cherry or Tainted Love by Soft Cell, or at least not yet: she quite rightly wants to play her own music.
So the record player that is perfect for a nine-year-old girl is gathering dust until such time as some music a nine-year-old girl might want to listen to becomes available for it, while the Sonos in the kitchen still reverberates to the sound of that drippy, solipsistic little berk whining about taking a pill in Ibiza.
