To make a vinyl record, the master tape of your recording is played into a machine called a lathe. This has a tiny, vibrating stylus which cuts into the lacquer coating of an aluminium disc, the “acetate”. Acetate discs are usually part of the process of manufacturing vinyl records. They are cleaned and further processed, […]
Category: 10″
“Why should the Devil have all the good tunes?” asked Charles Wesley, the great religious reformer and hymn writer. Like anything to do with religion, arguments about what music, if any, should be played church can be furious. There have probably been wars fought over it. Which is why this record is symbolic of a […]
“In the dark times,” asked Berthold Brecht, In the dark times Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing About the dark times. He was right and wrong: right about the singing, but not about the subject matter. Has the human race experienced a worse year than 1942? The world was at […]
I had never heard of Billy Daniels until this shellac disc – battered and scratched and with a crack running through it – came into my life. I was unsure whether it would even play, as the crack runs almost through to the label, but it worked okay. There is a noise, but no worse […]
The world is so full of strange coincidence that I should stop being surprised. But still. The shuttle which lands on Planet Vinyl is programmed to be random but different. If yesterday we heard a 7-inch 45 rpm playing eighties synth-pop, the only certainty about today is that it will NOT be a synth-pop single […]
Sting’s real name is Gordon Sumner. Bono’s real name is Paul Hewson. Madonna’s real name is actually Madonna, but you see where I am going. Many is the artist who has adopted a stage name for a bit of mystique. A little while ago, I discovered the faux (but enjoyable) Latin jazz of Chaquito, whose […]
Poor old Johnny Ray … This was a first line of “Come On Eileen”, which was a huge hit in the early 1980s for a UK band, Dexy’s Midnight Runners. I loved the song, but I was a teenager and had no idea who Johnny Ray was, so asked my Dad. “Hmmph. He was a […]
Marie Warder was a teacher, writer and pianist who grew up in South Africa. Not long after the end of the Second World War, she was walking on a street in Johannesburg. I was about nineteen, newly married and very much in love, when I happened to pass by a music store one day, and […]
In the 1950s there was a person with the initials G.S. who lived in my area. He or she liked music and collected records. I know this, because a box of 10-inch shellac records turned up in an op-shop near me, and most of them had “G.S.” neatly written on them. Sometimes, G.S. used a […]
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What it says on the tin
In all of music, is there a more romantic instrument than the cello? Rhetorical question. ‘Course not. If you want to hook someone on classical music, take them to see a good cellist play. Or even just play a recording, and you could do worse than this, one of the most demanding cello pieces ever […]
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