TLOBF Debate… Add to your collection?

The Word magazine this month features an excellent interview with the wonderful Elvis Costello where, amongst other things, they discuss his substantial music collection. A rabid purchaser of records and CD’s, he recounts a recent tale of spending some $700 in one trip to a store, adding to the ever growing library already assembled. A few years back, a house move from the UK to the US caused Costello to take stock of his possessions, and how tiresome it would be to have to ship everything to his new home. So, to address this, he performed what he called a culling – taking a sizeable chunk of mostly jazz recordings from his music museum and donating it to a student library. This was no piddling donation – some 10,000 items were handed over in a philanthropic gesture that must have cost him upwards of a hundred thousand pounds. Although I am sure it didn’t happen this way, I like to imagine him lugging boxes from the back of his car, into the arms of beaming students, all the while thinking to himself: “why on earth did I buy all these in the first place”.

I myself have carried out a similar culling over the years, though thankfully nowhere near on that scale. When I first left home, I dispensed with a teetering pile of 12″ vinyl, mostly shoe-gaze and late 80′s indiepop, boxing them up and being robbed blind by a local second hand record shop who gave me £50 for the lot. Even now, I feel I need the advice of Victim Support over this, as I look on eBay and see these seemingly worthless Moose, Revolver, Chapterhouse and Adorable records exchanging hands for ridiculous sums. Plus I feel a faint pang of nostalgia when I recall those old Spitfire singles, my Daisy Chainsaw EP, holding back the tears over my Wedding Present singles collection.

In fact, my life would be a lot richer had eBay come along sooner. When I got married, another culling took place, this time CD’s. My wife brought into the mix as much as me, and there was no way we could cram both collections into our tiny flat, so something had to go. However, the only people using Ebay then were bearded American’s selling disk drives, and so the beneficiary of this little lot was The Iain Rennie Hospice charity shop. It became a favourite pastime of myself and my wife to pop in and see if that Menswear album had sold yet. As far as I know, its still there.

Then, the third major culling, which took place early last year. We were to be three which meant cheerio spare room, hello nursery. And also goodbye record player and most of my remaining vinyl. On this occasion, I actually made a fair bit of money, but even this didn’t soften the blow as I slipped my New Order 12″‘s into a card sleeve to ship to a buyer in Israel. The day before the record player was due to go into the loft I could be found sitting on the floor in a darkened room, my original copy of ‘Temptation’ playing scratchily on the wrecked stylus. The whole experience left me feeling strangely depressed, as if I was saying goodbye to an old life of vinyl and toys into a new life of nappies and toys.

What the experience of letting it all go also showed was how much stuff I had accumulated over the years. Rich Thane would have been proud to see the piles of Charlatans EP’s, but there was also loads of complete rubbish, stacks of EMF singles testament to my “buy anything” policy. What sort of teenager was I? Obviously a reasonably fruity one, as without even realising, it appears that during the late 80′s I was a huge Erasure fan, as there were literally dozens of their 12″ singles. I had three different versions of ‘Crackers International’ for goodness sake. Something I have just admitted on a public website. In this sense, my “everything must go” policy was beneficial in more ways than one.

These days, I refuse to allow my collection to grow. I purchase some 40 CD’s a year but probably only hang onto a quarter of these, the rest eBay’d within weeks of purchase. I am the same with pretty much everything – video games, DVD’s – all find themselves shipped up to Scotland (I also seem to sell stuff to Scottish people, do you not have shops up there?) within weeks of watching or playing. Books are the only things I hang onto. I have gone from a fanatical collector to a liberated consumer. When I see other people’s vast and extensive collections, where I used to think “wow, look at all that stuff”, I know think “look at all that MONEY”.

So, what about you? Are you a collector of music? A hoarder? Do you boast an extensive collection? If your house was burning down would you be flinging huge wads of Senseless Things singles down for the fireman to catch before any smouldering toddlers? Are they all neatly laid out alphabetically, complete collections by artist and genre. I found that the problem with collecting is that you feel the compulsion to buy everything by a particular artist. Because you have Lowlife and Technique, you feel that you must have Waiting for the Sirens Call, the polar opposite in quality. Nestling next to Mansun’s Six is Little Kix, unplayed and unloved. But what sort of effect would it have on you if I came round your house and performed a culling of the collection, removing say anything you hadn’t listening to in the past year. Would it sicken you to the very core, or leave you feeling strangely invigorated. Over to you.