Why LPs face the vinyl curtain

We live in an era of constant and frantic change, and no one bears the brunt of this more than the music fan. Admittedly, that's a music fan talking, but I can't be the only person in the country with 1,000 LPs and nothing to play them on. (Until I get the damn thing repaired, that is.) Travis Elborough is just 35, but I suspect he has a morbid streak. His last book was a paean to the Routemaster bus, a form of transport that has also seen better days. Like that book, this one is steeped in a nostalgia we didn't know we were feeling yet. Maybe he's a sort of cultural ambulance chaser, predicting the things we are going to miss before they are actually gone. But his instincts are sound.

Unless you hate music, the LP has underpinned your whole life. It changed music, and music changed us. It's not something we should abandon lightly.

For what did we have before? We had live music or 78s, with a handful of minutes a side. If you'd tried to record Wagner's Ring Cycle on 78s, it would have taken 112 of them. Without the arrival of the LP in 1948, created by the Columbia record company in the United States, classical music simply wouldn't have been introduced to a wider audience. The LP was as significant a development in the democratisation of the arts as the paperback, maybe even more so.

Old Fashioned 45 RPM vinyl records...

Elborough has the passion of a true enthusiast. He has four copies of Michel Legrand's Brian's Songs: Themes And Variations. He found his first copy in a charity shop and loved it so much that whenever he sees another he feels sorry for it and buys it to give it a good home.

This seems to me the right side of madness, if only just.

But he's also an indefatigable researcher, who has somehow seen a clear path through the vast amount of material he has accumulated to write a book that reads not only easily and well but wholly coherently.

He takes us through the heyday of classical LPs and their adoption as a status symbol in Fifties suburban America; the subsequent boom years of 'light' music, Mantovani and his million strings; the way jazz adapted itself to the new medium and stretched to fill it; and finally and at greatest length, the way pop took over the LP and made a vast and fantastically profitable industry.

In this history, the 78 is old-hat, the 45 a mere upstart competitor, and live music something that generally takes place out of earshot..

What particularly comes over is the serendipity of it all. Why should it be that the 40-minute LP remains the most satisfying way of listening to music? With hindsight we can now see that the compact disc contained the seeds of its own destruction. Stretching 40-minute albums to 60 or even 75 minutes meant you could charge more for them, but crucially it also meant they weren't as good.

Downloading now almost seems like a reaction to this: forget the filler tracks, just buy the one song you like. Which, if you think about it, is what singles used to be.

It's one reason why young people download more than oldsters: they like singles, we like albums.

Despite Elborough's pessimism - which, after all, is the spur that made him write the book - I'd like to think the long-player has a little life in it yet. Anyone who agrees will relish this richly enjoyable book.

[DailyMail]

The Long-Player Goodbye by Travis Elborough

A record-making invention

The CD was just a shiny toy; it was the LP that revolutionised the way we hear music

The Long-Player Goodbye
Travis Elborough
Sceptre £14.99, pp468

Is anyone likely to lament the death of CDs? The evidence suggests not. When EMI announced that it was shipping over a million unsold units of Robbie Williams' Rudebox to China for the polycarbonate plastic to be recycled into road surfacing landfill, it felt like a fair use of the discs, rather than the label's own critique of their artist. Other than audiophiles, thrilled by the sonic sheen that the compact disc promised when it arrived on the market in 1983, few people have warmed to the CD in the same way that they once fell for vinyl.

It was 35 years earlier, in June 1948, that Edward Wallerstein of Columbia Records in New York introduced the world to the LP. Standing flanked by two stacks of discs, he demonstrated the difference in playing time between a conventional shellac 78 and a 12-inch disc designed to spin at 33 revolutions per minute. This vinyl acetate platter lasted 22½ minutes - enough time, using both sides, to listen to Beethoven's 'Eroica', or the first part of Yes's Tales From Topographic Oceans, should it ever come to that.

While the LP was conceived with the classical market in mind (and because the Second World War caused a shortage in shellac), it opened up new sonic vistas. For instance, Eric Satie's idea of musique d'ameublement was realised by a deluge of LPs with titles such as Music for Dining, Music for Reading and the studiously un-erotic Music for Two People Alone.

There was a similar shortlived boom in 'travelogue' LPs. A specialist in this field was Jo Basile (later to compose the music for The Magic Roundabout), who created records such as Accordion de Paris, the sleeve of which featured a beret-clad musician serenading a saucy mademoiselle.

The arrival of the LP spurred on the nascent art of sleeve design, kindling the attachment between fan and artist (later generations would derive their kicks from the artwork for Roxy Music's Country Life or, later, Big Black's Songs About Fucking). But the real significance of the LP was that it encouraged musicians to think of themselves as artists for the first time - rather than as simply hired hands there to interpret the music under the control of a composer or arranger.

If any LP can be considered key, surely it's Frank Sinatra's In the Wee Small Hours (1955), which he crafted meticulously, recording at night to ensure his voice had the right love-torn timbre. Sinatra resurrected his career with the record and went on to outsell Elvis for the rest of the decade, even if Presley enjoyed more number one hit singles. Later the Beatles announced their highbrow ambitions through records such as Rubber Soul which, rather than simply being a collection of singles, felt like an intended whole, paving the way for Sgt Pepper.

The desirability of such developments is something that Travis Elborough skips in this enjoyable history of the LP. The Long-Player Goodbye peters to a close with the arrival of the compact disc, but the CD did nothing to dismantle this new conception of pop: on the contrary, record labels and new magazines like Q rushed to construct the rock canon, encouraging the idea that no home library could ever be complete without at least one Phil Collins album. The long history of the LP would really end with the arrival of the MP3 player (the MPMan F10 in America 10 years ago), which has reinvoked that old idea of the hit song as pop's chief currency. It's easier to love an iPod than a Sony Discman, too.

Buy Long Player Goodbye at the Guardian bookshop
A fascinating and funny history of the pop album from the invention of vinyl and the LP 60 years ago, to its revival in the iPod age. Filled with enough detail and idiosyncrasy to inclusive insight into how music has shaped our lives.

[Guardian]