Groove

He collected vinyl records. He ditched his collection for CDs years ago, but when he played his first song on CD, "Won't Get Fooled Again" by the Who, it blasted out of the speakers with no warning. He realised that a vinyl record, however perfect, always had surface noise when the needle hit the vinyl, so you always knew something was coming, like the vibration of a rail when a train is on the way.

Many years later, he started rebuilding his vinyl collection because it made him feel closer to the music. Digital was convenient for when he was out walking or travelling, but his record player and vinyl colletion made him feel more connected. Yes, he had to take the record out of its sleeve, put it on the turntable, and flip it over when side one finished, but he had a piece of informative artwork in the record sleeve, and the sound was perfect, even with surface noise. When someone complained to John Peel about vinyl having surface noise as opposed to the antiseptic digital perfection of CD and MP3, Peel replied: "Life has surface noise, mate".

He didn't mind worn vinyl; it showed that it had been properly played. He often bought second-hand, because records he wanted did not contain the artwork or extras from the original releases, but he was fine with that.

He also discovered old picture discs, which looked amazing when videoed, the hypnotic Vertigo Swirl, as well as some discs that had holograms worked into the vinyl. Although vinyl was a static medium, people were doing lots of unexpected things with it.

There was a court case in the USA where the prosecutors blamed Ozzy Osbourne's "Suicide Solution" for a teenager's suicide. It was also posited that if records were played backwards (manually), Satanic instructions could be heard that would cause people to do terrible things. Rob Halford of Judas Priest testified for the defence, saying if we could plant subliminal messages, it would not be "Kill Yourself"; it would be "Buy All Our Records"

A Monty Python one had two separate concentric grooves, so you didn't know what you were going to hear when you put the record on.

Often he bought records online and sometimes, with them came extra discs used as packaging, and some of the packaging discs looked very interesting, so they became part of the collection.

One of them was totally black and I put it on the player, some dark metal came out and played for about ten minutes and then finished. I was good, but very short, so I thought I would play it again.

Something very different started to play. It was two voices planning a murder.

"So are we going to do this? Or are we going to keep putiing up with their shit?"

"This has to happen, they have been running this country into the ground, assassination has to happen. We have the guns"

"His favourite restaurant is "El Classice" he is always there spending our mone on booze and women"

"Ok Friday it is, Saturday he will be in a coffin"

Off The Record

What the hell. This sounded real, but must have been deliberately put there. I didn't know where the record had come from but it contained an assassination dialogue which I didn;t know whether it was fake or real.

it was something I wish I hadn't heard, I started scouring the newspapers for any assassination attempts, but nothing sprang out.

Had it not happened yet?

I didn't know, but if I reported this it would not be taken seriously, so I sit wondering if there is going to be a story on the news that was perpetrated by those on th erecord.