![]() ![]() Albums have popped up in all sorts of odd territories over the years. Yep Roc put out remastered CDs of those very same titles with yet another selection of hitherto unreleased material tacked on to reel in the completist buyer.īeing a Hitchcock completist is a challenging business. In 2007/2008 my bank balance withstood another financial blow at the hands of yet another round of re-issuing. No vinyl this time, only CDs with yet more, alternate bonus material. Three albums with The Egyptians and five solo efforts, all recorded before Hitchcock jumped to a major label (A&M) in the late eighties. The music industry’s incentivisation for music obsessives to switch to a digital format was as cynical as it was crystal clear.įour years later Hitchcock bought the rights to his own catalogue and had Rhino handle remastering and reissues. A vinyl copy of Element Of Light went ten songs deep. Hoovering up Robyn Hitchcock’s then back catalogue on CD was made even easier in the face of bonus tracks available on nearly every CD edition. The mug also symbolizes the moment my CD-buying switched got flipped. Twenty-three years later and with almost as many Hitchcock gigs under my belt, it remains one of my most sentimentally treasured possessions. At the end of the show I bought a souvenir mug from the merch stand. ![]() Httpv://That same year marked the first time I saw Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians, themselves a bastardised version of earlier outfit The Soft Boys, play live in support of Billy Bragg at Birmingham’s Hummingbird. For those playing at home they were “She Doesn’t Exist” (from Perspex Island) and ( So You Think You’re In Love UK single b-side) “Dark Green Energy”. Joining them on stage that night was Billy Bragg and Robyn Hitchcock.Ĭommenting on Michael Stipe’s early 90s guest appearance ubiquity one waggish columnist at Select magazine tongue-in-cheekily suggested that if you sang loud enough in the bath Stipe would bubble up from below to sing backing harmonies.Īnd sure enough, Stipe was afforded turns on not one but TWO Robyn Hitchcock songs in 1991. played a secret (and widely bootlegged) gig at London’s Bordeline under the name Bingo Hand Job. When Out Of Time dropped a few weeks later R.E.M. Who sunk the final nail into my vinyl-buying coffin? Robyn Hitchcock – that’s who.īy January 1991 I’d discovered R.E.M.’s Green and Document. With my first student loan I bought a Sony CD player and integrated amplifier and took to buying CDs as a way of maintaining good sound quality without the black stuff overrunning my dorm room. The convenience of cassettes was (and is!) unassailable but they sounded pretty darn terrible, even to my teenage ears. Home taping didn’t kill music for this fella. In the summer of 1990 I was eighteen and about to head to university, the lead up to which I spent committing my favourite records to cassette tape. I wasn’t convinced one way or the other until the prospect of hauling several hundred records up and down the M1 and M6 every twelve weeks presented. I grew up during an odd time, my music obsession taking hold just as the recording industry was trying it damndest to get consumers to forsake vinyl in favour of the more convenient, near-indestructible Compact Disc. (That and we had to lick the road clean with our tongues int’ mornin’). At the risk of sounding creaky, music just wasn’t as available as it has been in the last ten years. Until Napster, Audiogalaxy, Kazaa and, tipped us into the 21st century, physical formats were all we really knew. They won’t miss what they never knew.įor folk presently crossing over into middle age like yours truly, it’s a different story. Who knows? Millenials not weaned on physical formats won’t know any different. The 30th anniversary remaster of Cut Copy’s Zonoscope might well delivered as an inhalable gas or digestible pill. Music listening experiences might ultimately move beyond streaming. Come on in Dr Freud, have a seat – we’ve been expecting you. So why do many music fans and audiophiles find it so hard to quit the physical format and subsist solely on FLAC rips, HRA downloads and Spotify streaming? CDs won’t die out completely, they’ll simply slide away into a niche interest, similar to where vinyl sits now. The likes of Tidal, WiMP and Qobuz Hifi lossless services will plug the hole left by the slow departure of physical CDs. The foreseeable future will be dominated by streaming services, not downloads, not physical formats. The dominant format of the last 30 years is set to slowly slip from our collective consciousness. And we know now, when something approaches extinction, it becomes fetishized.” Hitchcock also nailed it in observing “The CD is slowly dying. In a recent interview with Digital Trends, Robyn Hitchcock commented, “the LP seems very dignified and regal”. ![]()
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