“A record with an inscription on it is like a page torn out of a diary.” A defence of biro ink on LP sleeves.
“Why do people do that?” exclaimed the guy in the record shop, disapprovingly. Someone had written on the back of Sadé’s third album Stronger Than Pride, thus diminishing its resale value. “JULY – 1988,” read the dedication, “To Kim, See you in Nice, With love, Rich. xxxxx” Just because I could appreciate the record shop guy’s frustration, it didn’t mean I agreed with it.
A lot of collectors will hold out for a mint condition copy of a desired album. To them, a biro inscription hovering above Sadé’s right shoulder is an act of vandalism. Possibly the difference between them and me is mere nosiness. What was the deal with Rich and Kim? And why Nice? Did one of them live there? Had they even met in person? Perhaps they were pen-pals and this Sadé album represents a mutual decision to take their relationship beyond the realm of correspondence. And if that’s the case, what happened in Nice?
A record with an inscription on it is like a page torn out of a diary. It mattered enough to act as a vessel into which one person’s feelings for another were placed. But then something changed. And because we only have one page of that diary, we’ll never know what it was. That might diminish the monetary value of a record, but it increases it in other ways.
I know I’m not the only person who feels this way because it was a topic I raised on Twitter recently, and received a delightful deluge of photos from people with similarly tantalising inscriptions on their records. There’s something beautifully unfiltered about the copy of The Jam’s Absolute Beginners single which simply reads “One whole year – doesn’t time fly by when you’re having fun. I LOVE YOU. xxxxx” – and reminds me of the protagonist in another song by The Jam, Monday, who is similarly unguarded about their feelings for the subject of his adoration: “But a sunshine girl like you/It’s worth going through/I will never be embarrassed about love again”.
Another correspondent sent me a photo of his copy of The White Album, which told a somewhat different story. “To my darling Sue, with all my love, Eddie”, read one inscription. Then, written on top of it, in different handwriting: “Many Happy Returns Dave, Love Sue XXX” – suggesting that this might have been the Sue which inspired Dion & The Belmonts’ jukebox classic.
If a record once meant so much to you that you wrote your name on the sleeve, are you sure you were so over it as to get rid of it? Or were you just over-keen to put some distance between your immediate past and your desired destination? When I was twelve, I remember visiting the house of my parents’ friends Nick and Maria. Like my parents, Nick and Maria ran a chip shop. Most evenings their oldest son – Nick Jr – also worked there. When Nick Jr saw me rifling through his records, he saw me pull out a pair of12-inches, Frantique’s Strut Your Funky Stuff and Lipps Inc’s Funkytown.
Now that Nick Jr was manning the fryer, he had no need of such juvenilia. “I don’t have time to listen to that stuff any more,” he explained, as he handed them over to me. Even if he hadn’t lovingly applied his name onto the labels using a standard-issue Helix alphabet stencil, I would still associate both records with him. What would Nick Jr say all these years later if I appeared at his door and re-presented him with these imperiously magnificent slivers of dancefloor manna? Would he still say that he had no use for them? Or would he realise that a significant proportion of the person he tried will away in the rush to adulthood is sealed in the grooves of those records?
Herein lies the bittersweet dichotomy of human beings and their relationship to records. We fall in love – be it with the music or with a person who we associate with the music – and we want it to be forever. But sometimes’s it’s not. Vinyl, on other hand, can weather several thousands of rotations. Almost all records outlive the feelings and, indeed, the human beings who welcome them into their story. Most of the time I spend in second-hand record shops, that doesn’t enter my thoughts. But then you happen upon another inscription. The Sylvester and Patrick Cowley 12-inch bearing the message “May your life be miserable without me.” The Labi Siffre album which Richard urges Caroline to place on the turntable on 11pm on November 13 whilst looking up at the moon, adding that, on the same time, he’ll be doing that too.
In the aforementioned Twitter thread, one correspondent popped up to say that in the 80s, his girlfriend found a copy of Nick Drake’s Fruit Tree box set for “just a few quid” in a Bournemouth junk shop. Written on it was the somewhat desperate entreaty, “perhaps you’ll understand me a little better now.” It’s a heartbreaking thing to write on any record, let alone one by Nick Drake.
Did its intended recipient even listen to it? Did they drop the needle onto Hazey Jane I and hear him plaintively inquire, “Do you feel like a remnant of something that’s past?” Or did they just dispense with it and the lover who gave it to them, in the process turning both into remnants of something that’s past?