Collecting

I'm trying to think about the first thing I ever collected. I guess it would have been comics except that I did simply want them to read, starting in the early seventies, when, on a Saturday morning, my dad would buy me 'The Incredible Hulk' (which I loved more for the Daredevil stories) and 'The Amazing Spiderman' for my brother.

Each comic was 4p and consisted of black and white reprints of the American monthlies, chopped into quarters to give us a weekly comic. Sometimes the covers were out of sync with the stories, revealing vital plot points ahead of time.

My granddad also had a trunk of American DC titles that belonged to my Uncle Pete and these were mostly from the 'silver age' period. Thus, by the time we moved to Hong Kong and were immersed in a more American culture, my brother and I were delighted to pick up the proper Marvel and DC monthlies, fully au fait as we were with every character's history. (My Nan carried on sending us the Marvel weeklies.)

Coming back to the UK, I switched to 2000AD and I still have boxes of them in my folks' attic, hundreds of editions up to around 'prog' 500. I haven't got them down for years so maybe that is working towards the kind of collecting, verging on hoarding, that I'm going to talk about.

After comics, it was records. I bought these to listen to, as well, in the way that I bought comics to read, except now elements of that collecting bug were becoming more obvious. I bought the Canadian album 'Themes For Great Cities', which was a compilation of tracks by Simple Minds, not because it had any music on it that I didn't already own but because the artwork was different.

Although it wasn't just that; more to the point, I wanted to own everything that Simple Minds had released. Here, then, is that collecting bug. When I eventually gave all of my vinyl to my friend Chris I think there were five different variants of the 'Sons And Fascination' album, all containing the exact same music. 

And so it continued with CDs and also with books. And while most of the CDs got a good listen, for as long as I've been writing this blog, I have periodically lamented my book pile, which I occasionally strip of all of the books that I finally admit I am never going to open. At the moment, for example, Suggs' autobiography is 'at risk': I know why I bought it, I feel I'd like to read it, but when I go to get a new book, I never pick it up.

And so to my slowly burgeoning collecting of analogue synths. I love buying then and tinkering with them but I don't really use them. Indeed, a big driver for signing up for the electronic music production course in Salford was to start making use of these wonderful bits of kit that are sometimes at risk of becoming primarily decorative. 

To be fair, I have shied away from the more expensive bits of hardware and I have wisely refrained from setting foot on the path that will lead to building a collection of Doepfer Eurorack modules, which is probably the clearest route to bankruptcy available to me right now. 

Anyway, this little fellow arrived the post, today. A 'ribbon' synth - the keys don't actually depress - it has a couple of oscillators and a not very powerful speaker but, through headphones, it makes some enjoyable analogue sounds. Another one for the collection!

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No scales
Reading: 'The Sound Of Tomorrow' by Mark Brend