Spiral scratch: workplace and the vinyl revival
On the face of it, logically speaking, pressed vinyl as a medium for recorded music makes no sense when compared with digital. No sense at all. When global sales fell to a meagre 200,000 in 2007, despite a mini revival during the rave-peppered 1990s, it should have heralded the very last flicker of interest in the once-ubiquitous format. Yet something strange has been happening.
Thomas Edison invented the phonograph around 150 years ago. While he didn’t gift us the horizontal outcome, a description of it was contained in his patent for the original cylinder. The first spiral scratch discs, just after the turn of the century, contained 4–5 minutes of music and spun at a dizzying 80rpm. Dead or Alive would have been more the former. The disc became the main music reproduction format by 1912, and vinyl chloride replaced the original shellac phonographic discs in the 1940s. We had the 7” by 1948 and stereo by 1957.
Thereafter almost every youth came to know the joy of ‘walking’ through a box of records, inspecting every inch of the sleeve for clues, inhaling in time to the suck of static as the shimmering plate was drawn from the inner glove. The crackle that heralded the arrival was the true soundtrack for many generations. We instinctively held our breath, for as long as it took. Portishead, the masters of hauntology, even included it in their 1994 masterpiece Dummy, adding a layer of almost sinister beauty forgotten by those who had jettisoned their fragile collections for the pristine treble of the compact disc in the 1980s.
By 1988 the CD had overtaken sales of vinyl, something that the earlier pretender, the cassette tape, had failed to do. Sony ceased pressing vinyl in 1989. But they started again in 2018, such that in the UK in 2020 4.8 million vinyl albums were sold. The 500,000 vinyl copies ordered by her record company of Adele’s latest album have caused a global shortage of the precious wax to the extent that artists who finish recording albums today are unlikely to see them pressed, bagged and with retailers until 2023. The artists increasingly including the format aren’t those turning out hardcore dance, either, but pop icons such as Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran. Vinyl is well and truly back.
Music has run alongside my property career since the early 1990s, in my personal life as well as being a Facilities Manager for Warner Music and PolyGram Records. I’ve long argued that the pandemic will prove to be a ‘Napster’ moment for the property industry (I really should have published the draft post a year ago) as it will need to rapidly evolve from lesser, higher value interventions (leasing, strategy and fit-out, primarily) to a far greater quantity of smaller-value transactions, responding to an overwhelming need for flexibility. It took the music industry 15 years to return to profitability after the upstart’s appearance in 1999.
There may be a parallel here with the office. The present arguments for a ‘digital first’ strategy are compelling, from ubiquity, immediacy and reach through its shredding of once unchallenged staples of our exhaustion such as the commute. Those who favour office presence present an unappealing alliance of the dogmatic, prehistoric and privileged, overlapping with an entire property industry looking for clues. The case for the office is pale and acidic, its arguments for social cohesion and collaboration — along with the associated gimmicks and merch — finding little resonance with those who can prove without doubt they can get on with doing what they’ve always done without it.
Why — when music is essentially free, available across all devices, resilient, instantly available from a catalogue of everything ever released and more on verbal command, that we can share with anyone, from which we can easily create our own ‘mix tapes’ without having to wind the curly plastic back in with a pencil, and where the apps help you out with like offerings to expand your realm — would we dream of paying for it on an expensive, vulnerable format we have to cart around and for which we need a separate device attached to other devices to play it on? True, DJs can beat-match — but we can do that digitally, too. Even the arguments about the sleeve art and notes dissolve when we can find absolutely everything we ever wanted to know about an artist and their work online. It makes no sense at all.
Perhaps it’s because it makes no sense that it does. What vinyl offers over digital has nothing to do with efficiency and logic. To even attempt to argue it would be beyond futile, if there is indeed such a place. The warmth of imperfection and vulnerability. The effort needed to enable it. Its changing character as the wax wears through use (the static of Dummy was identical every play, after all). The very limits of a collection. The marvel of the search through dusty corners of dwindling suburban high streets. The social cohesion of the shared interest. The handling of the cover, sleeve, disc. The drop of the needle as it finds the groove. The entire authenticity of the experience.
The office, too, perhaps makes sense because it doesn’t. There is no actual need for it. The aspect for which it is primarily argued — social interaction — can be satisfied elsewhere, in often more fitting, convivial surroundings, from a pub to a meeting centre to a hotel. There is no evidence that the office drives greater creativity and innovation because all but the gargantuan few are able to understand or quantify either. Our days have both expanded and shrunk simultaneously, to the extent that, as a client recently expressed, we “can no longer fit a day’s work into a day at the office.”
And the campaign against the office began decades ago. I know as I was one of those agitating for greater flexibility and freedom. Certainly not to the exclusion of the office, as is now widely advocated. But I have known for all this time that the static crackle, the eerie pre-echo of the opening guitar riff and then the belting into the opening bars of the 12” single of New Order’s 1981 debut single Ceremony (in the green cover — way better than the white cover) can never be replicated. Adjacent to the label on the inside, scratched into the vinyl it reads:
“Watching love grow — forever”
I didn’t know it was there till I had inspected every millimetre of the disc. As you do. I would trade this record for all the digital music in the world. It’s a case I can’t make. It doesn’t make sense. But bloody hell, it does.
