It was four years ago, my wife told me my mid life crisis had officially begun when I finally at thirty seven years of age, after spending most of my adult life yearning for, purchased a set of Technic’s 1210’s and a mixer. I had a very mixed bag of vinyl that I had picked up at various points along my lengthy career of partying, which started way back in 1988 when I was at the tender age of just fifteen. It was a real mixture of tunes that I simply had to buy at the time for when I finally did tip my toe in the water and get myself a set.
My obsession with House music has never left me. Years ago there were literally packs of friends, club gangs if you like that would frequent various parties, clubs in London and around the country and of course Ibiza. Over the years we all grew up, got married, had kids (me included) and most of my friends moved on with their lives and hung up their raving shoes for good. But as I was reaching my forties I discovered that my obsession with electronic music was, if anything, growing exponentially.
With the rise of the internet music had become so much more accessible to me, it was much easier to find “that” elusive track you had been after, and with platforms like soundcloud, I could now follow the producers I loved and get snippets of new material as they release it. I was like a kid in a sweet shop.
I had been listening to Reboot’s Resident Advisor podcast and was obsessed with finding the name of track nine and buying it on vinyl. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth I managed to track it down; Scarlett Meets Recloose – Moveology. I scoured Juno, decks.de and Beatport relentlessly, but to no avail.
So I popped into those wonderfully helpful and highly knowledgeable fellows in Phonica Records in Poland Street and spoke to the ever charming Vangelis, who had incidentally never heard of the track. He tapped the track name into the computer on the desk and spun it around for me to see;
“if it’s not on here, it’s more than likely unreleased, keep trying back” I checked the website name on the screen; www.discogs.com I knew that I had heard the name before, when I had been digging recently in Gary Dennis’s wonderful Crazy Beat in Upminster. I thanked Vangelis and blissfully unaware of the financial ruin I was facing toddled off home to look into the wonderful world of Discogs.
I signed up and was immediately sucked in. Here it was in all its glory, a huge treasure trove of all of the tracks that I had tried so hard over the years to track down. After so many years of trawling through Hard To Find Records less than easy to navigate website for these elusive slabs of black stuff I had given up. Imagine my sheer delight in not only finding them ALL here and in plentiful abundance, but cheap too, that was it, I was up to my neck in it already and didn’t even notice.
Slowly but surely a steady stream of flat square parcels started to arrive at my door, I was in heaven! However the missus did not miss this either. “Is that more records?” She would enquire, “errrr yes darling”, I would mutter beating a hasty retreat to my man room. My wife was approaching her fortieth birthday and we were having a party at home at which I was DJing, this was the perfect excuse to buy up every piece of vinyl I had ever wanted, which I did.
Now I find myself four years later and now a Discogs veteran, it is a love and hate relationship, love the fact that I can find and buy pretty much anything I want but hate not having the money to buy it all! With amazing sellers out there like the wonderful Ed Davies, who’s brown, square, manilla covered packages always arrive inscribed on the back with permanent marker “with love” you can really tell that not only does this man know and love good music, he also takes pride in his work. Now a Facebook friend, his constant posts of delights arriving at Davies HQ are almost too much to bear.
Discogs a truly wonderful tool for the vinyl enthusiast, just whatever you do, don’t go on when you’re pissed, it can work out VERY expensive.
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