Q Magazine - October 2008
I’m having terrible trouble with my piles. It’s all that sitting around in buses and airplanes on tour that causes it. Whenever you stop moving, there’s an overwhelming urge to get hold of something to help pass the time: a magazine, a book, a DVD or a CD. I’m particularly drawn to the latter. Hanging around in record stores looking for obscure albums is one of the great pleasures of touring America and with the exchange rate between the pound and the US dollar currently in our favour by a factor of almost 2:1, the sense that all these great records are half price is difficult to suppress. And when I get home, I find I have piles. After six months of touring my new album across Europe, America, Canada and Australia, there is hardly a surface in my office that doesn’t have something stacked up on it.
Eventually these piles disperse - the t-shirts to their drawer, the books to their shelf and the DVDs into that dark recess beneath the tv. The CDs however, just keep hanging around. They are slowly colonising the room, blocking the light like some creeping vine and making the room seem pokey. Worse, they are an affront to my sense of dignity. Until they are filed away alphabetically on the shelves in the corridor, I cannot claim to be their master.
That the CDs hold the upper hand is down to my own failure to find room for them in my collection. My two pine shelving units stand over six feet tall and can each hold 1100 CDs, yet of late they have been crammed full. One contains the general collection, from Albert Ammons to Warren Zevon, where brief sightings of the likes of Louis Prima and Mary Margaret O’Hara can be glimpsed between vast phalanxes of albums by Jackson Browne, Ronnie Lane or The Shangri-La’s.
The other is more specialised, with sections for folk, world music, classical and compilations. There are boxed sets there too and a ‘nursery shelf’ for new acquisitions not yet integrated into the collection. This is where my problems begin. Because the general shelves are full, the nursery has got badly backed up, overflowing onto the top of a nearby upright piano. The smart thing would be to transfer some of the less listened to CDs into storage in the basement, except – doh! – there are already five boxes of CDs in storage down there. My whole system has reached capacity. Something’s gotta give.
And so it was that last month, I began hauling the storage boxes out of the basement and laboriously going through each one, asking myself if I really needed to keep this CD or might it be more appreciated in another’s hands? In one ruthless afternoon and evening, I halved the number of CDs in the basement. Then it was time to bring the same pitiless eye to the general collection. Did I really need instant, 24-hour access to ‘What Is Hip: the Tower of Power Anthology’ or could I let it slumber in storage until I was taken by an irresistible urge to hear the unedited single version of ‘Oakland Stroke’? Soon, I realised that it was not CDs that were clogging up these shelves but sentimentality. Why was I giving space to ‘Christmas in the Harbour: Seasonal Songs from Newfoundland and Labrador’? The soundtrack to ‘Sweet Dreams’? And four CDs by Bis??
It was a hugely cathartic experience. I worked night and day over the course of a weekend, occasionally pulling albums out and playing them as I went, causing other members of the household to stuck their heads around the door and ask ‘what is that tune?”. The whole process led me to add hundreds of new tunes to my i-pod.
And now once again, I am master of my CDs. My surfaces are clear, sunlight pours into my room and the nursery shelf is empty, ready for cycle to start all over again. Yet the whole experience has left me with one nagging question.
How come I don’t own any CDs by Mott the Hoople?
This article was first published in Q Magazine in the UK
Billy also presents a monthly radio programme for Q Radio.
You can listen to it on the digital TV platforms in the UK Virgin Media, Freeview, and Sky.
Also on DAB London Radio.
Worldwide listeners can tune into the online player here:
http://radioplayer.qthemusic.com/
You can also catch Billy’s show online for up to seven days in Q Radio’s Listen Again archive here:
http://qradio.qthemusic.com/qradio/2009/01/billy_bragg_2.shtml
4 Responses to “Q Magazine - October 2008”
By Andy Gardiner on Feb 25, 2009
Billy,
Spotify.com. It’s the way forward.
By Andy Gardiner on Feb 25, 2009
…and they have plenty of Mott the Hoople
By J. Hickey on Feb 25, 2009
Please don’t look at the site link, it hasn’t been updated in years.
Anyway - I find myself, as I often do, feeling like I can relate to your problems, Bill. We recently moved into a new house and in the middle of selling out old place and getting this one, we had to stay with my wife’s family for 6 months. Knowing I couldn’t bring our modest by some standards but impressive to many CD collection with us, I carefully packed them up after adding about 85% of them to our iPods. (You can get alot of fucking albums on those things). I think a rough count of them as we packed them away put it at over a couple thousand albums. Anyway, when we finally moved into the new place, I was stuck trying to find a home for the collection. I resisted the urge to chuck them all since I “had them on my iPod” as so many people told me. I assume you’re like me and prefer to have the real mccoy in your hands. Or, at least SOMETHING in your hands. Something tangible. I loaded them into two nice new cabinets we bought and found that not only did they not fit in a format which made them all reachable, they were actually too heavy and started breaking the cabinet. The new house isn’t huge, so I had to be creative: make them accessible but not have to use stacks of CDs as furniture. I decided the only way to tackle the problem was to create my own solution, so I built a special CD “rack” that has found a home on the landing in our house - easily accessible to both floors (and you get a bit of exercise, too). I tried to purge as I was relocating everything. I quickly gave away the Rat Pack and Crooner box set I bought for Xmas 6 years ago - but only because they were horrible live recordings. As I type I currently have a box of CDs I asked my wife to listen to so I could decide what to do with them. We haven’t even made a dent in the 12 discs I decided I might be able to live without. My 5 year old daughter, Ava, helped me put away the CDs once the specially designed contraption was ready. As we stacked them, I listen for creaking sounds and kept measuring the space between the back of the unit and the wall. I have confidence in my own carpentry skills, but since Ava was with me, I was being cautious. I have to admit that if it was just me, many people would laugh if I was crushed by my CD collection. Ava has learned to read very quickly and she did a great job helping me put them all away but she thinks I have too many Billy Bragg and Elvis Costello CDs.
By Los Angeles Recording Studios on Mar 14, 2009
Good idea Hickey, im hoping to build a CD rack of my own with your inspiration. thanks.