So I went shopping for vinyl and started a blog…

Where do I start and you begin?

Let’s face it buying vinyl online isn’t a great experience. It *is* a great service but when it comes to browsing most online vinyl stores it can be really hard to see anything other than top sellers, what the labels are pushing and a bad algorithm / search / recommendations function. The magic of your vinyl flicking fingers alongside the High-Fidelity-knows-what-you-like-before-you-do store assistant infused shopping experience is rarely replicated (Vinyl Me Please aside who are pretty fantastic). We, the everyday vinyl lovers, can find ourselves lost in a pit of terrible scrolling and end up with a purchase that we don’t really know why we bought. Enter all the vinyl I currently have under my stairs screaming for a Discogs page. Anyway, I travel a lot, I buy a lot, and I thought I’d start a blog that ties together all the reasons I would buy an album or book or whatever. These can be anything from it was mentioned in a book (so I have a book section) or, like so many others, it has nostalgic value, or it’s just a banger of an album.

When it comes to books, well I learn so much about music via books, or books via music.

For example…

I first heard of Charles Bukowski via the Red Hot Chilli Peppers song Mellowship Slinky in B major when I was 15. My friends and I were all budding Fleas, or Anthonys Chads or Frusciantes (oooooh that Hendrix sound) and used to dance to it in my mum’s kitchen. (She confiscated the album from me as she considered it pornography when she heard Sir Psycho Sexy and gave it back to me when I was 16, but that’s another story for another blog LOL)

“I’m on the porch ’cause I lost my house key
Pick up my book, I read Bukowski
Can I get another kiss from you?
Kiss me right here on my tattoo”

Thanks to this I have read all of Bukowski and can hear all the references to him on U2’s pop. I am also the proud owner of a torched piece of skin on my pelvis where a black dragon tattoo used to be…although I hold Suede’s Brett Anderson and Mel Gibson’s Purple Heart tattoo in Lethal Weapon equally to blame for turning me into “The Man With The Dragon Tattoo”.

See what I did there? That’s what I do, I link books and music and pop culture together. So instead of letting it all spin around my head and Chat GPTR have all the fun, just like Bob Dylan’s “I’ve got a head full of ideas that are driving me insane, it’s a shame the way she makes me scrub the floor” I’ve decide to write them down. This all happens in between me literally cleaning my house. Like Jarvis Cocker, I too, am “the man who stays home and does the dishes” but in between middle age and all the house cleaning that comes with it there is music, there are books, there will be typos, there will be irreverence, there will be rants and there will jokes and I really hope to provoke as much as I do to engage and excite. The world of reviews has become so saccharine.

That’s life after all and In My Life, there is no life without music, books and pop culture.

I don’t have any social media for this for you to follow but will be getting an email together shortly if the blog gains traction.

So, If you want to contact me, hold tight for now.

More to come soon,

The EVL.