Enthusiasts: Records

Mark Winkelmann is playing me a horrible record, some religious group that would sound as if they were praising the hell out of The Lord if they didn't sound as if they were singing under divine or clerical duress into the sleeve of a choir robe.

“I've heard a lot worse,” Mark tells me.“I've got about ten religious records that have good bits or are generally good, but at lot of them aren't.”

He makes the record stop and I am glad and praise him. “I suspect this won't be a keeper.”

Mark's record collection covers a wall and a half of his sitting room. He estimates that there are around 5000, but it's impossible to know how many have passed through his possession since he got his first record as a kid (Madness, and yes, he still has it).

He a connoisseur but also an explorer, and so collecting is as reductive as it is acquisitive. Constant culling ensures his collection doesn't become a map of the record industry's output drawn at a scale of 1:1. “It's a constant process. Some stuff gets played for ten minutes after I buy it and then it's straight onto the out pile. You need to compare it to a gold standard. The enemy is not the bad record, it's the mediocre record.”

He brings a portable record player to record fairs, to check condition and make an initial assessment of quality. And the internet has allowed him to take more chances. “I might have stopped buying so many records if I didn't have a way to get rid of them and give me at least a portion of what I paid for them.”

One set of shelves holds a rock and pop collection organised alphabetically, but the stuff that has real allure is in a much larger unit loosely arranged by genre: jazz, reggae, modern composers, psych, psych and more psych, side projects, one-offs and reissues, the uncategorised. Plus about a palm's width of records that belong to his wife, Anne.

The sitting room is like a secret history of music, a sanctuary for otherwise orphaned musical artefacts. I'm not sure where the band called Rasputin's Stash belongs. Probably nowhere but here. Like the 1970s Turkish protest singer. The short-run Cher side project. Et cetera.

“There's a theory that there are two kind of record collectors, the ADD and the OCD”, the former lacking any particular goal, the latter an audiophile with tunnel vision. “I'm a bit of both. The kind of OCD focus, where I spend real money, is psychedelic folk and jazz.” He shows me a pile he's pulled out for an article he's writing. French crooner Johnny Halliday singing psychedelic tunes, Mel Torme performing Donovan covers -- purpose-assembled studio musicians doing 'psychsploitation', he tells me.

Some collectors define value by monetary worth, by obscurity, by an aspiration to conquer an entire genre or catalogue, as portals to nostalgia or social history. A few are Luddite snobs, although many vinyl enthusiasts do simply prefer their music without compression. Then there are the mint-condition obsessives. They've always seemed a little pathological to me, the hand-washers and light-switch-flickers of an otherwise perfectly logical hobby. Mostly, like Mark, they love music and love records, and with few limiting conditions.

The most he's spent is about 50 quid, on a '45 by a one-off group called 'People'. “It's the B-side that's sought out, it's called Glastonbury.” He doesn't shun reissues (to some collectors, this is like buying antiques at Past Times) or pass over things that look like they have a story, as long as they aren't completely trashed. He pulls a record out from behind the couch, to show me an example of one that's borderline trashed. Oh, yeah, there are some records behind the couch.

His taste in music has been at least partly shaped by learning to appreciate what was available before Ireland 2.0. “The selection was relatively poor compared to the UK. People were poorer, and the population was more homogeneous, so the chances of finding an old reggae record that hadn't been battered by being played a million times was pretty low. Whereas if you went to London to charity shops, you could probably buy them more easily.” So Mark would go to town on a Saturday and look through the cheapo section, buying what looked interesting and what he could afford.

He has a mental list of things he'd like to find, but hasn't gone to extremes, detective work like DJ Shadow is rumoured to do, starting with the town where a record was made. “He'd have the name of a musician and he'd get a phone book from that town and call everyone with the same name.” I'm thinking this sounds like fun. Mark's pause suggests he agrees. “Maybe if I lived somewhere where you're more likely to encounter it.”

(from Totally Dublin, April 2008)