Obsession?

Record collectors can cop flak for their passion. But if more people understood the psychology of record collecting, might they cut we collectors more slack?, asks Tim Jones

- By Tim Jones

As Nine Inch Nails sang in The Collector, "I pick things up, I'm a collector, and things, well things, they tend to accumulate." Most collectors can sympathise with that, as well as recognise that, for some, disc detecting is what UFO memorialised in their classic long-player, Obsession. Whether the former or latter rings true, we 'anoraks' - to the less enlightened, who don't 'get it' - have always spent appreciable amounts of our hard-earned on vinyl, cassettes, CDs, plus every other physical format that came along, like so many lab rats on opiates. But can the record-collecting community defend their 'habit'? Is there any hope of convincing a sceptical 'other half', or a bewildered friend or relative, that we're not all OCD-deranged addicts, and that there actually is some rhyme and reason behind sound-acquisition syndrome (SAS)? Well, as it turns out, there might be some hope. Maybe not of kicking the habit, but of explaining why the uninitiated should recognise that our affliction has some positive value. A hard sell, maybe, but - drumroll - we've got science on our side(s). Oh, yes.