This is Armadillo Music in downtown Davis, I have sketched the outside before but never sketched the interior. Well, I sketched the interior of the old store back in 2011, when I had my first art show in Davis for the Art About, but the store moved a couple of spaces up F Street to its larger location several years ago. I have been in a few times, but not really had much reason to look through records these days. When I first moved over here, my wife bought me one of those suitcase record players, and I brought over a bunch of my old records from when I was a teenager, not that many but as many as I could carry in hand luggage back in 2006 or 2007 or whenever it was. My old Beatles records I was given by my uncle Billy, largely, but also a bunch of old singles. I still think about the ones that I ended up leaving behind because I could only bring so many. But you know, I didn’t listen to them. That little record player wasn’t very good, as it was too small to play an LP without it flopping about, the speed was a bit off, and the sound from the speakers was, well it was fine but not with much depth. That record player sat in my closet for years, and the records have sat in my cupboard. My son recently started getting into music a lot, and one day came home with a vinyl album from one of his favourite singers (Laufey), so we got the little suitcase player out and he played it in the living room. Sounded alright, but right away I was online thinking, I should get a new record player.

So I bought a brand new up to date Audio Technica turntable, much smarter looking, with bluetooth capability so you can connect speakers or headphones. It connected well to my trusty little Bose speaker and sounded great. The difference is huge. However, when I was growing up I always had nice stereo speakers with my old record player, so I decided to get some new bigger and more powerful speakers too, stereo, that are both wired and bluetooth (I plug them into the record player, but I also connect my devices to them wirelessly). Not as mobile as my little Bose, but it’s for a different thing. Sure, this all takes up a bit of room that really I do not have. Space is a finite commodity in a small house, and I had to put them where I had all my sketchbooks piled up (I am in the process of finding a better storage solution for the sketchbooks, one where I can access them but they won’t get dusty). And now, I can get my old records out and play them the way I remember them sounding. It’s a bit middle-age retro of me, but it was inspired by the teenager in our family after all. I also bought it on the fifth anniversary of my uncle Billy dying, and he was the man with all the records when I was a kid, I would go over to his on a Saturday afternoon and he’d play me loads of records, then we’d go and get snacks and rent a movie and watch that until time to go home for dinner. So I was thinking of him when I finally got my record player. I realized it was the first one I’d ever got myself. My wife got me the suitcase one; my old record/tape/CD stereo system I had in England was given to me for Christmas when I was about 16, brand new at the time and the first CD player I ever had, and before that I had this massive (and practically indestructible) deck from the 60s or 70s with huge box speakers that used to make our little street rattle when I would play Never Mind The Bollocks. Sure I had the big old headphones on a coil as well but nothing like turning it all the way up, but that’s how it was in our street, we were never a quiet sleepy lane.

I won’t be turning it up to 11 nowadays. Anyway, I thought I should get a new record to christen the new player. Vinyl albums are expensive now; they were not cheap when I was a kid either, I used to go through second hand stores and car boot sales looking for my records, only buying cheaper singles from Loppylugs (my local store, where I’d spend hours), or going to the Record and Tape Exchange in Notting Hill or Camden. I never bought albums on cassette (tapes were for taping things on to!) and when CDs started to enter my life I went for them in a big way. I wasn’t really a big record collector like my uncle, and I have no intention of becoming one. I missed the vinyl format though (I still get up instinctively half way through Beatles albums to switch the side over) and the little crackle, the warm feeling. But they are heavy and take up space. Still, I wanted a record, so I popped down to Armadillo on this Saturday afternoon after drawing some trees, and spent a while flipping through the racks, like the old days. Not looking for anything in particular, just browsing. One aspect about Armadillo now is that they actually have a little bar in there now, so you can have a beer while browsing, or after browsing in my case. So I sat with a pint and sketched the store. There were some other people sat at the bar, one guy who was Arizona or Texas or somewhere was talking about eating rattlesnake in the desert, and declared loudly to his younger companions “Oh I hate Oasis, they are just a Beatles covers band!” At which I bristled, and wanted to say, “Well it’s not for you, is it” but I don’t to talk to strangers. After all, get me on the subject of, say, Phil Collins or Ed Sheeran and you’d get a much more dismissive response. I remember when I was in the surgery that time and they started playing Phil Collins, and there was not enough anesthetic in the hospital to cover that agonizing pain. But enough about that. I ended up buying a remastered version of Joni Mitchell’s album ‘Blue’ which I do have on CD, but always felt like more of a vinyl album. And it sounds great. I’ve no intention of becoming a record collector, but I will get a few albums that I’ve always wanted on vinyl (perhaps including the newly re-released Definitely Maybe) and spend a bit of time browsing in record shops. If anything, they are good subjects to sketch.