I just watched a documentary about the making of Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. I remember sometime in the mid-70s, I would have been 11 or 12.  My parent’s had gone out for the afternoon.  I pulled out the stereo and dragged it into the middle of the lounge room, and dug out some LPs I wanted to listen to.  Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was one.  I remember the physicality of it.  The stereo sitting, largeish and bulky on the carpeted floor.  The LP sleeves scattered on the floor.  The tone arm of the turntable moving across to place the stylus in the groove of the record.  The label going slowly round at 33 1/3 revolutions per minute.  Picking up the record and turning it over at the end of the each side.  Those were the images of music of my day.  You focussed on the music and you saw the machinery of its reproduction.  That, and the sleeve art.  It may be the innocence of being that age, or that you never focus on anything in quite the same way again, but I don’t think any images provided to accompany music ever added much to the experience.  I loved LPs. I loved the sleeves and jackets.  I loved turntables and the technology of it in a way that I have never loved the mechanics of the digital era, and I guess I’ll always remember that afternoon.  Or the night we played the entire Beatles catalogue all the way through.  Or hundreds of similar experiences.

I must be getting old. Nostalgia is claiming me.