Visiting a Vinyl Church

By MARK MORDUE

I go into Egg Records in Newtown one afternoon after pounding some local pavement to distribute leaflets for a poetry and music event I have been organising called Intuition Kingdom. Fellow pamphlet-pushers will know that just walking into some businesses with leaflets in your hand is enough to invite a death-ray stare.

Egg Records proprietor Barry Scott is different. He provides a safe harbour for all that is alternative, analogue, avant garde and indie in Sydney, not to mention your better life in vinyl and CD formats, with band t-shirts and obscure music books also available along with other rarities and paraphernalia.

I get my leaflets laid out on Barry’s counter before we devolve into a ‘quick’ one hour conversation about the first Mink de Ville album he is playing, which sounds sensational to my ears. I don’t even know who it is at first. Why didn’t he get bigger, Barry wonders? Drugs, I reckon. Barry is not sure. He thinks Bruce Springsteen sucked up all the oxygen for a lot of romantic rock n roll in the late 1970s.

Like me, Barry has a taste for early Springsteen, albums like Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ and The Wild, The Innocent and The E Street Shuffle. No one is saying there is not some great stuff later. But Barry didn’t get into “the bombast” that infected Springsteen’s music. I’m pretty keen on the panorama of sound myself, but I know what Barry means: the problem of self-importance or cultural weight somehow drying out the music. I compare it with latter day Midnight Oil as a similar case study. We reminisce about their first two albums, the freedom in the sound of the blue-covered and self-titled record everyone calls Powderworks and the mighty Head Injuries. Some energy they never quite captured again which may well have been the octane of youth and vision with it?

I’m meanwhile eyeing off the cover of Television’s second album Adventure. And can slip in a brag that I have it on red vinyl “somewhere”. It’s a favourite of Barry’s. “Everyone wants to buy their first album, Marquee Moon, but Adventure is a great album too. I don’t get why more people don’t pick up on it.”

Turns out Barry and I were both at a Television show at the Enmore Theatre about ten years ago. Band-leader Tom Verlaine is too good a musician not to deliver something of quality, but we both agree his 21st century Television were out-of-this-world good, a magic band capable of putting you into sonic and poetic dream states. Yeah, that good. Those first two Television records, they could come out tomorrow and still sound like a new edge on everything.

A stash of Alex Chilton albums on the racks inspires me to admit that for the last two years of Covid time I’ve found myself on a Big Star bender. Barry nods approvingly, as if this is a wise path for those of us in troubled times to follow. The Buddha could not be more of a shining light than Chilton’s Big Star! As long as you don’t mind your Buddha being sweet, chaotic and somewhat depressive.

By now it’s apparent we both have a passion for thin sounding, nervy, romantic rock n roll. I’m meanwhile gazing up at the Egg Records’ t-shirt wall, which appears like some church to my adolescence and twenties, all the acts I lived and breathed in my youth at one time or another: Patti Smith, Joy Division, Kraftwerk (that t shirt is super cool), Television (of course), The Smiths… it goes on.

Weirdly, I look around and realise the shop is mostly packed out with much younger people. Us two post-punk warhorses are the oldest rock n roll animals in the place. Barry says they like coming to buy CDs because they are affordable. He tells me the record companies have been gouging the price of albums to exploit the vinyl revival, jacking up prices to $50. So CDs are back in play as an alternative young people can hold in their hands.

We recall our old days nostalgically anyway, studying album covers and even the labels on the vinyl for clues and connections. Who played what, where, when… looking for names and tracking down music: it was detective work and you had to do it outside the mainstream.

Barry wonders, out of the blue, if I am interested in Frank Zappa? Turns out he got a boxed set of the man and has quite some selection available for purchase. I have to admit being pretty unfamiliar with Zappa, having gone down more of a Captain Beefheart route. More than that, I kinda came at music more through my love of writing, so I have lots of big gaps in my knowledge. I wish I knew as much as the likes of rock critics like Stuart Coupe and Clinton Walker. I’m just a dilettante next to those guys, I say.

Barry laughs. He tells me I gotta check out a podcast called Rockonteurs with Gary Kemp and Guy Pratt, an in-depth behind the scenes chat with musicians, engineers and producers. I bang it on my iPhone instantly. There is still plenty for me to learn, but hey that is the inexhaustible heart of it all.

Barry recalls going round to Stuart Coupe’s house years ago to buy a host of vinyl from him. Second-hand heaven, but a little mind boggling. Though Barry has collector troubles of his own, with the record shop far from all he has in his music library.

We both fantasise about having a special warehouse space where a team of elves might sort and clean all our albums and books – and make some tough calls on what can stay and what must go. Barry keeps cleaning the vinyl in front of him in the meanwhile. He tells me his wife loves him for his skills refined over the years.

“I’m good at cleaning records – and doing the dishes.”

My girlfriend arrives after an unsuccessful and last minute quest on King Street trying to find somewhere to get her fringe cut. Barry tells her to try the hairdresser next door. She gets in. He saves the day with local knowledge.

As the Saturday afternoon sun slants into the shop, I realise how great the place is looking. Barry has moved the counter up by the door, with some high anti-covid Perspex giving him the look of a rare jeweller at work with priceless heirlooms, which perhaps he is.

An old friend steps in the door. He saw a copy of Brian Eno’s Music for Films here last week and he has not been able to stop thinking about it, but now it seems to be gone.

“I should have just bought it.”

Don’t fret, Barry still has it, it was just moved from the ‘soundtracks’ to ‘ambient’ in the store.

I take a glance at an Alex Chilton solo album I’m not familiar with, study the back cover of Lou Reed’s Coney Island Baby like I did when was seventeen, then I pick up Television’s Adventure just to hold it in my hands. It really is a bit like touching religious relics. I can almost hear them through my hands, the songs, the sounds, the memories: some kind of movie that happened through the music, each album a journey. I decide I don’t need to buy any of them today. But I figure I will be back.