L is for LPs

It cost me about £2.40 and I played it nonstop that whole afternoon as I gazed at the album cover. On it was a picture of a person, whose age was not readily clear, teasing a bright orange coloured cat with a fish skeleton and above the picture, two words, Cat Stevens. His music was neither offensive nor revolutionary, but he wove beautiful pictures through his thoughtful lyrics, melodic tunes and acoustic sounds and I fell in love with it. By the end of the week I knew all the words and most of the chords and passed endless afternoons, crooning out my own pale imitations of 'Moonshadow' and 'The Wind' on an old 12 string guitar. And so began my love affair with the LP. For the next fifteen years or so, much of my hard earned pocket money was donated to support the careers of both fledgling and established musicians as the LP collection grew. I loved the covers, the album information and increasingly, the lyrics sheet inside. But they had their drawbacks. The background noise of the stylus on the vinyl, the 'jumps' when the needle encountered a blocked groove or someone touched the record player and the inconvenience of trying to reposition the 'arm' for a repeat play. Yet by far the greatest annoyances were the 'scratches' on the vinyl surface that no amount of doctoring could completely remove and the effect of a hot sun that would forever alter the flat nature of the disc. Many nights I have watched Arlo Guthrie spin around on my turntable as the stylus arm painstakingly negotiated a series of hills and valleys to ensure that the sounds I heard were pleasant to the ear. And an old Amy Grant album remains an unplayable museum piece after an unnamed son discovered great delight in the scratching sound that came out from the speakers when he dragged the arm to and fro across the brand new lump of rotating vinyl.

When the CD arrived, like most LP enthusiasts, I was initially curious but wary, yet as the price became more competitive and the attraction of a remote control with all its facilities began to dawn, I soon found myself, like many others, ignoring the stacked album shelves and taking more than a passing glance at the small silver discs. Until, eventually, there were no LPs to buy and I was converted. Anyway, you can't take an LP collection on holidays! In recent years, I have begun to delve back into that old collection, partly because so much of the music was innovative and has never been bettered but also because each album has a story to tell of a particular point in my life and with it, a host of past memories. Mind you, it's not all good, but much of it is better than the endless supply of tuneless meanderings that are served up on our radio stations today.

That's why I adore many of the old hymns, so often discarded in our modern worship, but so full of words that touch my heart and breathe of the living God. Hymns such as 'Amazing Grace', 'My Jesus I love Thee' and 'Great is Thy Faithfulness' that express spiritual emotions and experiences that no modern writer could convey any better. And while I love our new songs, our new methods of worship and our song writers who articulate their faith in words and tunes that I both understand and enjoy, I am forever drawn back to the simplicity of 'The Old Rugged Cross' and the hymns of my childhood.

It's no coincidence on my very first LP, I should find that beautiful old hymn, 'Morning has Broken', written back in 1931 and rescued, by a pop star, from obscurity for the whole world to enjoy. In all our worship, let us praise the High King of Heaven who is still our Vision, our Wisdom, our Battle Shield and Ruler of all.