A young woman is over at my house. She is searching through a pile of LPs that are stacked flush against my stereo. She finds a Flying Buritto Brothers LP that I picked up second-hand in an op shop in High Street. She gently lifts it out of the pile and turns the record over and over in her hands. She removes the vinyl from the sleeve and examines it. There’s a scratch, she says. I nod and answer that I can’t listen to ‘The Dark Side of the Street’ without anticipating the scratch, the jump. Even if I hear the song on the radio, or listen to it on a CD, I’m always waiting for that moment. And so, always there, the moment of confusion when I do not hear the jump, when the song seamlessly plays to its end. Vinyl is beautiful, she says, so much more beautiful than a CD or an mp3 download on a computer. Is that because it is tangible, I ask? The question confuses her. She is much younger than me and has grown up knowing that the digital is also real, that it has its own kind of solidity.

‘Maybe. But I just love the size of a record. I love that the artwork of the sleeve becomes so important to your experience of the music. I love that you have to be careful with the vinyl. Can we play it?’