Featured Essay: The Pop Music Magpie Diaries

by Newt Albiston

I have a confession to make. I’m in the record business.

Records are fun. They are large waxy discs containing musical messages, and they are not that serious. I have many records from many places, records of many colours and expressions. Records, records, records, boxes of records to sell, cubes full of the bloody things. I often fib the answer to the question “what was the first record you ever bought” because Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’ was not my first ever record. This is a made-up lie by a made-up liar. 

I’ve lived a double life, is the thing. I’m a lover of naff music in the body of someone who has tried to cultivate a snobbish sensibility in their outward presentation. My real first ever record was a heart-shaped 10 inch of a pretty mediocre single by the English pop-rock band McFly. I’d been so deeply committed to McFly as a youngin’, seeing them 5 separate times and even meeting them after my mum had been scammed for concert tickets. This 10 inch, which was also a lovely shade of gently translucent Barbie pink, was my real first record. My second record was Joni Mitchell’s Blue, but I was not raised by the sorts of parents who listened to Joni Mitchell. That side to my taste came through the classic self-exploration and yearning combo, baby. 

I was 17 when I started my record collection. Like most record-buying teenagers in 2015, the actual record store (a finite resource for someone outside of a major city) was secondary to the humble charity shop. I filled my shelves with scratched up recordings of 1960’s musicals, singles by Stevie Wonder and Earth Wind and Fire. With no one around to tell me no, I would quickly snatch up anything that I could afford with my limited funds, and I would allow it to gather dust in opposition to the newer and cooler LPs I’d pick up upon visiting a real record store.

On my first ever Record Store Day, we ventured to an independent record store in Southend, Essex. I’d read a PDF of the releases, and I wasn’t expecting to get anything big, I just wanted to say I’d bought a RSD release because that felt like an essential piece of the record collecting puzzle. I laid eyes on her the second I passed the threshold into my first ever independent record store. Pink. 7 inches. Aqua’s Barbie Girl, with the original version on the A side and a karaoke version on the B side. For 10 pounds, I couldn’t believe my luck. How fucking funny was it, to own Barbie Girl on a 7 inch record?

It eventually got locked in a box to gather dust for a decade. Why didn’t I let it rip? When I was hosting wanky parties, why wasn’t I unlocking the singles box I’d inherited from an auntie, and why wasn’t I unleashing the power of Aqua on all of my wanky party guests?

I’ve got a few other naff records too. Rick Astley’s debut, that’s in my collection. It was a joke gift from an old friend, something he’d bought during my first year of record collecting. I’ve got a  Sébastien Tellier record that I hate listening to around others because of how graphic some of the sexy lady moaning can get on certain cuts. 

Shame can seep into your passions if you’re not careful. It can rot your whimsy and destroy any chance of true freedom that one could feel if they were to play without boundaries, without rails or convention. I say this because I’m ashamed, and I am guilty of shopping without shame in spite of the fact that I always come home with a pinwheel of regret spinning in my chest.

The reality is that oldheads who run the record stores and fairs aren’t as snobby about what goes on their turntables as you might think. Sure, I’ve run into the odd record-dealer who thinks that people stopped making music after 1982, but most of them admit to listening to popular music, or are at least interested in it from a business perspective (which is to say I always see the same dudes with Taylor Swift bootlegs to spare). I think there’s this misconception that people who have always lived with records are harsh and unwelcoming to those who are framing their records and leaving them on Now Playing shelves instead of tucking them into a polyethylene sleeve and saying night night. They might not look approachable, but I think they’re just happy to get rid of any stock. 

We’re at a bit of a crossroads in the record-collecting and dealing community, and a big part of that is that the market continues to expand and change in spite of tightening wallets and smaller profit margins for everyone involved. This is to say that when I went to Helsinki with one band on my mind, I did not spend my 90 Euros lightly. I sprinted straight to that domestic section at the back of an X Records store (a chain of record stores across Finland) and I flicked through the P’s until I found the majority of PMMP’s back catalogue. Pressed in anticipation of the band’s reunion, I giddily picked up 2003’s Kuulkaas enot! and 2005’s Kovemmat kädet.

I’d been coveting these records since I’d first heard PMMP’s music back in 2022. The giddiness I felt upon listening to their music, the realization that mid 2000’s pop-culture had been a universal concept and there was so much left for me to explore if I just elbowed past the language barrier? I’d never been afraid of a good pop tune before, but it was as if this had radicalised me further.

Fuck, I wish I spoke Finnish. I know these ladies are angry, were angry. There’s so much hurt, joy, resistance and love on these two records. It reminded me of being 5 and hearing Just Like a Pill by Pink for the first time. Nostalgia will eat you alive if you let her, but I was so excited to feel like a kid again that I just completely immersed myself in their music. 

My partner had taken a pit stop at a coffee shop next door so that I could browse uninterrupted through the wonderful domestic section that X had organised, and the range of genres in the racks were diverse and weird. Finnish rap pressed on neon green vinyl, the customary metal and black metal and death metal and sludge metal, and a lot of quality pop music. I picked up the two PMMP records that I’d been searching for, and I made my way to the counter with my stupid little British accent and 90 euros less than I had brought with me into the store (reminding myself in the process that the record sellers did not care about what I was spending my money on). Why was music so expensive? Why were my green and pink slabs of wax the same price as a one night stay in a central London Premiere Inn?

Production costs, materials, fair wage, capitalism, margins, other words associated with selling big slabs of wax. I whip out my PMMP records as often as I can because I think they make excellent bubbly background music. When records cost 2 quid and a stick of gum, there wasn’t such a feeling of risk. You could afford to be freakier in your collections, to listen to anything and everything that intrigued you. It’s a dying art, though, the blind purchase. 

When did this hobby stop being fun for some people? Vertigo labels and special cleaning solutions, have you stopped to smile and giggle in recent memory? Buy a naff pop record. I ran an event recently where I curated the vinyl playlist, and spliced between the tasteful MPB that I’d brought to play was the bellowing foghorn that is Carly Rae Jepsen’s Emotion. Out of everything, that record caused the most kerfuffle and confusion, and I had to explain my choice to a handful of beer swigging men at the bar.

I don’t cater to them. I cater to the tiny little idiot in my chest who likes bright sounds and pretty colours, the tiny little idiot in my chest who loves music with their entire heart and has never even thought to be embarrassed about Carly, or Kero Kero Bonito, or fucking Britney. Everything is fair game if you’re having a great time. 

Buy the Addison Rae record. Buy 100 Gecs, or the K Pop Demon Hunters soundtrack. Buy SOPHIE or Sugababes. Drop the shame and play the damn records when you get home. Listen to the production, notice new things, or don’t. Put on Robyn whilst you cook, or Scatman’s World when you’re searching for the world’s ultimate meaning. There is no such thing as a wasted space in anyone’s collection.

Newt Albiston (They/He) is a writer and cultural critic from the UK. Their work has been featured in the Huffington Post, Fansplaining and Oh Reader, and their writing often covers pop culture, musicology, and gender. They also deal records with their partner under the name Keyring Records.