Analogueage

Over the past few years, a resurgence of interest in vinyl recordings has taken popular music by storm. Cellist Leonard Elschenbroich tells Simon Heighes why classical musicians should also take an interest

-  Simon Heighes

‘Fly me to the Moon’, Frank Sinatra’s 1964 hit, lived up to its name. Half a century ago, in July 1969, it was the first music heard on the Moon when it was played – on cassette – by Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin as he stepped onto its surface. Eight years later, NASA’s exploratory Voyager spacecraft entrusted its 54-minute cross-section of Earth’s music to a record, etched with instructions on how to play it – including a handy stylus. The scientist behind the project, Carl Sagan, was optimistic that the spacecraft would not only be ‘encountered’ but that the record itself ‘will be played… if there are advanced space-faring civilizations in interstellar space’.

Who’d have guessed that 50 years later, we ourselves would still be playing these records (as well as cassettes, inexplicably making a comeback too). Over the past 15 years record sales have skyrocketed. According to the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), over five million vinyl LPs were bought in the UK last year – that’s eight per cent more than in 2020 and the 14th consecutive year of growth.

As for the hi-fi market, ‘there’s never really been a revival for us; we’ve always sold turntables since 1967, and we’re selling a lot more now than we did ten years ago,’ says Tony Revelle, chief operating officer of the leading specialist retailer Audio-T. ‘We now sell more turntables than CD players, streamers and DACS combined, and sales of one of the most popular turntable brands – Rega – have increased ten-fold.’