From Frank Sinatra to Led Zeppelin, Chennai’s vinyl community celebrates music in its raw form

On NASA’s space probe, Voyager 1, there is a golden vinyl record that contains bits and pieces of information about the human life. It is etched with sounds of Nature, greetings in over 50 languages, and music from multiple regions of the world. Also on this , is an hour-long recording of the brainwaves of director Ann Druyan. She was asked to ruminate on the beauty of the universe, but instead was consumed with the thoughts of her husband-to-be Carl Sagan, who proposed to her minutes before she recorded the brainwaves. It is beautiful to think, that somewhere out there in the vast expanse of the universe, there is love. 

At Vinyl & Brew on TTK Road, over resounding laughter and music, many anecdotes, facts, and stories like these were exchanged among a bunch of vinyl record enthusiasts. A cross between a pub quiz, a classroom lecture, a TED talk and a comedy show was hosted by Chennai-based quiz master and avid music enthusiast Berty Ashley. 

The evening began with a lesson on the evolution of speech and the effort to preserve it. The lesson was punctuated with trivia about the invention of recording devices, and moved on to the invention of vinyl records. 

An audience member having a look at a rare vinyl record
| Photo Credit:
Ashwath Nair

“I grew up in a house full of vinyl records. My grand dad was the one who started the collection when he was working with the [Indian] Railways. He had records nobody had even heard of, and my dad would put me to sleep to ‘Deep Purple’,” says Berty, talking about his foray into the world of pure, unadulterated music. 

Berty went down the rabbit hole of comparing a vinyl record to the Lazarus bowl — a fictional object believed to have captured Jesus’ words when raising Lazarus from the dead. “The reason I do this, is to explain the beauty of the vinyl format. It is the only format of music where the frequencies are physically imprinted onto something,” he says. Every other format of music, he adds, is mutated. Tapes are magnetic, CDs and DVDs are digital, and streaming is coded information. “With vinyls, there is no distortion, no compression.”

On the record

In a segment which was called Groovy Baby, a few vinyl collectors of the city, took the audience on a journey of their introduction into vinyls; a memory; or an anecdote; and finally sent out a manifestation for the record they would like to own some day. 

Berty showcased some of his most prized possessions like a copy of Paul McCartney’s Give My Regards To Broad Street. The physical vinyl was carefully removed from the sleeve for everyone to marvel at from afar, and the sleeve was passed around. Next came Frank Sinatra’s 1955 release, In the Wee Small Hours, which was the first concept album ever to be made.

Abhilash Sethurayar
| Photo Credit:
Ashwath Nair

The next Groovy Baby to take stage was Abhilash Sethurayar who owns every single U2 album including the special editions and limited editions. “I own the Rattle and Hum album in every single format — Vinyl, CD, DVD, Blu-ray, LED disk, everything,” he says. . “My aim now is to collect these rare albums which are iconic like Led Zeppelin 4, Hotel California, etc. I’m not looking for artists.”

MS Krsna
| Photo Credit:
Ashwath Nair

Singer-songwriter MS Krsna took to the stage next. “My dad’s job back in the day, was digitising old records, so we had four or five record players at home. After a while, he started donatingthem. When I got older and discovered vinyls myself, I was so angry with him for giving away all these amazing records and the players,” he said, showing a rare record of the 1986 Tamil film Mouna Raagam. 

“When I started working with a record label, I started digging to find what was there before cassette tapes, and when I found vinyls, there was no market for them in India. I waited for my moment and started collecting them slowly. When I first bought a record player, and it was delivered to me, I did not even know how to assemble it. Today I have over 60 records,” says podcaster Sudhir Vyas, fondly known as Paattukaaran in the Tamil music circles. His most prized record is a copy of The Lumineers’s Cleopatra. Apart from being a collector, he is responsible for trying to get today’s music producers, to press their music on vinyls. 

The evening was dotted with inside jokes, sharing rare collector’s edition of vinyl records, experiments to determine if one can play a particular song on a record just by observing the grooves, and many cups of coffee.