I bought the Righteous Brothers’ You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling the day it came out – I’d long sold my soul to Spector – and I’d heard it many times before this time I’m talking about now, which must have been very early in 1965, deep winter, we’ve just moved into a new house, and I’m listening to the record, label in that classic black and silver London livery, on my spiffing new top-of the range valve record player that gives off this characteristic, rather comforting but not exactly fragrant smell of dust being incinerated on the valves as they heated up, and I happened to glance up from whatever mundanity I was engaged in and look out of the uncurtained window into a dark clear crisp cold star-bright night of deep winter (no lights in our street). I was struck by that perfect marriage of sound, sight and sensation. Icy purity within and without. It was probably my first rock ’n’ roll epiphany.
Thirty years later, I play the sound and I can still feel that prickle in the neck and the shudder in my spine.
Other records are not just one time, but a collection of moments, a distillation of them, a feeling, and ever now and then you come across a vinyl madeleine that sends you spinning back, unstuck in time, to somewhere and somewhen long forgotten.
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