Things did not, however, work out that way.
Once I’d finished on the airwaves I was increasingly reluctant to shell out for new music. There was plenty of new stuff out there, and while people associated with the industry would suggest this was due to my trading and downloading interests the actual reason was more straightforward.
Quite simply, the local music outlet seemed increasingly disinterested.
I’d always seen buying music as an inevitable part of the whole taper/trader thing, and must have put thousands of dollars through that shop over the years once the CD revolution had rekindled Hughesy’s interest in buying music.
Early on, the people who worked in the music department at least pretended to be interested when I wandered in looking for some obscure masterpiece, and the process reached its peak when Wilko was in there, but when the store changed hands the new proprietors didn’t seem all that interested.
When I was aware of something that interested me the first step was to drop by in the middle of my lap around town, ask for a look at the Platterlog, and check whether what I was looking for was in there yet. Often, even though what I was after wasn’t in there yet, there was something else in the New Releases pages that caught my eye and produced an order.
As time went by under the new management the state of the Platterlog went from regularly updated to the new stuff’s in the front of the folder to I think there’s an update around here somewhere. Bearing the fact that I could easily spend something between fifty and two hundred dollars on music every fortnight I found the apparent disinterest more than slightly inexplicable.
It wasn’t as if I was short of stuff to listen to at home.
So, from the time towards the end of 2004 when the radio stint came to an end, new purchases dropped to the point where they were virtually non-existent.
If there was something I needed to get my hot little hands on I could always order it from Amazon or some other on-line source, but as time went by I found the inevitable delays involved with delivering the stuff a source of increasing frustration.