Reverb-TV Matt Lidis Column

I have a vague memory of seeing something on telly when I was a kid. A couple had split up and the female component was throwing her now ex-boyfriend’s record collection from a first floor window. As the vinyl cracked and splintered along with his heart I always wondered what dividing a record collection when I was all grown up would feel like. As a music obsessive from a very young age, it was always clear that my record collection would always grow much faster than any sense of responsibility, maturity or commitment and so me and it would one day be reunited in similarly acrimonious circumstances.

The meandering twenties I chose mean that my first experience of cohabitation came relatively late and as a result of time and technology the grand dividing of our records was an entirely different experience to the one I (rather depressingly) hoped for.

The ludicrous cost of living space in our nation’s capital meant that all my thousands of cds were living at my father’s house in Bolton and their electronically stored counterparts on my hard drive in London. When my girlfriend and I first moved in together the conjoining of our record collections was one much less romantic than our homely union. What should have been a beautiful experience involving us, red wine and our newly-acquired-by-proxy collections sprawled all over our new floor symbolising the exciting intertwining of lives was one much more clinical.

We sat in a silence, broken only by the whirring of laptop fans, as we scanned our screens for the contents of each others external hard drives, extracting digital files we did not already own and dumping them onto our own computers. Files that would probably never be heard. This disturbingly easy and depressingly empty experience made me want to hear something familiar, comforting and old. Something that would remind me that there is a chance we might not be downloading memory implants of holidays to Mars in five years. The warm rush of an album that was more than likely one of Grand Prix by Teenage Fanclub or a homemade Kinks Best Of, whilst temporarily uplifting, was a sign of a retreat into self indulgence that would, as usual, eventually spell the end.

As I sat in the front room mulling over the broken relationship, listening to Seamonsters by The Wedding Present, drinking the red wine missing at the start, I began the process of deleting the illegally acquired music files from my laptop. The process was over in a matter of minutes and was of absolutely no cathartic value. No banging, no crashing, no swearing, no rush of emotion. “Empty recycle bin”, and it was over. No musical trace was now left of her and the ease with which my solo flight took to the skies was eerily quiet. I hoped. Now if only I could delete her phone number from my mind…