I recently reconnected with a friend in the UK, who told me about the Pet Shop Boys forum. When I was a much younger lad, the Pet Shop Boys were my favourite band. Truth be told, they still are. But in my youth I was a much more rabid fan, committed to collecting everything and anything related to Messrs Tennant and Lowe. So recently I've been transported back to those days of scouring dusty record shops for rare releases, signed vinyl, anything to satiate my lust for anything PSB-related. And it's been a very enjoyable reminisce.
My compulsion was such that, even when I was a student in San Francisco on a summer exchange program, I spent a lot of my free time travelling across the Bay Area at record fairs and stores. I found a lot of very cool records:
It would be easy to regret having lost so much time to so seemingly pointless an exercise as loving, needing these records. Surely I could have been having much more sociable fun? But consider this: I still have all of these records, and rarely do I play them. They've travelled thousands of miles with me, from US to UK and back again. And every time I look through them, I'm taken back to a record store somewhere, to the sights and smells of years ago, remembering what it was like to hear the music for the first time, who I was with (and who I wasn't with).
Neil Tennant once said that pop music is important because, unlike almost any other thing, music evokes in each of us the people, places, and times that were most important to us. How can anyone consider that to be a wasted investment of time?
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