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Credit where it’s due

Charles Spencer

Wednesday, 8th October 2008

Charles Spencer battles the credit crunch

What is unforgivable, however, is my reckless expenditure on Amazon, the online mail order service that makes buying books and CDs so appallingly easy. In the old days I’d get back from the theatre, sink into my armchair and get drunk. Now I spend 30 reckless minutes on Amazon and discover that I have spent the housekeeping money. The credit-card bill has to be secreted from the wife as assiduously as the empty Scotch bottles in times past, as does all the tell-tale cardboard packaging in which the goods arrive (mercifully, Mrs S has gone to work by the time the post arrives).

I now rather grandly think of myself as a record collector, rather than a mere consumer, and I mostly collect records no one else could possibly want. My most recent aberration has been for the more obscure and lunk-headed prog-rock artists of the late Sixties and early Seventies. What madness made me think it was essential I owned a double-CD set of Atomic Rooster, a terminally depressing band entirely free of charm, grace, wit and memorable tunes? What made me purchase Night Music by Darryl Way’s Wolf, yet another of those doomed attempts to unite classical music with rock? The only surprise is that I haven’t yet taken complete leave of my senses and ordered the entire back catalogue of Emerson, Lake and Palmer.

But as I said at the start, this is a time to make the most of small mercies. Something prompted me to revisit the jazz rock of Colosseum, which I actively disliked when it blared around my boarding house at Charterhouse 35 years ago but which now strikes me as hugely exciting and inventive. I’m also holding out faint hopes for the splendidly monickered Blodwyn Pig.

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