From Adam and the Ants to the Zombies: This is a warts 'n' all journey into sound in which one man puts the needle to the record and reacquaints himself with the forgotten treasures and indescribable horrors of his long neglected collection of vinyl LPs.

Maybe the sudden impetus to begin documenting my record collection had something to do with a need to begin taking stock of my life. After all, I did recently turn forty; an age when many men are propelled into crises of one sort or another. But then, I'm not a crisis sort of guy. Or at least, I choose not to wear my crisis on my sleeve. So no fast cars or womanising for me: I can't drive anyway and I was always pretty hopeless at giving the ladies the old smooth patter. And as I'm of that 'middle youth' generation that pretty much wears the same kind of clothes they wore in their twenties, I don't feel any sudden urge to start dressing younger — which at least means the world can be spared the sight of my designer underpants peering out from above the waistband of a pair of baggy low-riders.
What I have noticed though, is a greater propensity to pick over and evaluate the key events of my life thus far: this in much the same way that during half time, a football commentator might summarise the first forty five minutes of a match. Meanwhile, as he does this — to stretch a metaphor to breaking point — I visualise myself sitting sweating in the dressing room, anxiously wondering whether I will actually get to show my worth over the full ninety minutes plus extra time, of the metaphorical game of life in which so far, I've shown only brief flashes of inspiration, engaged in no small amount of clumsy challenges and scored an own goal or two.
And so, it was during such a bout of retrospective naval gazing that I began to mull over my twenty five years as a consumer of (un)popular music. In particular, I began to think about my collection of vinyl LPs. Like many people in this age of CDs digital downloads, I rarely play 'em. Indeed, as I flicked through my old albums — re-alphabeticising any which had been misfiled as I went along — I began to realise that there were far too many of them that I hadn't heard for years, as well as a fair number that I'd never really gotten round to listening to properly in the first place. And so, one night over the dinner table, the idea came to me in a flash, and I excitedly announced to my long suffering partner that I was going to listen to all of my albums systematically, one-by-one, from Adam and the Ants to the Zombies. Not only that, but I was going to write about each one, and in doing so build up a kind of warts 'n' all portrait of the greater part of my life as an avid consumer of music. In the process, I'm looking forward to rediscovering a good number of half-forgotten musical gems as well as weed out some of the more superfluous and less essential platters from my collection.