Sound It Out – A documentary by Jeanie Finlay

Original article from Left Lion

When tapes became de rigeur in the eighties, they said vinyl was not long for this world. When CDs came striding in in the nineties they said that tapes and vinyl had definitely had their day. When minidisc were released, well, nobody paid the blindest bit of notice really, but tapes were hardly anywhere to be seen. Now it’s all gone digital and mp3s have taken over the CD market. So if technology is so progressive and mediums have come and gone, why do we still find ourselves with the cumbersome yet delicate vinyl in our hands and hearts?

From the first smell of my parents’ vinyl cleaning cloth to being allowed for the first time to lay the needle on one of my dad’s LPs, I was hooked. The Saturdays of my youth were whiled away in town with mates: Topshop, Miss Selfridge, the local hippy shop with the obnoxious smell of myriad scented candles, sitting around and watching life go by. Oh, and record shops. I started off with the standards: Woolworths, Our Price, Virgin and HMV but I soon discovered proper record shops and never looked back. Hours were spent flipping through the racks and taking in the tatty walls of flyers, posters and ads – you just didn’t get the same feelings in HMV. I’d go to neighbouring cities and wander the back streets to find new record shops and see if they had anything extra to offer me. None had decent carpet, none were well lit, all had someone I was too scared to talk to behind the counter but most importantly, vinyl outnumbered CDs and tapes and I always felt like I was in Aladdin’s cave.

I digress; the point is that vinyl will never die. Favoured by DJs and music lovers, it’s more than just sentimentalism that keeps them being pressed – it’s not the medium but the sales point which technology has shifted. The internet has given so much but has taken away a number of tactile pleasures and one of them is the fingertip shuffle through stacks of vinyl. In Nottingham, although we still have the likes of Oh My Gosh and the mind-boggling Rob’s Record Mart, we lost Selectadisc over a year ago and Funky Monkey has bitten the bullet too. We’re lucky as a city to still have a number of record shops, some places are barren of the grooved black discs and the obsessives that hold them.

Jeanie Finlay, a locally based filmmaker of the documentary persuasion, hails from the North East and her latest film, Sound it Out, is the observational portrait of the last surviving record shop in Teesside. The shop is struggling against the recession and the obvious technological changes in our buying habits, but it’s still going and over the last eighteen months, Jeanie has been collecting footage of the owner and punters that make the place so special.

If Jeanie’s previous documentaries (Lace City and Goth Cruise) are anything to go by, this is going to be an entertaining and insightful film that will tug at most music lovers heart strings as well as giving us a chance to see the vinyl addicts at play.

Sound It Out is due to be shown as part of Sideshow in Nottingham on Saturday 11 December. There are still funds to be raised so that Jeanie can finish her film and get it in the can. There’s a simple solution though, dob her some money – whatever you can afford – and the film gets made and you get a credit on the film. It will be very much appreciated and they will give you a MASSIVE shout to all their followers. The more you donate the louder they scream!!!

You can donate and support Soud It Out at Indiegogo.