The More You Live, The More You Love

These days are filled with music and less internet. I'm not in the mood to wander through websites, read blogs or spend time on e-mail. I went back to my cabinet, opened it and took out the CD's I wanted to hear again after so many years. Music which filled up the free times of the past, when you lay on your bed studying, or reading a book while the records made their rounds. So yesterday I played mostly Toyah records. Started from Sheep Farming In Barnet and ended with Love Is The Law. Albums I hadn't heard for quite some time and which I enjoyed a lot to hear again. During the first part of the eigthies I was a huge fan of Toyah Willcox, having all her records and most of the singles. A school friend introduced me to her music, and I remember borrowing the records from the library of Haarlem. A cycle trip we undertook each couple of weeks with a small group of friends. Afterwards we visited the record stores, where I started to buy the Toyah albums and singles. Yesterday ...

A couple of days ago I was finally putting my vynil records in a cupboard again. On the attic we have created a nice listening and relaxing room with my old audio tower, a television, a DVD player and my old collection of vynil records alongside my collection of music DVD's. Going through my special singles collection I discoverd that behind every single there's a story. In the mid eighties I organised trips to major Dutch cities with friends to go on record hunting. Those days it wasn't just the big chains of stores you have nowadays. The Free Record Shop, one of the biggest in the Netherlands these days, was a small one those days, which offered the music lover a lot of import 7" and 12" singles, mostly not available elsewhere and sometimes hardly heard on the readio (I bought all my regular Marillion 12" singles there). They only had shops in big cities then like Amsterdam, Haarlem and Utrecht to mention some. Nowadays every small city has one and you fin...