A passion for vinyl

Every year at this time, as trees come into bud and flowers bloom, middle-aged men (and a few women) sleep overnight on pavements to ensure they don’t miss the year’s crop of Record Store Day releases; April may indeed be the cruellest month if one fails to acquire that limited 12” picture disc of Toto’s ‘Africa’. It is with such dedicated individuals that Magnus Mills’s new novel is concerned, memory, desire and vinyl being the constituent parts not only of Record Store Day on 22 April but also this authentically square book. The Forensic Records Society has been printed to look like a collectable 7” single, complete with die-cut dust jacket resembling a vintage paper sleeve.

For nearly 20 years Mills has been entertaining and occasionally perplexing readers with his enigmatic tales of thwarted expeditions, projects and schemes, stories which may or may not be allegorical. From his debut with the 1999 Booker-nominated The Restraint of Beasts to The Field of the Cloth of Gold, shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize in 2015, Mills has excelled at the comedy of administrative process and mild exasperation. In his novels and short stories, as in life, men (and a few women) sit around in groups debating the right way to do something without ever quite understanding what the others are getting at. In this respect, The Forensic Records Society is classic Mills.

The novel begins with a discussion of exactly which member of The Who yells the words ‘I saw you!’ at the very end of the group’s 1966 single ‘Happy Jack’ — drummer Keith Moon or singer Roger Daltrey:

James gazed at the turntable as it ground to a halt.

‘That’s Keith,’ he said.

‘You certain?’ I asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Not Roger?’

‘No.’

He played the record through for the third time. This was the agreed number of plays, so he then removed it from the turntable and returned it to its sleeve.