The Great CD Purge of 2009

That was all to change quite suddenly when, in December 2008, I encountered Stephen. I was at a house party thrown by some lawyer friends in Shoreditch. Like many people who I met that evening, Stephen claimed to be an artist by profession. In our subsequent meetings he would allude to an undisclosed source of income, separate from the small sums of money that he made from selling his art, which consisted of sculptures fashioned from personal items acquired from Lost Property auctions. Wherever this money came from, it apparently allowed him to live a life of relative leisure.

 

That night at the party we got talking about music and I mentioned my CD predicament to him. Stephen asked me what I would do if I lost my record collection and the lengths I would go to get it back. 

 

The following morning I awoke on the floor, among the comatose bodies of my fellow party-goers, with an impression of the carpet embedded in one side of my face. In the kitchen I reacquainted myself with Stephen who, over a cup of tea, made me the following proposition:

 

He would ‘steal’ my music collection and then hide it around London for me to find. Re-acquiring each CD would entail effort and commitment on my part. It would also be likely that many of the albums he hid would be found by somebody else before I could reclaim them, and would be lost to me forever. Stephen ended his bizarre sales pitch by brazenly requesting £500 for unspecified  expenses. 

 

My response to him at the time was: “How do I know you just won’t sell it all on Ebay?” 

 

Despite the insanity of Stephen’s proposition, over the next few days I warmed to his idea, which seemed to offer me a graceful exit from a way of life that was fast becoming unsustainable. When I told my girlfriend about the scheme, she seemed to be in two minds, visibly wrestling with the suspicion that I had gone completely mad, while, at the same time, barely able to contain her delight that she would soon be getting her flat back and would never again have to listen to Raping A Slave by Swans.

 

A few days later Stephen visited me at home and we finalised the details of his plan: At some point in the coming fortnight he would ‘break in’ to the flat when me and my partner were both out. Stephen was very keen that this should be an authentic burglary with broken glass and upended furniture.  Mindful of what my landlord and girlfriend might think of this I insisted on him taking a spare key. 

 

Having acquired my collection Stephen would hide ten random CDs in locations around London everyday. At 6am in the morning he would email me a list with detailed instructions regarding where I could find each disc. An hour later he would make this publicly available on a special Facebook page he had set-up. With an hour’s head start I was guaranteed to find at least one of the CDs on the list before the scavengers made off the remainder. Additionally, Stephen extracted a promise from me that I would not try to replace any of the albums that I did lose, as this would defeat the object of the exercise. 

 

On the evening of January 14th I returned home to find my CD collection gone. Although I had been forewarned I wasn’t prepared for the shock of its sudden absence, the acres of bare shelf space and the slow-dawning realisation that only piece of music I owned was Morrison Hotel by The Doors, which I had left in my CD player and which Stephen had neglected to take with him. 

 

The following morning I received an email from Stephen and made a mad 7am dash to Limehouse where I found Future Days by CAN gaffer-taped to the wooden stump of a jetty by the River Thames. There and then I promised myself that after work I would set about tracking down some of the others albums on the list, however by the time 5 o’ clock rolled around I was tired and ready to go home. That evening I bade farewell to: Women In Prison by Evie Sands, The Carnival Bizarre by Cathedral, a country compilation titled Big Rig Deluxe, Mit Gas by Tomahawk, Mona Lisa Overdrive by Trashmonk, The Colored Section by Donnie, Emporer Deb by Black Moses, Vanguard by Finlay Quaye, and Voices From The New Music by Telstar Ponies. The fates of these albums remains uncertain. Either they were found by lucky members of the public or were exposed to the freezing temperatures of a metropolitan winter. 

 

In the coming days I would make similar snap judgements about the relative value of music in my collection and experience occasional moments of heartbreak. One morning,  having rescued Your Majesty... We Are Here by Earl Brutus, I elected to call in to work late so that I could also recover the Saint Etienne compilation – You Need A Mess Of Help To Stand Alone. By the time I arrived at its hiding place somebody had already got to it and I left disappointed. That weekend I salvaged three out possible ten albums – a record that I would go on to equal but never break.

 

Meanwhile Stephen’s hiding places were becoming increasingly elaborate. Upon arriving at a gym in Shadwell, I was confronted by a wiry man who told me that a round in the boxing ring with him would earn me Belle & Sebastian’s debut album – Tigermilk. A few minutes later I stumbled outside with my prize and a badly swollen lip. On another occasion I received a voicemail message from Stpehen informing me that he had left my beloved copy of Generation Terrorists by Manic Street Preachers on the Fenchurch Street line between Barking and West Ham stations. 

 

In addition to my daily acts of salvage, some my record collection came back to me via an unexpected source. Inside the casing of each CD, Stephen had placed an honesty card listing my home address. All of a sudden people began returning my CDs in the post or in person. Anyone who turned up at my flat was invited in for coffee and some of these meetings blossomed into friendships. The most enduring of these is with a chap called Darren who eventually managed to obtain 11 CDs from my collection. While refusing to return them outright he is more than happy to swap them with other albums that I own. 

 

On August 19th 2010 I reclaimed my final CD from the wilds of London - a compilation of singles by a 1950s rock and roll band called The Crowstones. Stephen had hidden it in a tree house in somebody’s back garden. As I descended the ladder I heard the sound of patio doors sliding open and a man in a tracksuit charging down the dewy lawn towards me, while I leapt over the fence and made my escape.  

 

In total my foraging had recovered 604 CDs from the original collection with an additional 982 being returned to me by conscientious members of the public. In the 20 or so months since the experiment began my love of music had led to me being beaten-up, chased by guard dogs, attacked by a pair of swans and almost killed by the 6:50 train from Shoeburyness to London Fenchurch Street. I was listening to more music than I had since my teens. My CD collection had ceased to be a dusty archive and was now a resource that I explored and appreciated. Furthermore my sorties into London had restored some of the joie de vivre that had been ebbing away from me in recent years. Stephen meanwhile claims to have been paid to steal the collections of two more music lovers. His most recent theft apparently consists of over 23,000 items. “It’ll take me years to get rid of it all,” he said when we last met.