The Interview: DJ Provenance on Digging, Data, and Dying Formats

Unit 114 sits at the end of a corridor where the lights run on a two-minute timer, so every two minutes the interview pauses while somebody waves an arm at a sensor. The unit is three metres square, lined floor to ceiling with the grey crates dealers buy by the pallet, and colder inside than the car park.

DJ Provenance is here most Sundays. Today there is a laptop on a milk crate, an extension lead run in from the corridor against several posted rules, and a delivery of forty-one twelve-inch singles that arrived on Thursday and has not been entered yet. Until it is entered, he says, it does not exist. He is not being funny about this.

The spreadsheet opens on a column of dates. Row one is 12 March 2004: a white label bought for three pounds from a shop that closed in 2009. The last row, when we start, is 32,140. By the time we leave it is 32,181.

On starting a spreadsheet in 2004

Why did you start it?

Because I bought a record twice. Same record, three weeks apart, both times convinced I was being clever. I was nineteen and that was eight pounds I did not have, so I went home and made a table with four columns to make sure it never happened again. Artist, title, label, catalogue number. That was the whole thing.

The interesting columns came later, and they came by accident. I added a shop column because I wanted to know which shops were good. Then a price column, because I wanted to know if I was being fleeced. Then, and I genuinely cannot tell you why, I added a column for who I was with. That one has ruined me.

Ruined you how?

It turned an inventory into a diary and nobody warned me. Sort by that column and you get everybody I have ever known, ranked by how much time we spent in shops together. There are three hundred and something rows with one person's name in them and I have not spoken to her since 2014. I can look up a Tuesday in November 2007 and tell you where I was and what I paid. My memory is not doing that work. The file is.

On the columns that matter

Which column earns its keep?

Played. Date, venue, roughly where in the night. It is the only honest measure of what a record is for. There are thirty-two thousand rows in there and about two thousand of them have ever been played to more than one person. The rest is furniture, or research, or hope.

The one nobody expects is the last column, which is called mistake. It is a yes or no field. It should obviously be a slider, and one day I will fix that, and then I will have to go back through twenty-two years and grade my own regret in increments. So it stays a yes or no.

How many yeses?

Two thousand and eighty-eight. Which is more than the number I have ever played out. I have thought about that more than is good for me.

Where did Thursday's delivery come from?

A family clearing a flat.

Whose flat?

No. I am not telling you that, and if you find out from somebody else I would rather you left it out. Buying a dead DJ's records is a normal thing that happens every week in this business. Printing their name next to a price is not.

On formats that die

There is a note in the 2011 rows about a drive failure.

March 2011. I lost the digital library, about four thousand files, most of them bought as downloads and never backed up because I was an idiot with a day job. What survived was the spreadsheet, because it was small enough to email to myself. So I had a complete record of everything I no longer had. That is a very specific kind of stupid feeling.

It changed what I buy. I want objects with catalogue numbers now. Anything with a number on the spine can be found again, by me or by somebody in forty years. A file called mix2 final FINAL is gone the moment the drive is. It is also why I own a hundred and eighty minidiscs, which people find hilarious and which you lot have written about, so I feel vindicated.

Does streaming rescue any of this?

Streaming is a shop with no shelves, no staff and no memory of you. I do not hate it, I use it every day for triage. But it does not know I bought a record on the day my sister moved out, and it will never work that out from my listening history, which is the argument in that piece you ran about what replaced radio. The context is not in the audio. The context is in the receipt.

On what the file cannot hold

What is missing from it?

Sound, obviously. Twenty-two years of columns and not one tells you whether the record is any good. I tried a rating column in 2006 and deleted it in 2006. Ratings age badly. Prices do not, dates do not, who you were with does not.

And it cannot hold the room. A record works in one room at one hour with a certain number of people in it, and if I could log that I would never have to think again. Best I have managed is a notes field, and my notes are mostly the word yes with an exclamation mark.

What happens to the file when you stop?

It goes to somebody who will keep entering rows. That is written down, in an email to my brother, which is not a will but is the closest thing I have. The records can be sold, they are only records, and somebody is still pressing more of them on the Baltic coast as we speak. The spreadsheet is the only copy.