'I bought the Kravitz CD out of pity'

Nostalgia, low prices, a cute girl – in the days before downloading, there were lots of reasons to part with your money in a record shop. DARRAGH MCMANUSrecalls some of his impulse purchases

GOING THROUGH the contents of my MP3 player recently, I realised something: I’ve bought a lot of albums for odd, ridiculous and random reasons, and to hell with quality or good reviews.

It’s not that these albums are necessarily bad (though some are), more that I didn’t know, or care, when I bought them. Impulse could often override logic, circumspection or the fact that this tenner has to last a week so why are you blowing it on that Sultans of Ping cassette just because you once sat next to the singer in a college lecture?

Many were got in pre-digital times; I wonder do people still “impulse buy” now that their business is mainly done online, not browsing through the racks of real, physical records.

Vincent Dermody has been working at Tower Records in Dublin city centre, for seven years. “The internet has certainly made it more clinical,” he says. “Before, someone who only bought a certain amount of albums a year might have fallen prey to, say, the physical attributes of something they’d see in the shop, and buy that. But nowadays they know exactly what they’re getting online.

“Having said that, people do still spend time going through the racks of albums in the store. And we still have the old tradition of selling a CD directly from the player: someone will hear it, ask about the album and buy it. So to some extent, people do still get albums for reasons they hadn’t anticipated.”

That Sultans story, believe it or not, isn’t even the silliest reason I’ve bought an album. Here are others:

I had a tenuous connection to the band

I bought 23rd Psalm Caféby Dublin alt-country group El Diablo because a friend knew one of them from college. Why? I don't like alt-country. I don't even know what that is. Is it anything to Kenny Rogers-style country?

It was reduced to a ridiculously low price

Spotted Morrissey's Your Arsenalon sale for two quid and literally couldn't resist the lure of a bargain. Then never listened to it.

To annoy my better half

My inamoratawasn't too enamoured of David Holmes' This Film's Crap Let's Slash the Seats.So when I spied his follow-up, Let's Get Killed,well . . . who could have resisted?

A Japanese girl gave me a crackly copy and I wanted to hear it properly

Akiko, my English language student, taped The Velvet Underground and Nicoas a going-away present, probably because the only subject we'd covered in class was the fact that Warhol designed the sleeve. She must have recorded it underwater or on the moon or something – more static than rush-hour on O'Connell Street.

I saw one of the band members in real life

Years back I spied one of the guys out of Air on top of the Duomo in Milan. He smiled and said " Merci" as I let him pass on a narrow walkway. This brush with fame inspired me to purchase their fairly unlistenable 10,000 Hz Legend.

As part of an in-depth wedding-related daydream

I'd always thought it would be kind of swell to get married in a desert town somewhere in the US/Mexican border badlands, with a Tex-Mex band playing the reception. Hello, Best of the Mavericks.

Patriotic sentiment

Despite a decade's evidence of creative decline, national solidarity made me seek out U2's How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. An hour later I was seeking out information on How to Dismantle U2's Fading Career.

Irrational pity

I realise Lenny Kravitz didn't know I was probably the only person on the planet to buy the useless Circus, and probably wouldn't have cared if he had. But it just looked so pathetic, sitting there like an unwanted old dog.

To impress a cute girl in college

I figured the dark-eyed beauty who sat two rows down in history would never consent to sucking face if she knew my shelves were stacked with big-hair metal and tinny Scandinavian pop. So out they went, and in came a maudlin Tindersticks album I heard her mention one day. Didn’t work, by the way.

Nostalgia – and blind optimism

When former Suede-heads Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler resurrected with Here Come the Tears, I had to get it, in a desperate attempt to relive both mine and their salad days. That didn't work either.