Art & Creativity Quote by Andrew Eldritch

A small confession with a quiet provocation: Eldritch is distancing himself from the sacred rituals of fandom while still claiming proximity to the thing that matters. “I don’t trawl record shops anymore” isn’t just about aging out of a habit; it’s a rejection of the crate-digger identity, the idea that authenticity is earned through hours spent hunting, cataloging, and curating. For an artist long treated as a totem of subculture, that’s a pointed demystification.

The verb “trawl” does extra work. It suggests labor, obsession, even a little desperation. He’s not saying he stopped buying records; he’s saying he stopped performing that particular kind of devotion. In its place: bars and friends’ houses, spaces where music is ambient, social, messy, and unoptimized. That shift reads like a preference for music as atmosphere rather than artifact, experience rather than acquisition.

There’s also a wry comment on how taste now circulates. Record shops once functioned as physical algorithms: staff recommendations, scene gossip, the implicit hierarchy of who knew what first. Eldritch’s new channels are informal networks, where discovery is accidental and unprestigious. It’s a subtle flex, too: the frontman who doesn’t need to chase; the music finds him.

Contextually, it lands as an older figure in post-punk speaking from the far side of scarcity. When the entire world’s back catalog sits in your pocket, the romance of the hunt can feel like cosplay. Eldritch isn’t mourning that romance. He’s puncturing it.