40

IN WHICH… I STAND JULIAN UP

I hadn’t had any chance to speak at any length with Julian to apologise for having told him I’d be in, a couple of days earlier, when he had thoughtfully kept the shop open after his usual 5pm closing time, and I hadn’t shown up. He’d sent me a poignant text: ‘I’ve waited 35 mins after I closed, mate. Can I go home?’ Which, of course, meant that I owed him and should therefore make a purchase by way of an apology now that I had eventually turned up. I found a couple of likely LPs – an ‘official bootleg’ by Nils Lofgren, and a Noel Redding Band LP featuring the Hendrix sideman with guitarist Eric Bell, best known for his time in Thin Lizzy.

I’d also brought with me a bag of obscure 1970s singles which I’d been struggling to sell via eBay and figured Julian might take off my hands, particularly as he’d just bought an even more obscure one from me by The Big Spenders (me neither) called ‘Cum Ba Ye’ (no, not that one) but on the collectable Gemini label. Our arrangement works well – I show him the records and accept whatever he reckons they’re worth, or accept them back equally graciously if he has no need for them.

The nearest record shop to Julian’s had recently closed its doors for good, and his radius of opportunity had widened. There was still the vinyl cafe in nearby Watford, but other than that, his competition was the sporadically open Chris (Music Archaeology) in South Harrow; Sounds of the Suburbs in Ruislip Manor, only open on two days of the week; Nightfly Records in Uxbridge, which lasted over three years, but disappeared in June 2019; plus the Northwood jewellery-cum-vinyl-selling shop, Estamira, where necklaces, bracelets and earrings battle to divert your attention from the boxes full of vinyl on your left as you walk through the buzz-in door.

A recent visit to the latter elicited the confession that the owner finds Julian’s shop a little too claustrophobic and accurately priced and that he has no plans to change his current haphazard system of seemingly chucking records into boxes, on to shelves and down in his basement in an entirely random fashion. ‘People like crate digging’ he claimed. Yes, but maybe not having Mantovani next to Metallica or Edgar Broughton alongside readings from Edgar Allan Poe. Ninety-nine per cent of his records are not in plastic covers. Even those on sale for £25 to £50 plus. That has to be wrong.

When I was last there he had a Quicksilver Messenger Service gatefold LP featuring Gary Duncan, who had just died, exposed to the elements and only likely to be found by pure chance. ‘Your marketing techniques need rethinking,’ I scolded him. He didn’t seem concerned and laconically said, ‘And your name is..?’ I think he only sells from his own collection and doesn’t look to buy in. He wasn’t best pleased, he said, that on a recent visit to a record shop in Chelmsford he was charged £2 for a Troggs’ LP with the cover torn in half.

Like the jeweller, Julian also has the advantage of being on a busy road, with often slow-moving traffic, which means that literally thousands of people per day get to see the outside of his shop and his signs explaining the business. He gets a great many people coming in to sell him stuff. While I was there this time a chap came in, who had ‘found some records in my old gran’s gramophone player’ and wondered whether he’d be interested. Julian told him he would need to check them for condition and value, but the man then tossed a small grenade into the conversation by claiming that he had a Beatles’ album signed by all four of the group, with strong provenance from a photograph showing the family member (who’d been in the record business and knew the group) with them. This cover could well have been worth four figures if it was as described.

Julian did, though, have a signed Depeche Mode LP for sale. I later found out that he got £200 for it, and that the signed Beatles’ album guy never returned. ‘I knew he wouldn’t, he seemed like a time-waster.’ He didn’t actually say ‘time-waster’ but the chap with (or without if Julian is right) the megabucks album might just read this…

One of the few significant autographs I have is one of my treasures: ‘To Graham. Love Elkie Brooks. XX’. The signature is on a glossy black and white photograph of Elkie, who captured my attention and affection when she was fronting Vinegar Joe – still the best live act I’ve seen – as the female foil to Robert Palmer. The band never quite managed to transfer their electric performances to studio recordings and despite three very good albums went their separate ways. In her live pomp she was more than a match for Tina Turner, both vocally and visually, but didn’t find hit records until going solo, with the likes of ‘Pearl’s a Singer’ and ‘Lilac Wine’.

The reason I had stood Julian up was that I had instead found myself, accompanied by old pal Martin Wilson, sitting outside an impressive church in the village of Buckden, near St Neots, Cambridgeshire, on the steps leading into the graveyard. We were having our photograph taken by a gentleman who had been walking past as we were taking a shot of each other. After he filled us in with some local details – his elderly mother lived there – we asked him whether he knew where the Vinyl Revival Store (proud and accurate website boast – ‘the only record shop in Huntingdonshire’) we had come to visit might be.

‘You’re heading in the wrong direction, boys,’ he told us and walked us a few yards back up the road, pointing to what looked like someone’s garden, but which had a small sign attached to the gate-cum-fence. ‘It’s in there. I’ve never actually been in before.’ We invited him to accompany us, and wandered into what appeared to be a back garden, where what looked like a gardener’s shed sat in a corner. Nudging the door open we saw racks of records and a couple of young lads sitting on the floor, eagerly flipping through 12ʺ dance singles, one of which was beating away on the shop turntable.

Our arrival seemed to have alerted the owner to the fact that he suddenly had five potential customers in his bijou shop space, and the personable Ian came in to ensure that the half dozen of us virtually filled the place to overflowing. It was a hot afternoon, and the dance boys had arrived on bikes after quite a lengthy journey, which added a certain, shall we say, fragrance to the atmosphere in there. Our guide, whose name we never did catch, was telling Ian, in a phrase increasingly familiar to me, that, ‘I do have a record player, but it doesn’t work, so I haven’t been in a record shop for years.’ Ian pointed to various pieces of both new and vintage record-playing kit displayed around the shelves and when he learned that the defunct item was a Bang & Olufsen player, offered to take a look to see whether he could restore it to active duty, an offer our new friend vowed to take him up on.

Martin, more of a CD man than vinyl these days, sat outside in the sun, complaining of the lack of CDs, while I delved through the varied selection of brand new and second-hand albums, together with quite a large number of Record Store Day offerings, some with quite hefty reductions. I identified a couple of potential purchases, only to have to opt out of the reissued Bevis Frond record I’d found at what I thought was a reasonable £12, on the grounds that I was becoming more convinced I already had it. So I was looking at a Nils Lofgren and Grin album from 1979 on CBS, for a mere fiver. I had, mind you, definitely seen a copy of Ian’s Gordon Jackson sealed reissue LP, here on display for an unlikely £27. I’d recently bought it for £12 at Spitalfields, which really does demonstrate the advisability of not rushing to buy the first copy of any new product you come across, without checking out prices elsewhere.

We’d had a pleasant afternoon chatting to Ian and hearing stories about other record shops and dealers in this area, one of whom, we were told, had recently spent an unlikely sounding four-figure sum buying a northern soul single from another dealer. ‘He can afford it, though, he’s a multi-millionaire,’ he said, which had us assuming he must mean Black Barn Records owner Adrian Bayford who won £148 million on the lottery. We were almost ready to leave when Martin told Ian, ‘It’s a pity you don’t sell CDs as I’m not really into vinyl anymore.’

Ian just pointed, well, pointedly at a large cabinet containing hundreds of CDs, then went and brought in a whole tray full of what might best be described as unconventional live recordings of some big-name groups which he’d picked up at a sale. Martin was in CD nirvana – none of either version of that name’s music there, mind you – as he flipped through all sorts of obscure blues and rock, and blues-rock CDs, eventually finding ten he fancied, including live sets by Johnny Winter, Mick Taylor, Walter Trout, assorted elderly blues-men, and very interestingly, Blind Faith. ‘How much are these?’ he asked Ian, who was a little vague. ‘I don’t know really, I didn’t think anyone would want to buy them.’ Martin doesn’t have the reticence I often suffer from when it comes to bargaining on price. ‘Well, what were you thinking, 10 or 20 pence each?’ Admittedly, they were pretty dusty and most of them had photocopied covers and dubious provenance, but I’d been reckoning on having to pay a couple of quid each. ‘That’s a bit too cheap,’ pondered Ian, before agreeing: ‘You can have them for 50p a throw.’

Vinyl Revival Store was the second shop of the day for me. On the way up to collect Martin, I’d called in on the Stylus coffee/record shop – another of these increasingly popular hybrids – in Baldock. As ever, once I’d managed to park, I set off in the wrong direction to try to find the shop, pausing briefly en route, once I did realise which direction I should be taking, to consider the multi-meaning sign outside of the Chinese medicine establishment: ‘Free Foot Assessments Here.’ I carried on perambulating.

This was the kind of record outlet which I am pleased to see as it brings the delights of vinyl to a different kind of audience, but is clearly not aimed at quenching my own vinyl appetite. To be fair, when I checked their Facebook page, of the 59 ‘reviews’, all were five-star positive. The vast majority of the stock I saw in the well-fitted-out, stylish room at the rear of the coffee and cake area consisted of very new LPs by mostly new bands – although Noel Gallagher seemed over-represented.

There was a notice on the wall: ‘We buy second-hand records. Must be in good condition. All genres from 1970s onwards.’ The notice hadn’t been over effective. I could see no evidence of any such animals being sold on the premises, mainly frequented by what struck me, perhaps unfairly, as members of Baldock’s ‘hipster community’, clearly happy to be there in the very acceptable surroundings, but not really focused on record buying. While I was there only three people joined me in that area. Two of them were clearly looking for a table and left immediately; the other one flicked half-heartedly through a rack of records but, like me, found nothing to buy.

Now Martin and I were sitting in a hostelry mainly concerned with alcoholic drinks, supping respectively a rum and a shandy. I had prompted Martin to tell me his ‘first record’ tale, which involved a holiday with an uncle, who was employed by the camp where they stayed, as an entertainer of the younger residents. Uncle’s forte was devising cartoons. He invited a member of his audience to come up and begin proceedings by just putting a small initial image down on the paper with the marker pen provided. They’d draw a ball, perhaps, or a basic cat, and whilst spouting his pre-prepared patter, he’d turn it into a grand building with flamboyant features or a circus elephant. One day he told Martin he would call him up on stage and wanted him to start things off by just marking a large ‘X’ on the paper – which, he said, would draw laughs from the audience, but he knew how he’d then turn it into an impressive elaborate illustration.

Martin was soon up there with Uncle, taking the applause, as the drawing act came to an end and the band struck up, as dancing girls appeared on stage. Dazzled by the showbiz glamour and strangely excited by the appearance of the dancing girls, but not knowing quite why, Martin was then overcome by the thrilling music accompanying the new act. When this transformative experience was over, he asked his uncle what the music they’d been playing was. He was told it was Sandy Nelson’s recording of ‘Let There Be Drums’, dating this awakening of his senses and sexuality to, probably, 1961, when the record first entered the charts.

Martin, who’d have been around ten, then made it his business to acquire the single, promptly bought for him by his grateful uncle, and which still occupies a place in his now somewhat larger collection which, he once rang me in a state of high excitement to reveal, included ‘a Blackfoot Sue single I’ve just found in the loft.’ I can be as patient as the next person, although not always. On this occasion I contented myself with asking, ‘And why do I need to know that?’ I was already aware that it was because he was planning his entry into the world of eBay single selling, and had been sporadically calling to tell me about the copy of ‘Psychotic Reaction’ by Count Five he’d found in the loft, and others by John Walker, Cilla Black, Cymbaline and now Blackfoot Sue.

I recalled the band’s name from their ‘I’m Standing in the Road’ hit from 1972 but had to tell Martin that although their couple of albums might fetch a few quid, their singles were not particularly sought after. ‘That’s not the point,’ he expostulated, ‘I sold my car to a guy from Blackfoot Sue in the early 1970s – what a coincidence!’

‘Not a coincidence at all, Martin, just a talking point. How did that come about?’

‘I’d advertised my MGBGT for sale and this chap turned up at my place and said he was the drummer in Blackfoot Sue and he was interested in the car.’

Quickly googling the group, I discovered that the band’s line-up included twins – one of whom, Dave Farmer, was the drummer. It must have been him.

‘How much did he pay for the car?’

‘I don’t remember, but he paid in cash – although the deal nearly failed over one of his demands.’

‘Which was?’

‘That I included the Afghan coat I’d left lying in the driver’s seat in the deal at no extra cost.’

As we drove back from Buckden, Martin told me of a much more recent transformative experience, a couple of days earlier, when he had finally realised his ambition to have a tattoo – proudly flaunting at me from the inside of his lower arm, the image of a skull sitting on a book. ‘It cost me 60 quid,’ he revealed. ‘For another fiver I nearly had “f**k and kill” added underneath.’ I was unimpressed. ‘You could have bought 120 CDs from Ian for that…’