INTRODUCTION

IN WHICH THE AUTHOR ADMITS TO VINYL ADDICTION AND EXPLAINS HOW IT HAS IMPACTED ON HIS LIFE

‘Vinyl’s making a comeback, isn’t it?’

The man in the record section of the charity shop was making friendly conversation as he spotted me looking through the discs.

I looked up and regarded him, perhaps a little too sternly, before responding, perhaps a little too aggressively:

‘It never went away.’

I believe that anyone who owns two or more records is self-evidently a record collector.

Whenever you add another one to however many you already have you are enhancing that collection.

I have thousands of the things, and despite the incomprehension of my Mum who, when asked to make my Christmas present an LP one year, replied, ‘Why? You’ve got records already’, I continue to add to the total regularly.

This book deals with every aspect of record collecting I could think of. How it’s done, when it’s done, where it’s done, why it’s done, who does it and how one goes about it.

Read this book – with its tales of countless hours spent in 100s of record shops worldwide, at record fairs, car boot sales, online and real-life auctions, romances consummated in vinyl, fruitless searches for elusive records, selling, buying, exchanging, coveting, losing, loving, hoarding, hating, finding, wanting, demanding records – and you may just begin to comprehend the emotions involved in a lifelong vinyl love affair.

If you used to be a collector but believe you aren’t one now, think again. Get the record player out of the loft, gently caress the dust off the first disc to come to hand, and give it a spin. You’ll wonder why you ever stopped doing it. If you don’t, you’ve lost forever what would once have been one of your simplest, but greatest, pleasures – playing favourite records.

If you, your grandparents, Mum, Dad, brother, sister, aunty, uncle, friends, or workmates have ever shown an interest in, and/or collected, records, 33 and 45 rpm circular (usually, not always) vinyl discs, this book – my vinylography, although the publishing poohbahs wouldn’t let me call it that! – should prove a real treat for you or them.

Records have a greater capacity than Doctor Who’s Tardis for transporting you back in time. Even someone as ‘woke’ and on trend as the highly influential writer for The Times Caitlin Moran acknowledged as much when, in April 2019, she explained how records encapsulate ‘everything you were before’ and should therefore be revisited and revered, otherwise ‘you’re selling out the only person who has believed in you… : you.’

This book seeks to reawaken the often dormant desire which first promoted the gathering of records, and to confirm the belief of those who still indulge in it, that they happily belong to, and should celebrate the undervalued, misunderstood, significant group of music-obsessed vinylholics, who always want – need – to buy… just one more record.