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IN WHICH… I REVEAL HOW THIS BOOK WAS BORN

Because I was born in 1950, and am therefore of a certain vintage, collecting music by downloading or streaming just does not appeal to me. I want something to own, to hold, to look at – even better, something to read – while I’m listening, to give me a certain connection with the artist(e)s who originally created it. I’m happy to pay to do so. To tread this path, I can either choose to hunt for records online, or visit the constantly fluctuating number of shops selling only second-hand music.

There are also increasing numbers of shops which stock only new vinyl, albeit often containing reissues of previously issued music, or vintage sounds not deemed worthy of issue at the time.

New shops are appearing regularly, many of them combining food and drink facilities with records for sale. Some established shops are closing, for various reasons, perhaps because the owner has not taken notice of the old but established adage, ‘give them what they want and they will come’, or because (s)he has chosen the wrong location.

After I was made redundant, I realised I needed something to occupy my time. The idea of managing to take a look at the many record shops I was aware of, but had never yet visited, due to time constraints, loomed large.

I pitched a feature idea to one of the magazines to which I have subscribed for years: Record Collector, launched in 1979, and now the UK’s longest-running music magazine. I hoped they might not be able to resist a story about someone setting out to visit every one of the 90+ record shops in England selling second-hand vinyl which currently advertise in their mag. The article was duly commissioned and printed across two pages in October 2017.

I was pretty sure that it would immediately produce a barrage of complaints from readers that they had already visited all the shops and that my ‘mad quest’ as Ian McCann, then RC Editor had dubbed it, had been done before. It didn’t. It appeared that, if I could indeed create and complete this journey of, sorry, disc-overy, I might even have a valid claim for an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records.

The feature was illustrated by a photograph of me standing outside Second Scene, my local record shop in Bushey, near Watford, run by Julian and Helen Smith, who have become friends over the past few years, and from whom you will be hearing in this book on a number of occasions.

There it was in print. I’d pledged to visit almost 100 record shops. That meant I would now actually have to set about doing it. Fortunately, I hadn’t been rash enough to set a time-limit and had realised, too, that on its own, such an idea wouldn’t sustain a full book, involving too many, too similar chapters. Instead, the idea was growing of combining multiple record shop stories with stories about every other aspect of record collecting.

I started to travel around the country – the world – somewhat randomly, ticking off shops as I went. I began to enjoy the experience of visiting new places, taking in the local record shops of Australia’s Blue Mountains, Salisbury, Liverpool and Stockton on Tees; San Francisco, Oxford and Cambridge; Harrow and Hereford; Oslo, Guernsey and Jersey; New Zealand, Norf and Sarf London. Always returning to Second Scene to report on my progress.

I decided that, unless a conversation began naturally between us, I would not go out of my way to instigate verbal contact with record shop staff, other than Julian, as I wouldn’t want them to clam up if I mentioned I was writing a book, or begin bigging themselves and/or their shops up to me.

It is amazing what you might hear if you just listen. Vinyl Revelations is located at 59 Cheapside, Luton, along with the message: ‘We do not have a letterbox so please do not use this address for postal correspondence!’.

The almost inevitable middle-aged proprietor is telling a customer, ‘I’ve been in the record business for twenty-four years. I’ve seen the ups and downs.’

The customer wanted to sell him two records: ‘I’d like a tenner for each.’

‘But I already have copies of both that I’m selling for four quid a throw.’

‘Well, how about a tenner for the two?’

Fortunately, it didn’t take long to find a publisher as keen on the book idea as I was, and as I travelled around, talking to knowledgeable, obsessive record collectors, phlegmatic record dealers, depressed record shop owners, optimistic online vinyl traders, I soon appreciated just how deeply ingrained the love of, and for, records and record shops has become over the years.

Virtually everyone to whom I mentioned the book idea was able to recite with very little prompting the names of the first record they had bought and the shop they had bought it from. Even though they may not have played or bought vinyl for many years they smiled at the memory of first hearing those amazing, new sounds on tinny, usually tiny, transistor radios. And at the way in which they then felt compelled to dash out to buy their own copies, enjoying the follow-up chat at school or work they created.

Reminded about that experience, most of them then said they still had that and many other discs stashed upstairs in the loft. They kept meaning to get them down to listen to them again on the vintage record player that was stored there as well. This had allowed them to stack up half a dozen singles which would, one by one, plop down satisfyingly on to the one which had just been played – albeit by that action they were leaving scratches and other marks which inevitably affected their sell-on value adversely.

But who then suspected there might ever be such a bonus for the far-seeing collector?

Back then, everyone owned, or had access to, a record player. Even the greatest sportsman to tread this planet – Muhammad Ali.

I met Ali’s biographer, Jonathan Eig, when he came to London, having been shortlisted for the prestigious William Hill Sports Book of the Year award in 2017. He told me that he owns Ali’s record player:

‘I found a listing for Muhammad Ali’s record player. The seller claimed to be the son of one of Ali’s early lawyers. The opening bid was $250. No one had bid. Figured it wasn’t really Ali’s record player. I bid anyway. I was ready to send the money, but the seller emailed me and said he was bringing it to Chicago. Definitely has to be a scam, right? Figured I’ll never get the record player. Then I got a call. He was in Chicago, and wanted to meet. He pulled up in a huge van. He was a big guy – 6ʹ5ʺ, 280lbs. He opened the trunk and showed me the record player. His name was Frank Sadlo. Frank knew Ali for years. He helped clean out the house after Ali’s mother died. That’s how he got the record player. Frank’s dad was a white lawyer working in the poor black neighborhoods of Louisville in the 1940s and 1950s. He represented Cassius Clay, Sr. and wrote the first professional contract for Muhammad Ali.’

How cool is that, owning Ali’s record player!? I do, at least, own a copy of his 1963 LP, I Am the Greatest.

The mechanics by which 1960s record players allowed discs to drop one by one could be altered to play the same record over and over, particularly when it was relevant to a recently terminated teenage love affair.

I recall listening to the Kinks’ ‘Tired of Waiting for You’ sixteen times in succession, in frustration that my then girlfriend, Pauline, from a few doors down the road, appeared to be far more interested in taking the bus to Heathrow Airport in the hope of seeing the Walker Brothers fly in or out than in walking up the road to see me.

The Kinks had already become important to me. The life-changing, instant impact of hearing the opening bars of ‘You Really Got Me’ absolutely charging out of the one tinny speaker of our black and white telly in the summer of 1964! I can’t remember whether the record was being played on Juke Box Jury, or the group was featured on Ready, Steady, Go, but I was left virtually paralysed as the record roared out – and into my heart forever. WHAT a sound. WHAT a riff. Whoever played it. I was thirteen and a half. Of course, I had to have that record, and rushed out to buy it at the first opportunity.

So influential to me were the Kinks that I would have laughed at the very idea of any group ever pretending to be them, and actually becoming successful by charging people to watch them not quite be the Kinks. But this phenomenon would emerge. I put it down to baby-boomers wanting to recapture their halcyon days…