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…AND VINYLY

I’ve had a wonderful time visiting record shops, talking to collectors, and collecting my own thoughts about what is a long-lasting obsession for so many. One of the most bizarre stories I came across during the writing of the book appeared in The Times in November 2018. It was illustrated with a photograph of a man leaning his ear on a maturing cheese while listening to an LP playing on a turntable. The caption read: ‘Beat Wampfler, a Swiss cheesemaker is experimenting with maturing his product by playing it a variety of sounds through small speakers below the cheese – including songs by Led Zeppelin and A Tribe Called Quest.’

Along the way, there were many unexpected moments. I thought it would be good to round off with a few which may make you smile…

I am in nearby Northwood, telling a young lady: ‘Of course, I’ll move out of the way so that you can see the earrings.’ I was quite happy to shift over. She had asked politely and she naturally wanted to see in the mirror how the gold earrings she was contemplating buying looked on her. I was blocking her view. So I’d budged, and temporarily stopped rifling through the shelves groaning under the weight of records fighting for customer attention in what may well be a unique establishment – a jeweller-cum-second-hand-vinyl shop, most recently calling itself Basement Vinyl. Probably, I suppose, because Records In A Damp Cellar Reached Via A Smelly River Of Effluent From The Nearby Takeaway wasn’t quite as eye-catching a name. We both left happy. She bought the earrings, and I departed with several LPs.

I visited Rough Trade at Dray Walk, Old Truman Brewery, 91 Brick Lane, London E1 6QL on Friday 13 October 2017, but bought nothing as they had no second-hand items as far as I could see. It was, though, a huge shop, and did boast a record shop first for me. It had a ‘central casting’ bouncer on the door. Whether to stop people sneaking out with nicked records or to ‘persuade’ passers-by to come in was unclear.

‘His wife’s died. I suppose that’ll mean I’ll lose one of my best customers.’ This was the odd reaction by a South London record shop owner when, in my presence, he took a call from one of his customers telling him of the death of his wife. I’d have thought he’d now be likely to see more of the sadly bereaved man…

The proprietor of the excellent Viva Vinyl record-shop-cum-cafe in Hove was explaining that her husband’s huge record collection became the basis of the shop’s stock: ‘When we realised it would cost the same to put the collection into storage as it would to rent premises for a shop, that’s the option we decided on.’ Then she revealed the type of customer service necessary not to lose business: ‘Shortly after we opened, a customer wanted to buy four records with a credit card. I realised I hadn’t arranged for a credit card facility. So I drove him to the nearest cashpoint. Now I do have a credit card machine.’

Fellow Wealdstone FC supporter, Roger Slater, now living in the West Country, was telling me about his claim to be perhaps the youngest person ever to attend a 1960s Rolling Stones’ live concert: ‘Probably because of my sister, 12 years older than me, I was taken to my first Stones’ concert in 1964 (I was five at the time) at Greenford Granada, because her then boyfriend and, later, husband rose through the stage playing the Compton Theatre Organ during the interval…’

‘When I got it home, I looked at it, thought of what it had cost me, and was promptly physically sick.’ This was Martin, owner of Sounds That Swing in Camden, telling me how he paid well over what he could really afford to get an obscure Elvis Presley record.

Not everyone gets record collectors and record shops, but that is part of the terrible fascination of this whole micro-world, to those of us who do. Those who don’t can rail against us. The character ‘Uncle Geoff’, played by Geoff McGivern, was told in the opening episode of David Mitchell and Robert Webb’s late 2017 Channel 4 ‘comedy’ series Back, that ‘vinyl is making a comeback’.

‘Yeah, for c***s,’ he responded.

But, do we care? I, for one, certainly do not.