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IN WHICH… VINYL ESCAPES FROM THE GRAVE

Like some kind of vinyl vampire, the long player refused to die, no matter how many times popular opinion wrote it off and consigned it to the dustbin of history. Slowly but surely it clawed its way out of the graveyards created for it when firstly CDs, then downloads and streaming looked to have all but buried it under a torrent of seemingly fatal disdain and abuse.

Vinyl was uncool, unloved, unmourned. Yet, though backing away to the musical margins, vinyl’s valiant rear-guard action not only halted its retreat, but fought off those who would condemn it to the past, and began to attract the attentions of contrarians, opinion-formers and hipsters cool enough to recognise its unique qualities and realise it still had much to offer.

Slowly, but inevitably, even big business began to notice the reactivation of the vinyl market. It must have done, surely, as while I was eating my breakfast recently, I looked at the box from which my wife was spooning her ‘Dorset Cereals’, made of trendy ‘nutty granola’. There on the back was the legend: ‘Life’s not a dress rehearsal… So, go on, join a choir, make a bark rubbing… go record shopping.’

The Times’ colour supplement magazine of 18 November 2017 featured in its ‘Shop! 150 Christmas Gift Ideas’ display, a full-page photograph of a Santa-and-his-sleigh toy figure and other items, all scattered on a turntable playing a 45 rpm single. Marks & Spencer featured the image of a vinyl record playing on a turntable as an important element of their Christmas 2018 TV advert. Not only that, McDonalds launched a 2019 TV advertising campaign promoting the addition of bacon to their Big Mac, with one of the scenes set in a busy second-hand record shop specialising in jazz. In May 2019 TV ads for a new Seat car featured what was clearly a second-hand record shop.

These and similar adverts and features are aimed not at me and my already hooked vinyl contemporaries, but at what they, and I, believe will become the new generation of vinyl fans, ensuring that records remain desirable objects for many years to come. Even we hardest of the hard proponents of second-hand vinyl will accept that there is a place not only for newly released reissues, but also for freshly released original records.

The only problem I can see with millennials embracing vinyl is its sheer cost. I have a very few newer acts in LP form – but I baulk at paying 20 plus quid for them – and I definitely won’t pay that for new editions of old records, the costs of making which were covered many years back. Don’t under-estimate the danger of greed once again putting vinyl’s future at risk.

That said, some of the new vinyl covers are extraordinarily attractive objects, and really can outshine even pristine old albums – but don’t have the built-in memories and effortless elegance of what we more mature types will always regard as the real deal.

Some vinyl has become so desirable and valuable over the past half a century that certain records must eventually become genuine antiques. Not, though, the LP featuring one of his own tracks that ‘Little’ Jimmy Osmond bought when appearing on TV’s Celebrity Antiques Road Trip, selling on for a tiny profit.

I am fortunate to own a good few records, originally sent to me to review when I was a local newspaper hack, and which I liked enough to keep, but which sold in such tiny numbers that they have acquired considerable rarity value. Largely ignored then, almost no one got to hear how good they were, even in the heyday of pirate radio stations. I had convinced myself on occasion over the years that I should cash in on the current value of these records as, surely, it must be set to plummet as vinyl ‘freaks’ begin to age and ultimately disappear. So, I took the plunge and offered some for sale. I sold a much sought-after album by a totally obscure band for a little under £400. It would have cost under three quid to buy it on its original release date. I let several others go for significant sums, but soon began to regret this aberration.

Not because the sales cost me potential profit – they didn’t really, because antiques, and record sell-on values are like shares – you can never really know for sure where the bottom or top range of their value is. Some long-standing valuable vinyls are, though, now beginning to shed, or not enhance, some of their financial potential as their current/prospective owners/purchasers die off.

My plan now is to hold on to most of my 1960s and early 1970s record rarities, so that I can not only enjoy the bragging rights of owning them, but also the memories they retain for me, regardless of value. It’s different, of course, even for confirmed collectors if someone offers you serious money for a record you don’t like. But then, why would most people have that record in the first place? The ones I didn’t like when I was reviewing were the ones which ended up in one or other of my local second-hand dealers’ shops.

My collecting of vinyl was definitely boosted by a man who inspired and promoted so many of the artists I grew to admire – John Peel. An article in the Radio Times many years ago was illustrated by a photograph of him in a room entirely surrounded by floor to ceiling shelves – all bulgingly full of LPs. I gazed at it, entranced, for some minutes, marvelling at what it would be like to own such a cornucopia of treasures and to be able to reach into it and discover at will something you’d be guaranteed to enjoy. From that moment, I set about emulating JP, albeit, inevitably, on a slightly lesser scale.

These days, of course, I no longer buy records I don’t already know and like – at least, not without listening to at least some part of them first. Really? Who am I kidding? I do, as you will no doubt have already assumed, frequently buy records just on the basis of looking at the cover, reading the sleeve notes, or second-guessing what the tracks will sound like, based on their titles and writers, the label the record is on, the year it was made and maybe the name of a session musician or two that I recognise. So I certainly do buy records blind or, at least, deaf…

I could check them out on YouTube first to hear whether I will like them – but the reproduction on my laptop is tinny, and really that also takes away much of the anticipation of owning a record I didn’t even know existed just a few minutes ago. Better to wait until you can play and hear it for the first time on your own. That way, no one else will get to hear should you have misjudged, and it actually sounds like a gang of squalling cats retreating from a bunch of barking dogs.

There is also the risk that if you ask to listen to the record in the shop where you’ve found it, the dealer will hear it and think, ‘Hm. That sounds better than I remember, I think I’ll keep it for myself.’ That’s genuinely happened to me before now. Either that, or someone else in the shop might offer more for it than you…

I have become acquainted with record shops of virtually every description – tiny, huge, filthy, spotless, floating, spooky, invisible, friendly, neutral, unwelcoming, expensive, reasonably priced, cheap, accessible, hidden away. One with a water well in it; one with water all around it. Others that also deal in fireplaces, boxing memorabilia, jewellery, menswear or offer wine-quaffing alongside the discs.

I have discovered many characters, most quite happy, proud even, to describe themselves as vinyl addicts, whose obsessions and compulsions can be compared with those hooked on the more usual drink, drugs, gambling and tobacco. Most of them are male, but there are a significant and, I suspect, growing number of female sufferers. These are the people for whom there is always another record that they absolutely need to own – to be able to take it from a shelf, hold it, look at it, listen to it, discuss it, love it.

I’d always believed my own vinyl compulsion began in late 1962, but when my mother died in 2017, my siblings gave me the task of going through her own record collection – a grand description of what was basically scores of badly looked-after Frank Sinatra, Johnny Mathis and Nat King Cole albums and singles, most of which we had bought her over the years as presents. As I did so I also came across several kids’ records – ‘Sparky’s Magic Piano’, ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, ‘Three Little Pigs’ and others – which had all formed part of the soundtrack to my infant years. I’m not even sure they were made of vinyl – it may have been shellac or some other substance – but they were recognisably records. And they were mine. So, I’d been groomed even earlier than I had always assumed – particularly as I would later buy almost equivalent records by Sparks, obscure 1960s rock band Rumpelstiltskin, and, er, ‘Piggies’ by The Beatles. Spooky, eh? Spooky Tooth, at least.

Today, now I am coming towards the end of my seventh decade, the addiction shows little sign of being cured, or even curbed. Not that I have ever tried to do either. Watching Mackenzie Crook’s brilliant BBC2 show, The Detectorists, I realised I was watching people living in a parallel universe to the one we record collectors inhabit – people prepared to go out at all times of day and night, ignoring scepticism and downright abuse from friends, families and passers-by who ‘don’t get it’ and trawl through difficult terrain and unpleasant conditions, hoping to discover buried treasure.

So, what will happen to my own buried treasure when I finally go? My wife, Sheila, who undoubtedly will outlast me, has the telephone number of Second Scene’s Julian Smith, younger by some years than me, and she is under instructions to call him and let him come round and buy my collection, lock, stock and Blossom Toes (two albums worth at the moment around £800 each) barrel.

Allow me to introduce you to the couple who were, in my eyes, living the vinyl dream…