This week was a landmark for me in my little life. No, I’m not talking about my 70th birthday, I’m talking about saying goodbye to my vinyl record collection. Collecting is perhaps a very British trait and over the years I’ve had friends who collected aircraft numbers, railway locomotive numbers and even bus numbers. As someone who once worked in the passenger transport industry, I’ve also collected books about buses and many other things but my collection history probably started with music.
Way back in 1972 my brother and I received a joint Christmas present. It was a stereo record player and the first record I ever bought was a collection of film and TV themes by John Barry. The title track was from the TV series The Persuaders which starred Tony Curtis and a pre 007 Roger Moore as two unlikely crime fighters brought together by a retired judge.
At the time I wasn’t a great music fan but my brother and I were soon tuning in to Top of The Pops, the iconic BBC TV show, and began buying 45 rpm singles.
The very first single I ever bought was actually two singles, both reduced to 24p each as they were no longer in the charts. Banks of the Ohio and What is Life, both sung by Olivia Newton John.
In the summer holidays we were glued to Radio One when they announced the new chart placings on a Tuesday afternoon on the Johnnie Walker show. I’m not sure if Johnnie played the entire chart or perhaps just the top 10 but on a Sunday afternoon there was a repeat of the entire top 20 although I can’t remember which DJ was manning the turntables.
A long time ago I bought some software for digitising my music. It was quite a laborious process. The record player was plugged into my computer and the record had to be played all the way through. Then further software eliminated the hisses and clicks before the resulting track could be burned to a disc or saved as an mp3 file and used with an mp3 player.
I did that with only a few of my more obscure records because pretty much everything else I had on vinyl was now available as a CD and in later years easily downloadable. Few of today’s younger music fans will have a substantial physical collection of recorded music like I have.
In the 1980s, at the height of my music buying years, I began to buy 12 inch singles which were usually a slightly extended version of the original single. I also began to collect picture discs which were singles with a photo or image embedded in the vinyl. My favourite was a single by Alexi Sayle called Hello John, Got a New Motor. The disc was in the shape of a Ford Cortina with Sayle himself spreadeagled over the bonnet.
For quite a number of years those records have been gathering dust in the back room of the house and I thought that perhaps now is the time for them to go.
I messaged a company that advertises on Facebook offering to buy music collections. They messaged me back wanting photos and after numerous long conversations they decided against travelling up north and buying my collection.
Anyway, in St Annes a new vinyl music shop has appeared and after a good look through my records the owner offered me £100 for probably less than a quarter of my collection. I was hoping he was going to take the whole lot off me but he mentioned another new shop not far away which buys and sells records, models, antiques and all sorts of things. The owner and I negotiated for quite a while but eventually I took £120 for the rest of my collection. I felt as though I had parted with a large chunk of my life for a measly £220 but what could I do? Put the records back in my spare room just to gather dust? Hopefully somewhere out there are some music fans who will buy and enjoy the records I used to love.
My record collection was mostly made up of singles although there were a few albums in there like my Elton John collection including Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, complete with all the original booklets that came with the album. Back in the seventies I loved Elton’s music but in the 1980s either Elton changed or maybe it was me but I lost interest in his later music. Years later I picked up Made in England which I’ve always thought was more like his older work.
Back in the 80s I was a great fan of Madonna and a particular favourite was Into The Groove which was the theme from the movie Desperately Seeking Susan in which Madonna herself had a small part. I must have had all Madonna’s 80s hits on 45 rpm discs. According to Dale who bought most of my vinyl collection, Madonna’s records are pretty popular with young people today.
Going way further back to the 1970s my old friend Steve and I used to spend our Saturday nights in Manchester in a bar called the Playground. The DJ there, who just to make things confusing was also called Steve, used to begin his Saturday night session with Love’s Theme by Barry White’s backing band Love Unlimited. Back then I was always telling Steve about a singer called Steve (yet another one). This particular Steve was Steve Harley and his group Cockney Rebel. Steve, the friend not the DJ or the singer, he wasn’t keen on Steve Harley at all until one day when I asked him if he had heard that Harley had reformed his band and they had an entirely different sound as well as a new single. One night at the Playground I asked Steve, the DJ, if he had Steve (Harley’s) new single and he had. He played it and Steve, the friend, thought it was so brilliant it would be a new number one.
It was a number one, a big hit and Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me) was the only number one (I think) that Steve (Harley) ever had.
Still in the 1970s a performer who made his name back then was David Essex. He played the lead in the stage musical Godspell and then went on to star in the film That’ll be the Day. I remember seeing his album in a record shop and thinking what a cool dude he looked in his white suit. The album was ‘Rock On’ and the single of the same name went to number 3 in the UK charts in 1973.
The next year David released one of my all-time favourite tracks Gonna make you a Star which went all the way up to number 1. He also appeared on my favourite double album ever, Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds and went on to star in the musical ‘Evita’. In 2011, he joined the cast of TV soap ‘EastEnders’.
When I saw David Essex singing Rock On wearing a white suit on Top of the Pops for the first time, I thought he was the epitome of seventies cool and it occurred to me that one way to transform my gangling self-conscious self into something better might be to get that very same white suit. I couldn’t afford a suit at the time so I settled for a jacket, a white jacket, and I well remember admiring myself in the mirror before my first Saturday night out wearing it, sometime back in 1973.
The first problem I encountered with the jacket came on the bus into town. I sat on the back seat and in those days, the back seats of our local buses were a little notorious for being dusty and grimy as they were over the engine and absorbed all the engine fumes. Also there were people who put their feet up on the seats leaving marks to which people like me (the twerp in the white jacket) were highly susceptible. Another thing is that all my life I have been cursed with being clumsy and once I had met up with my friends I somehow managed to spill beer all down my sleeve. Anyway, the night went on, more or less successfully. I certainly remember having a good time although the white jacket failed in its primary function; that of attracting gorgeous girls. Later on we stopped at the kebab shop and somehow a sizeable portion of chilli sauce managed to attach itself to my jacket. Rather than feeling like David Essex, I felt a little like Alec Guinness in the film The Man In The White Suit, wanting to get away from everyone! I never wore the stained jacket again and it lingered sadly in the back of my wardrobe smelling of kebab, chilli sauce, beer and diesel fumes until my Mum, on a major clean up splurge, decided to throw it out.
Of course, it could have been worse: I could have gone out wearing jeans, a white t-shirt and a red jacket and tried to look like James Dean! (Actually, that was another night!)
Many years ago in my mid-teens I was in Manchester doing pretty much what I have always done, then and now, whenever I have free time on a Saturday, either looking at records in a music store or looking at books in a book shop.
