IN 1976, The Beach Boys' 20 Golden Greats was released and it hit me for the
first time that music from a previous era was somewhat better than Pussycat,
The Wurzels and the other weak fare that made up the Radio 1 playlist. I was
11 years old and I lived in Croydon, South London.
Within weeks I discovered a second-hand record shop called Beano's on a tiny
side street - it was a landmark in my life without equal. Immediately, I
became a vinyl record collector.
At 15, I took a Saturday job on Surrey Street market, selling Danish eggs past
their sell-by date, because it was two doors away from Beano's. Any
obscurity I heard on the radio - Aaron Neville's Tell It Like It Is, Keith
West's On A Saturday - Beano's seemed to have. Other people would go in and
walk out disappointed: the rockers who wanted Cast Iron Arm by Peanuts
Wilson, or shifty longhairs asking for Growers of Mushroom by Leafhound. So
in demand, such mysterious names - clearly, these records were the acme. I
had to know more. I made it my life's work.
One of the first guides to record-collecting, Paul Affelder's How To Build A
Record Library was published as far back as 1947, when only shellac 78s were
available; I was shaped by Tom Hibbert's books The Perfect Collection and
(more so) Rare Records, both published at the turn of the Eighties. The
advent of downloads and the loss of shops such as Beano's - once the largest
second-hand store in the country but now a third of its original size - has
redrawn the record collector's map.
A brace of new books recall the boom years and point to an uncertain future.
Travis Elborough's The Long Player Goodbye covers the history of the album,
and how “record collecting and ‘hi-fi' became legitimate hobbies” in the
early Fifties. The long-playing vinyl album, launched in 1948, gave birth to
the archival collector: “Their playing time and the sleeve allowed for
entirely new combinations of sounds, printed text and illustrations that
would dovetail perfectly with the needs of the epoch.”
Long-playing records, and the colourful, more portable 45 that arrived a year
later, were objects to fetishise. A companion to Elborough's history of the
album is Old Rare New - ostensibly it's a book about the independent record
shop but the psychology of the collectors, myself included, who contribute
to the text is the tasty meat. Few describe themselves as “obsessive”; they
average about 8,000 pieces per collection; only one confesses that he is
tempted to download an album rather than shell out for an original vinyl
copy. I'd venture that they are all in denial.
In the past few years the term “crate diggers” has been coined to describe
this type of obsessive collector. Though these people are famously reticent
about giving away their secret source locations, venues such as Darren
Reed's various South London shops, Bill Allerton's Stand Out just off
Portobello Road, and Alan's Records on East Finchley High Road are community
centres as much as record shops. These are places to hang out for hours at a
time and exchange treasured information that would seem cold and far less
interesting on a computer screen. Holding a record, talking face to face
with other collectors, it just feels more human, in the way that vinyl has
something that the compact disc - let alone the download - could never have.
Byron Coley's chapter in Old Rare New suggests that CDs “have no magic, no
soul, and no interest except as sonic delivery vehicles”. The act of guiding
a needle on to a record, by contrast, is a sacred act. What's more, the LP
is a statement, whether a missive from Dylan or a 12-part rumination on
late-night bar loneliness from Frank Sinatra. Only vinyl, as originally
programmed with two sides of specially sequenced songs, can hit the mark.
Travis Elborough neatly describes Sinatra's genius as “gradually becoming in
song, much as Edward Hopper was in paint, 20th-century America's pre-eminent
exponent of doomy romanticism and urban isolation.” This, before anyone
else, he channelled into albums (Only The Lonely, Where Are You, In The Wee
Small Hours) which were themed, complete mood pieces; Elborough writes that,
after the Munich air disaster, Bobby Charlton - who owns every Sinatra LP -
sought solace in these albums to overcome his grief. A CD copy of Where Are
You, with various alternate takes and false starts tagged on to the end,
would surely have done a worse job at soothing Charlton's battered heart.
Still, it's most likely that if Sir Bobby wants a new album of Sinatra
out-takes he will buy it on the internet. Old Rare New catalogues shops that
are biting the dust weekly as walk-in trade disappears. Some will survive -
“they'll be like stamp shops, only more dull” predicts Billy Childish - but
the days of finding top rarities for tuppence in backwater towns are over.
These old shops have an atmosphere “like a faded Christmas card” says the
free-jazz collector David Keenan, who sums up the visceral thrill of
crate-digging: “I once scored so big in a Central Scotland record shop”, the
identity of which he carefully doesn't reveal, “that I thought I was
actually going to puke.” Keenan is one of a few collectors whose
contributions to Old Rare New are outstanding.
The most gonzoid but accurate comes from Johan Kugelberg, a renowned American
collector of art, books, and (mainly) records. He is fortunate enough to
have an almost bottomless wallet, and hoovers up entire genres in a matter
of months before keeping the cream of Swedish Punk, Junk Shop Glam, early
South Bronx Hip Hop or whatever in his apartment while firing the other 80
per cent of his discoveries back into the marketplace. As such, he regards
himself as an “enthusiast” rather than a “connoisseur”. He reckons that
collecting stems from an attempt to reconnect to “the very moment when art
opened your mind to the endless possibilities of human expression for the
first time.” Camus said something similar. Walter Benjamin wrote that the
collector has “taken up arms against dispersal” and is attempting to make
order from the chaos around us.
This explains the desire to categorise, with mutant genres springing up
(Freakbeat, Acid Folk, English Baroque) that didn't exist in the time of the
music's creation. There is an etiquette between collectors that is unspoken
and open to misrepresentation, especially between enthusiasts and
connoisseurs. I had picked up obscure Glam 45s since the late Eighties -
they were cheap, fun, and could instantly convert me into my seven-year-old
self gawping at Noddy Holder's mirrored hat on Top of the Pops. It took
until the late Nineties before I met up with a couple of like-minded souls,
and we merrily swapped finds and info on Glitter Band-wannabes with names
evocative of the three-day week: Spiv, Mustard, Hector, Bearded Lady, The
Dalston Diamonds.
Being an enthusiast and (deep breath) a pop historian, I wanted to share this
knowledge in the most direct way by issuing a CD anthology of obscure Glam.
Velvet Tinmine was the first release of many, which gave me the double-heady
feeling of pride at being the first out of the blocks, and of giving the
whole world an aural treat.
Unfortunately, it also meant that my two fellow collectors - keepers of the
secret knowledge akin to freemasons - have barely spoken to me since; they
thought Glam was theirs alone. The cat was out of the bag, and newly
discovered Glam rarities now go for heavy money on eBay. This doesn't make
me too happy, either, but the socially adjusted record collector has to
realise that curating and sharing is a crucial part of the experience.
Old Rare New's contributors are DJs, journalists and band members. They
understand the magic and they know it can make the world a better place, even
if their enthusiasm means that the second bedroom has effectively become a
vinyl library, spilling over into the hallway and maybe (in one instance I
have seen) the bathroom. For myself, the lack of a vinyl future gives me an
excuse to dig deeper into the past.
Almost certainly, I will end up like Steve Buscemi's furrowed, forlorn
character in Ghost World, but I will own the very first 45 on the Columbia
label (Ray Martin's Blue Tango) and know it is a special piece of vinyl
history.
At which point I realise I am operating on a different level to most vinyl
collectors I know, let alone other people on the early evening Tube to Mill
Hill East. It is a road that never ends because, as Byron Coley says, “there
is nothing quite like walking into a strange little record store in a town
far from home and finding a record you've been after for so long, you didn't
even remember you wanted it until you flipped through the bin and saw it.”
Last week it was a British issue of a 1954 Moondog EP; next week will bring
another unexpected, beautiful surprise.
The Long-player Goodbye: How Vinyl Changed the World by Travis Elborough
Sceptre, £14.99; 288pp Buy
the book here
Old Rare New: The Independent Record Shop edited by Emma Petit
Black Dog, £19.95; 160pp Buy
the book here
