I bought my jukebox, a 1974 Wurlitzer Americana 3800, in the spring of 1999. She holds 200 7in singles, gives off the purple glow of a fading radioactive sunset, hums like a 1950s refrigerator and reminds you what records were supposed to sound like — not thin and compressed into machine computer code, but vast, warm and with lots of legroom. But in the age of the iPod, when a sleek unit smaller than a cigarette pack can store literally thousands of songs, what can possibly be the attraction of owning a kennel-sized metal box full of scratched vinyl, uniquely unportable and with a volume control that you need a screwdriver to operate? And, at this special time of year, for anyone considering making an impulsive Christmas purchase — as we have been encouraged to do by manufacturers — what are the pros and cons of investing in such a cumbersome antique?

Today, in pubs and bars, the jukebox stuffed with a few dozen scratched 7in singles advertised by a crudely handwritten playlist has been replaced by a compact, brightly lit unit crammed with CDs offering thousands of instantaneous entertainment choices. Or else it’s a curious novelty item, flagged as one of the attractions of a desperately fashionable hang-out: “German beers. Italian sausages. Original 1950s jukebox.” Or, worse still, the vintage jukebox has been stolen from the public it was built to serve, and squirreled away in the corner of a room by a selfish middle-aged music fan, whose semi-autistic, fetishistic approach to the object bears no immediate relation to the innocence with which the machine would once have been enjoyed by happy-go-lucky teenagers. Me, in other words.

When I bought my jukebox, I had just co-written a well-received television series that I had no reason to assume would be cancelled immediately. I wrongly imagined I could easily afford the £1,000 price tag Juke Box Services of Twickenham, who heroically recondition old jukeboxes, had attached to the Wurlitzer. I reasoned that I might soon even have a flat of my own to keep it in. Three months later, work had dried up, and my unjustifiably self-indulgent purchase was finally delivered to a second-floor, northeast London maisonette, where three men struggled to stuff her through a doorway ultimately too narrow to accommodate her. The Wurlitzer went back to Twickenham for a few weeks.

I measured my window frames and booked a hydraulic lift, an expense I could suddenly no longer really afford. A decade later, I really should have double-glazed this flat, but one day Wurlitzer will need to exit through the same window by which she once entered, so we shiver, but while we shiver, we are listening to the aching bass part of the Byrds’ Hey, Mr Tambourine Man as it was meant to be heard. The first lesson of jukebox ownership is this. Never buy anything bigger than your house.

The physical bulk of the purchase dealt with, there is then the issue of what to stock the jukebox with. I bought the Americana 3800 because she held the most 7-inches, but I soon realised that I was about to begin wrestling with the terrible dilemma of what, exactly, would be my 200 favourite singles of all time. Nick Hornby has made a literary career out of anatomising this curiously male desire to arrive at ultimate lists of definite best-ofs, be they musical or sporting. And stocking a juke-box gives a man a way of setting in stone, or at least in little slots on a rotating platform, the physical evidence of his long-apprenticed professorship in good taste.

I gathered up all the singles I had bought throughout my life, and scoured the internet, second-hand shops and record fairs to plug the gaps in the wants list I had scrupulously drawn up. I imagined visitors prostrate in admiration at my immaculate selection, which would have cherry-picked the finest moments from every era of popular music, while still including enough rarities and obscurities perhaps to expand my guests’ inevitably narrow horizons a little as well, to make them realise how much better informed — and how much better a person — I was than them.

The procedure was fun. The website www.gemm.com was a gold-mine of cheap 7-inches, and I still remember the moments when some sought- after items presented themselves in the flesh. Barbara Ray’s heart-rending country and western weepy I Don’t Wanna Play House leapt out of the rack of a charity shop somewhere in the Western Australian desert; the Tenors’ early reggae classic Ride Yu Donkey revealed itself, unexpectedly, on a stall in Spitalfields Market; a four-track EP by Cannonball Adderley and Nancy Wilson arrived in the post in an unexpectedly beautiful picture sleeve.

In the end, the Wurlitzer kind of stocked herself. Anything recorded much after the early 1980s sounded too thin and clattering in her vast speaker cabinets. She preferred the warm fuzz of vintage psychedelia and the Cuban-heeled stamp of the 1960s beat boom, the joyful stomp of vintage soul floor-fillers and the scratchy minimalism of 1970s punk; the booming basslines of 1950s Chicago blues and the plangent laments of country singers.

The Wurlitzer is a high-maintenance mistress. I scour the internet for replacement styluses and, on more than one occasion, the engineer from Juke Box Services has had to be cajoled into making a long journey north. But I am grateful to the Wurlitzer because she cured me of musical pretension, or at least staved it off for a few seasons. I was 30 years old, a die-hard music fan and even a semi-professional critic, drawn ever further away from the three- minute pop songs that first captured my imagination into worlds of free jazz and post-rock and white noise. The Wurlitzer reminded me of the irrepressible power of the perfect 7in. And with a flat stuffed with revellers, she made a succession of New Years’ Eves in the early Noughties swing in a way that poring over a box set of Albert Ayler albums probably wouldn’t have done. I remain eternally delighted by my expensive mistake. But remember. A jukebox is not just for Christmas.

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