Vinyl Junkies

For Christmas in 2025 my sister-in-law bought me a mug with the legend “It’s Not Hoarding if it’s Vinyl” emblazoned across it. She knows me well. It now stands full of paper clips in the room I keep my vinyl hoard in.

In the Seventies I lived in Lancaster just about the time I was coming of age. My records certainly weren’t a hoard then, but they were on their way to becoming a collection. A guy I worked with, John LePage, showed me how to make a box to store records in. He said you buy four pieces of blockboard ready cut to fourteen inches square and a piece of plywood to form the back. Take them home, counter sink and screw it together. It may take half an hour to make. You can paint it if you want to.

a vinyl hoard?

Now fifty years later, I’ve got fifteen of those boxes with over a hundred albums in each. Fifteen hundred records and more. If I play three a day over the next five hundred days, I’ll probably get them all in before I go to the great record shop in the sky. Ah well- maybe. That’s some going, even in retirement, and if I take out family days, Christmas days, birthdays, holidays, football matches and time with my wife, we are up to a thousand days already. So it’s probably totally unrealistic but then again hoarding is. I am not sure I would describe myself as a hoarder but others would. Hence the mug. I try hard not to be.

But do you know what the saddest thing of the lot might be? I can remember where I got most of them from or have a good go. I can certainly have a good go at guessing. The first long playing record I ever got was The Beatles' first album “Please Please Me “. My mum and dad were separated and my sister and I got our dad to buy two LP records, one for her and one for me. They were 30/-  (shillings) each. We got him to buy us these instead of his usual selection box. My sister got “With the Beatles”. We wore them out. But guess what - I have still got mine.

When I was doing my paper round, for which I got 30/- a week- luckily. I would plan out what records I would buy next, as I plodded around in the wet, cold and snow delivering the Bolton Evening News.

So it went. I used to buy new albums then. The folk boom came. I fell in love with the music of Mr Dylan. But if you wanted to be more esoteric you could buy albums on Elektra Records but they were 32/6d. The price of being erudite. Two and six more.

You could sit upstairs on the bus going to school with an album propped up on your knee, thinking everyone is looking at me because I’ve got a Jesse Fuller album. In truth they didn’t give a shit.

Somewhere wonderful to buy vinyl was Yanks in Manchester, a subterranean cellar next to the public toilets where Len Fairclough got caught or so they say, just across the road from The Palace Theatre. It was full of deleted records from across the pond that you could buy as cheap could be. The stuff I got from there was mind blowing.

In 1990 I moved to Blackpool. Forget the Tower, the Big One, Bloomfield Road - sorry Steve - the greatest thing Blackpool ever had to offer was Saddle Records which eventually ended up in Layton. This was a goldmine. Sadly missed by me and hundreds of others I would suspect.

a vintage Blackpool record shop

I once paid £20 for a David Blue album “Stories” in a second hand record shop in Chorley. I asked the lady if she wouldn’t mind taking the price tag off. She replied that of course she would and added that I would be surprised how many people asked this, so that their partner wouldn’t notice how much the record had cost.

And so on. Don’t worry I am not going to take you through every phase and every record I have ever bought since 1963. That would take more than five hundred days for me to write and for you to read. You would probably find it pretty tedious anyway.

I might add that these days I buy albums for their cover as much as for the record itself, which, of course, could well be knackered. There is always a good chance of that. I recently bought “Have I Right?!” album by The Honeycombs for two pounds in a charity shop in Poulton for the obscurity of the album itself and the cover. The record actually plays quite well. I had also previously bought an album by The Four Pennies at the same place for the same price with the same outcome.

I have six frames specially made for album covers on the wall in my mancave. I change these regularly to show off my collection and covers. Still remember the Jess Fuller album on the bus. Don’t know who I am trying to impress anyway. Nobody comes in here. Right now they display 60’s British R’n’B albums - The Rolling Stones, The Animals, The Pretty Things, Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames Live at The Flamingo and an Alexis Korner album. The last is of interest. Some second hand dealers have realised the interest in covers. I bought this for 50p with no record in it. These are in the frames now because I put them in after I took out my Christmas albums covers. Sad bastard stuff really. Confessions of a Vinyl Hoarder indeed.

Georgie framed and friends

I have always thought that the concept of the speed of records, seventy eight, forty five and thirty three and a third rpm was a good analogy for the way the baby boomers., like me, have lived our lives. Starting at breakneck speed and coming of age as the music slows to thirty three and a third. In the poem I have taken this idea and written around it in my poem.

The last verse stops in the early seventies. It has a certain pomposity and piousness about it. Still we were without too much doubt like that in our early twenties in the early seventies. I was anyway.

The Speed of Sound

You slid it from its cardboard wrapper
as if it were a holy relic.
You cranked up the gramophone.
The needle crashed down.
The black twelve-inch record,
spun at breakneck speed.
Seventy-eight revolutions a minute.
Brittle and fast they could easily shatter

Just like the records our lives turned fast,
We were the bees’ knees and bobby dazzlers.
Jiving, crashing, rocking and rolling.
ploughing the furrows, moving through the grooves.
Baby boomers let off the leash.

We lived our lives at seventy-eight rpm.
Brittle and fast we were easy to shatter
Whole lotta shaking going on

Stored in their paper sleeves,
there they stood pleading to be heard.
You switched on the Dansette.
The diamond hard stylus never missed a beat
The black seven-inch record
spun without threatening to break
Forty-five revolutions a minute.
Loud and proud get out of the way

The speed of the records was the sound of the times.
We were razor sharp and dressed up to the nines.
Short skirts, suave suits, with scooters outside.
Our clothes and the music danced hand in hand.
More than just records they said who you were.
We lived our lives at forty-five rpm.
Loud and proud get out of our way
Talkin’ ‘bout my generation

Laminated, leaning up against a shelf
each cover looked like work of art.
Hi fi separates balanced the sound.
The cartridge revealed glorious stereo.
The black long-playing record
spun six songs a side
Thirty-three and a third revolutions a minute.
Shining and modern they were shatter proof

Cooler, calmer, career guided and minded
coming of age as the music slowed.
We had boxes of albums stacked by the wall.
Nothing is better than a vinyl collection
and buying records at the speed of sound.
We lived our lives at thirty-three and a third rpm.
Shining and modern we were shatter proof
Wish you were here.

the speed of sound

And if, after all that, you're starting to feel the urge, consider this. Think of it as a vinyl junkie hit list.

In “On the Road” Jack Kerouac offered thirty tips for aspiring writers. Many clearly are about writing itself but others are more general such as “Be open to everything” and “Be in love with your life. I am going to offer some fun filled tips for buying records, predominantly second hand ones at that. If you want to spend twenty pounds plus on buying a new copy of your favourite album that’s fine but these tips are about getting out there and hunting for fun and being open to everything, wanting to build up your record collection and most of all being in love with life. Not quite thirty still nevertheless you can add some if you want to. So let’s go.

· Never pass by a charity shop without going in to see what they might have.

· Car boots can sometimes offer something you may want.

· Always look at the collections of your family, neighbours and friends. They will have stuff in their attic they will probably be only too glad to give away.

· Consider eBay from time to time.

· Take chances on something you might not be sure about but it’s always worth a couple of quid.

· Get out of your comfort zone. Buy stuff you feel might expand your musical boundaries.

· Most importantly of all, never ever leave something you think you might want because what will be for sure if you hesitate or doubt, it will be gone by the time you have made your mind up. You have been warned!

Thanks for reading. Happy collecting.

Bill Allison