If you’ve never spent any time being a collector, what I’m about to relate, will seem insane, but if you are, it will seem unremarkable.
You don’t collect a lot of records by passing up any and every opportunity to find some vinyl. This means wherever you go, anything from a city to a village, has to be scoured for charity shops and junk stores, just in case there are records to be harvested.
Of course, you’ll go weeks and not find anything but that’s not the point. You might do. Months of looking through piles of show tunes, Top Of The Pops albums and a seemingly limitless supply of Jim Reeves records is just part of the lifestyle until one day, for no good reason, you come upon a UK copy of Johnny Winter’s debut album and it makes it all worthwhile.
That might not sound too obsessive but there’s more extreme behavior to come.
Wherever you live, you develop a network of places which have records for sale that you commit to memory and patrol constantly because you’d never know when new stock would arrive and because there’d be a group of collectors in town, you’d need to check them almost every day to stay ahead of the competition.
When I was a student in Newcastle, it was before CD’s. There was only vinyl and tapes. I lived off marmite and Ryvitas so I could spend my grant on records and loads of places sold them, both secondhand and new. New was of no interest ti me. So every morning I’d do ‘the rounds’ in case anything was new. Most couldn’t match this relentless dedication so I often scored big.
Today, the sheer number of places to check out in a mile radius is staggering but I’d wager most cities were similar. My favourite place was the University retail outlet which sold records and books. The records were cheap, often rare or unusual as students got rid of their collections before entering the real world. There were also multiple junk shops on Westgate Road and Byker Road.(remember them?) full of great plies of electronics and brown furniture and under everything, on their back, were the records.
It was an almost military exercise getting access to these, moving boxes of old hi-fi gear to get at them. And all the dealers got to know you and would put stuff aside for you to browse when you came in.
The great mystery was what lurked at the bottom of these great piles of albums. You had to excavate them at some point. But it didn’t stop there. Charity shops were almost non-existent at the time. Instead, because records weren't recycled through them, things like house clearances went through the auction rooms. So you’d find yourself sitting amongst antique dealers bidding for a big boz of vinyl most of which you’d give to the same junk stores you inhabited.
There were also hippy shops like Fynde in Handisides Arcade as well as the card bar which were both good sources of records.
Then if you were really serious, there were newsagents that sold singles in a rack for 10-20p. These tended to be in the suburbs, the likes of Fenham, Byker and Heaton. Reps from record companies shifted excess stock this way. I did these once per week because they didn’t refresh as often and it involved walking a few miles to get around them all.
I went around all these places for years. That’s how I acquired loads of rare and unusual records. The thing was, I was aware that this behavior marked you out for ridicule from other students who didn’t. It was often quite harsh and critical like you were some sort of lunatic. It was where I learned that those that weren’t so horrible, this obsessive behaviour didn’t seem so terrible. All other collectors viewed it as entirely normal, in fact. I mean, it’s harmless enough isn’t it? I’m not sure people would be so hard on anyone now. More is known about people whose brains are wired differently.
I still see record collectors and dealers for whom vinyl is all encompassing. Usually it's men of my age or older, fellow collectors from back in the day. It’s perhaps more accepted if not actually appreciated, the single men in particular don’t look like they always look after themselves particularly well. That’s what being obsessed about something for your whole life does.
