The most records I have bought at once is 78. Yes 78. It was at a record fair in Edinburgh. You know how it goes, you start out picking up the mainstream stuff you don’t have but soon enough, ooh it’s a Leo Kottke album for a pound. Might as well have that.
There was too much to carry home in one go. I recognise it now as a kind of mania. It’s also a consequence of years of research, so that I’ll see an early Ozark Mountain Daredevil’s record and I’ll know something about it. It’s a curse because things easily pique my interest. Ooh a Seatrain album. Then I get obsessed with completing collections of a band’s discography. On that occasion I picked up Without A Net by the Grateful Dead, the last vinyl album I needed.
It had gotten so bad that guys who ran stalls eyes’ lit up as I arrived knowing I would be taking a lot of their stock home. I think during this manic phase about 15 years ago, volume of records mattered to me more than anything else. I acquired about 3000 in that year, similarly a few years later we were living in Norfolk which had an enormous amount of car boots, especially one called Arminghall and it was huge. People would have tables of boxes of records for a pound each and my attitude was ‘hey it’s just a pound’ and I’d get 40 or 50 twice a week.
You do end up with dross but it’s exciting. I got quite complacent about it. It was just at the time of vinyl’s peak unpopularity so when I came across someone selling Rory Gallagher and Canned Heat records for £3, stupidly I didn’t buy them, thinking them too expensive. The great thing is there’s a lot of records out there. No matter how many you’ve got, there’s always the time when you come across that Seatrain debut album or the obscure Groundhogs first and you have to have them.
In later years I’ve grown to recognise this slightly dysfunctional, manic behaviour and have been able to control it better. But the old instincts are still there. About 4 years ago I got addicted to buying 12” singles because they were cheap as no one wanted them and sometimes contained up to 25” of music. So naturally I spent about £500 hoovering up about 300 of them. And I still get phases of buying 7” singles in bulk because to me, they’re very romantic and very much part of the heritage of the music business.
Also I know that as a poor kid who spent every penny on secondhand records from age 13, I know that I’d have loved to be in such a position. Buying records en masse was all I wanted to do, in fact it’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. The notable thing is when I meet other collectors, whatever it is they collect, they are usually of a similar bent. It’s obviously some flavour of neurodiversity which is inexplicable and makes no practical sense at all but which we all share in defiance of the ‘haven’t you got enough?’ critics.
For what it’s worth, I think it might lose some intensity in old age because there’s not much stuff I don’t have now that isn’t rare and expensive. But that said, when I was in hospital after my stroke, I passed the 3 months by ‘looking’ through my records in my mind, which is a bit odd and I still get a frisson of excitement when going into a charity shop. I suppose after 50 years of collecting it’s inevitable that old habits die hard
