I’ve been busy this week, entertaining Mum and Dad who have been stopping over en route home from their summer break. I suspect this is as much a rite of passage for them as it is for me, welcoming them into my marital home as my guests and taking time out to entertain them.

It therefore seems only appropriate to pay tribute to one very important part of my upbringing that may have unintentionally shaped my interests and career goals for the whole of my adult life. Really it is all their fault – they bought me my first record player for Christmas when I was five years old. I remember it vividly, a small battery operated orange box that you split into two, standing the lid up to reveal a speaker and with a small seven-inch turntable underneath. I remember my father schooling me in the art of placing the stylus in the correct place on the spinning disc and the importance of not dragging it off and scratching the precious vinyl underneath.

So addicted was I that I demanded a better one after it broke, and I think it was Christmas 1980 that I gleefully unwrapped the replacement. This was another battery operated model, this time propped up on legs that allowed the speaker underneath room to breathe. Although still only the size of a single, you could if you so desired put it into 33rpm mode and play entire LPs on it, just as long as you remembered not to tread on it as it sat spinning in the middle of the floor. Better yet it came with three sockets on the side. Into one you could plug the supplied headphones, into another a small microphone but better still into the third you could plug the headphones in without muting the speakers and so could pretend to be a real live DJ to your own records.

If my family had any surprise at the career path I announced as a teenager I was choosing, they probably mentally referred back to the photograph below which proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the wheels were set in motion at a very early age.


So, I hear you ask, what exactly did I play on these fully functional record players? Well in the photo above you will note an old plastic ice cream box crammed with singles, a tub which to this day sits on the shelves in the living room and which every so often is brought out of hiding for a blast of nostalgia.


Compared to my own personal purchases which are carefully stored in their sleeves and in cases and old shelves, these precious old discs are kept in a manner which would have purists reeling in horror. Hardly any have sleeves, having originally come in simple paper holders which vanished long ago. They are crammed together tightly, scraping against one another as each one is pulled out and almost universally covered in dust. Yet strangely enough they all play perfectly, the key being the fact that most date from the 60s and early 70s when singles were pressed with raised bumps around the edge of the label to enable them to play on autochangers without slippage. Thus the rather fearsome scraping noises heard when extracting each one from the box are in fact the label-edge grooves and not the precious musical ones themselves.

The box actually contains records from four different sources. First of all there are a handful of kid-friendly records, dating from an era when you could pick up Music For Pleasure discs for a few pence at the supermarket. So it is that I have an anonymous cover version of “Rupert” backed with “Snoopy vs The Red Baron”, the Mike Sammes singers performing “Puff The Magic Dragon” and a disc with “Two Songs From Rainbow” as performed by Telltale, the singing group who were binned after the first two series to be replaced by the rather more longstanding Rod, Jane and interchangeable other. There are also a couple of the famous Walt Disney releases which came packaged as a 24 page storybook. The idea was that you played the accompanying 33rpm disc which narrated the story, reading along in the book and turning the page when prompted by the chimes.
Perhaps most importantly and looking back most amazingly, the five year old me inherited the combined teenage record collections of both my parents. It is an eclectic selection, ranging from classic pop to obscure classical performances. My father’s contributions are from the late 50s and early 60s. I have original 7-inch pressings from Johnny and The Hurricanes and the always memorable “You’re Driving Me Crazy” from the Temperance Seven, notable of course as the first ever Number One single produced by George Martin. To the despair of some friends jazz music is the one genre that has always passed me by and which I cannot get into at all, yet I actually grew up enchanted by the sounds of Paul Mcdowell, Brian Innes and Phillip Harrison. Not that my father didn’t also have some rather wild musical tastes, making him presumably the only 15 year old in the Midlands to own the “Dancing Time For Dancers EP” by Joe Loss and his Orchestra and “Pepito” performed by Los Machucambos.


It would be remiss not to note the presence in the box of “I Love You Because” by Jim Reeves and particularly its b-side “Anna Marie” which would one day give my sister her middle name.

Then there was my mother’s contribution to the box which needless to say neatly reflected the tastes of a teenage girl from the early-mid 60s. I can genuinely say with total honesty that I grew up listening to The Beatles as without having a clue who they were and why they were so ubiquitous in my box of discs, I would sit for hours and spin every single one of their early classics, “Please Please Me”, “From Me To You”, “I Want To Hold Your Hand” and more. Perhaps more exciting from a collectable point of view are the two “Hard Days Night” EPs which are slightly tatty after 40 years but which remain in their original colour sleeves and play with barely a scratch. Oh yes, and also in there is a record that indirectly led to me being here in the first place, a copy of “I Like it” from Gerry and the Pacemakers which I later learned was “their song” when my parents first started dating.


Note also the evidence of something that is never needed in this age of perfect digital copies. Back when people used to swap records with friends, it was necessary to sign your name on the back of the sleeve to avoid later confusion over its ownership.


Finally the fourth part of the collection is the strangest part of all. My Grandfather passed away in early 1980 and for want of a better home for it, I inherited much of his personal record collection. As a proud former soldier from the Scottish Highlands, he liked nothing better than to listen to artists singing proudly of the motherland, which meant that I in turn grew up spinning discs from the likes of Jimmy Shand, Kenneth McKellar and most especially Andy Stewart. Chart fans know of “A Scottish Soldier” and its epic 40 week chart run in 1961 that for a time made it one of the most charted songs of all time. I on the other hand knew it as the nostalgic ballad that I played as a child and the connection it gave me with my late grandfather whose death it took me years to get over. The box also contained a copy of “Donald Where’s Your Troosers?” the words to which I could recite backwards, several years before Simon Mayo spun a copy on Radio One and turned it into a novelty Top 3 hit for Christmas 1989.