I’ve been collecting records since I was about five years of age. The radiogram was a feature in just about every living room in those days; a piece of furniture with a radio and record player that when turned on, like the old TVs, you had to wait about five minutes for the valves to warm up before you could hear anything but when you did it was a pleasing warm, woody sound, the very antithesis of today’s harsh digital sonics. The whole thing intrigued me: The autochanger dropping the discs onto the turntable, the arm swinging across and plonking down on the disc, the music that came out, I just loved it. And we had a Ferranti stereogram with a Garrard turntable in it., very posh indeed. My interest in good quality hi-fi later on may well have started here too.

Knowing I’d developed this interest in records, my nanny allowed me the treat of a rummage through a box of old 78s she kept under her bed, and I would take a few home with me every visit. These were the records that were the hits of the fifties that my mum and her family would have played on their gram back then when she was a teenager. I was attracted to the different colours of the record labels, fascinated by their different designs and logos, and thrilled by how fast they spun compared to the other more modern records. My favourite was ‘Dreamboat’ by Alma Cogan, I loved it and played it a lot. The only thing I didn’t like about playing records then (and it used to terrify me) was when the mechanism stuck and failed to drop the record down sending the arm onto the bare rubber mat (the resulting noise still makes me shudder when I think of it) or if the stylus slipped off the edge of the disc. ‘Mam?!!’ I would shriek in terror. But it didn’t deter me. This was the beginning of my addiction to records.

I love collecting it, I adore selling it. The day I stop acquiring discs will be the day they put me in a box (a really useful box maybe?)

I progressed from shellac to vinyl and my pocket money was eagerly dispensed into the tills of the record counters at Woolworths, Lewis’s, WH smiths, The Co Op or some newsagent who happened to have a rack of records, as they did back then in the 70s. But my taste was still locked in to music from an earlier generation and pretty retro for the time – I think the first grown-up record I bought was Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around The Clock’ followed by other old stuff: Guy Mitchell, Jerry Lee Lewis, and something a little more modern: Des O’Connor would you believe (he was a big name then). My mum loved Johnny Ray, dad played a lot of Nat King Cole, I bought Frank Ifield records.

Discovering classical music by chance on the ‘wireless’ and my dad bringing home an LP of Holst’s Planets opened up a whole new world of musical discovery: Bach, Handel, Elizabethan lute music, Mozart & Haydn, then Sibelius, Rachmaninov, Mahler, Copland, Bernstein, Britten, Vaughan Williams, Finzi & Howells. My records were beginning to stack up, and room had to be made to accommodate them. A decade or so later it was jazz and the collection expanded considerably with countless Blue Note, Prestige, Impulse & ECM LPs. I purchased a CD player, discovered Joni Mitchell, Kirsty MacColl, Tori Amos, Kate Bush, Alison Krauss and the collection expanded even further. This was getting serious now.

And then, at the time of the millennium, I became a record dealer myself, selling by mail order and online. I founded the jazz store The Bebop Shop, opened the Knighton Music record shop in 2005 and now The Vinyl Attic @ Knighton. Our stock continues to grow and so does my own collection some fifty-odd years on from those early shellac explorations. What was a small rack of discs in a corner now expands into various rooms and records everywhere, tidy and orderly, but everywhere. And the passing of half a century hasn’t diminished my enthusiasm for wonderful records. I still get a thrill from a rummage through a box of old vinyl; it’s a nostalgia trip that takes me back to a bygone era. I love collecting it and I adore selling it. The day I stop acquiring discs will be the day they put me in a box (a really useful box maybe?).

What was a small rack of discs in a corner now expands into various rooms and records everywhere

I’m in no doubt that this lifetime of vinyl that I’ve enjoyed both as a hobby and as a career is in no small part down to my mum and the support she’s given me throughout the years. If you ever rang us up many years ago to enquire about jazz CDs and a very polite lady happened to answer with “Knighton Music, can I help you?” then that would have been her. She would take the order and spend a good while having a chat with you and she could talk the talk when it came to jazz as she’d got to know all the names: Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, Lester Young, Charlie Parker…she was the best telephonist I ever had!

And she was undoubtedly the best Mum ever. As my collection grew over the years she put up with my records taking over increasing amounts of space in her living room. She tolerated the ever-increasing size of hi-fi boxes and the floor-standing speakers that got in the way of the telly, and she never moaned once about the cables that were laid everywhere; she had so much patience whilst I browsed through dusty boxes of LPs in record shops far and wide. And she loved (and in some cases grew to love) the music I played. As she got older she would often get bored with the tv and say, “put some music on” and she’d sit and listen with me. I remember our last vinyl session comprised of some gentler Coltrane records including the moving ‘Wise One’ from his ‘Crescent’ album. She’d been ill earlier that day but now she looked so calm and settled, and we talked about how beautiful the music was. Little did I know it would be the last time we would enjoy some records together.

Whilst chatting to her in hospital I’d promised I would continue to build the new website and that I’d make it the best one I’ve ever done. She said she knew I would and she looked so happy for me that I was making good process with the project. Sadly, she never got to see the result; she got very poorly soon after and passed away just before Christmas 2025. Determined to honour my promise, The Vinyl Attic @ Knighton build is done, now launching in Autumn 2026 and dedicated to her memory. Thank you mum for all the fond memories, for the encouragement you gave me in my music-selling career and for the love of records you blessed me with x