London's vinyl revival: what goes around comes around

There are a hundred or so people crammed into the Great Northern Railway Tavern for the latest Stylus Stories night. Many are in their forties, but rather more surprising is the smattering of twenty-somethings. On stage is a record player, a chair and a conductor’s stand, on which is perched the eponymous 1975 album by burlesque American rockers The Tubes. The record is removed from its sleeve and the needle lowered on to its signature track ‘White Punks on Dope’. In isolation, you might be forgiven for thinking that Stylus Stories is little more than a support group for a dwindling section of die-hards. But the wider statistics tell a different story.

Last Saturday, most of this country’s surviving record shops played host to their busiest day of the year. The sixth British Record Store Day saw limited-edition vinyl releases by the likes of David Bowie and Bob Dylan sold on a first-come, first-served basis to customers who knew that their only hope of bagging their desired item was to start queuing the night before. On Berwick Street, where six record shops are located within a stone’s throw of each other, those queuing were kept entertained by a string of live performances. Over at Rough Trade East, self-proclaimed vinylhead Paul Weller rattled out a few tunes. Nearby, Downstairs At Mother in Shoreditch hosted the climax of Secret 7”, an exhibition that saw 700 artists — among them Gilbert & George, Ai Weiwei and David Shrigley — provide unique artwork for seven 7in singles (100 were pressed of each) by artists including Elton John, Nick Drake and Public Enemy. On Saturday all 700 records were sold, with proceeds going to Art Against Knives. Buyers procured themselves a unique piece of art for just £40.

If any evidence were needed of our enduring romance with vinyl, Secret 7” is surely it. It’s hard to imagine any of the aforementioned artists being persuaded to go to such trouble for a CD single. Vinyl’s re-emergence as the music connoisseur’s format of choice has been dramatic. In 2012, the UK vinyl market saw a 70 per cent increase, soaring from £3.4m to £5.7m. Worldwide, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry reported that sales of vinyl records were at a 16-year high — and that’s before we factor in the boom in sales of second-hand records. Over at one such emporium, Record Detective Agency in Palmers Green, proprietor Derek Burbidge reports a marked upturn in business. To spend an afternoon here is to reconnect with the thrill of going into a record shop in a pre-CD, pre-download era. In the words of Burbidge, who has resisted any temptation to take his business online, that thrill ‘comes from walking into a shop, knowing that you’ll come out with something that might change your life a little bit — yet not knowing what that something will be. That’s the one thing record shops have always had over buying online.’

Needless to say, back in the 1980s, when record companies threw their weight behind the new digital dawn, this wasn’t in the script. In 1987, PolyGram’s owner Philips bankrolled a supplement in Q magazine with PolyGram-signed Dire Straits singer Mark Knopfler on the cover, espousing the virtues of its CD players. This was the age in which an entire generation of music fans was encouraged to throw out its vinyl collections and ‘upgrade’ them to the new format. The fact that millions did just that propelled the music industry to hitherto unscaled levels of prosperity. Reminded of that era, Phil Barton, owner of Sister Ray, allows himself a hint of a smile. His Berwick Street record store, back when it was called Selectadisc, was immortalised in 1995 when it appeared on the cover of Oasis’ second album (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?. ‘Much of our trade these days is people coming in to re-purchase the vinyl they got rid of years ago. Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms is a popular title. Anything you might consider part of the canon is a brisk seller: What’s Going On; The Dark Side of the Moon; The Queen Is Dead. But it’s not just older people buying those records. What we’re getting now is teenagers realising that a bunch of tracks on a phone is no match for hearing this music as it was intended. Downloads are old hat to them; vinyl is the new thing.’

If Barton is in buoyant spirits, it’s hardly surprising. ‘The vinyl revival has saved our business, there’s no question about it.’ In 2001, when vinyl was almost at its nadir and iTunes had yet to launch, he recalls ordering 2,000 CDs and 50 vinyl copies of Radiohead’s OK Computer album, which he might expect to sell in ‘about a month’. If Radiohead put out an album now, he says, ‘I might shift 150 CDs as opposed to 200 on vinyl.’ It’s a similar story, he notes, for all of Sister Ray’s big sellers this year. Vinyl albums by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds and David Bowie have all comfortably outsold their CD counterparts. These sorts of figures may not hasten a return to the days when the only way to buy music was to go to a record shop, but for Barton, it’s the difference between bankruptcy and solvency.

It’s the same story for Britain’s oldest existing vinyl pressing plant. Back in 2001, the writing appeared to be on the wall for the old EMI factory in Hayes, Middlesex (see page 45). With the premises sold to property developers, the final job of plant manager Roy Matthews was to give the new owners a guided tour. It must have been one hell of a tour — by the end of it, the new owners pledged to try to keep it as it was. Renamed The Vinyl Factory, business is once again flourishing. Ironically, one of its biggest clients is EMI Records. Now that the label no longer has its own pressing plant, where else can it go to manage the demand for titles by the likes of Coldplay and Richard Hawley?

Fifty years ago, the whole of EMI’s Hayes plant was given over to meeting the clamour for Please Please Me, the album that formalised the beginning of Beatlemania in this country. For anyone still unconvinced that music of a certain vintage is best experienced through the hardware for which it was designed, Mark Burgess, proprietor of Flashback Records in Islington, says that The Beatles’ debut album remains unsurpassed: ‘It’s impossible to really understand why people went crazy for The Beatles without hearing their early records on vinyl. The clarity of digital formats doesn’t enhance them — it diminishes them. But on an early vinyl pressing, you can hear the loudness, the way the instruments bleed into each other. Nothing else serves the power of this shit-kicking rock’n’roll band as well as the original record.’

In Old Rare New, a 2008 anthology of writing celebrating the independent record shop, singer Cat Power describes the sound of her mother’s Otis Redding albums as ‘balls-out, rad-ass, loud soul perfection’. Why do you never hear people talking like this about the music on their iPods or CD players? At the dawn of the CD era, it was the clarity of the format that seemed to draw out the superlatives. But tastes change. Now the holy grail appears to be ‘warmth’ — and, in a download era, that’s a hard thing to replicate. MP3s — the sound file predominantly favoured by iTunes — hold a fraction of the information contained on their analogue counterparts. In sonic terms, they are like an eggshell without the actual egg: you’re getting a mere replica of the surface. In time, the quality may improve, but emulating the experience of vinyl may prove an impossible task — a point illustrated by Barton’s recollection of getting The Clash’s 1980 album Sandinista! for Christmas: ‘It came with a dense booklet that sustained me for a whole week. Every day, I’d play a side and read the lyrics in real time. The format demanded that level of immersion from me.’

In a post-digital age, it’s sometimes confusing trying to separate what we want from what’s on offer. Spotify offers endless choice, but we’re presented with music at such a great velocity that we can’t poss-ibly process it. Isn’t there something to be said for the effort involved in leaving your house and rummaging through a pile of records, before carefully narrowing down your purchases to an affordable sum? Aren’t you obviously going to make more of an effort to weave your new acquisition into your life than the last thing you clicked on Spotify? Thirty-four years have elapsed since my first purchase, a Barron Knights single bought for 79p in a Birmingham record shop. I’ve moved with the times, but can’t honestly say I’ve found a better way to buy music. Back at Record Detective Agency in Palmers Green, I pick up a pile of seven-inches from the soul section with no clear idea of what I’m after. Through the scratches and surface noise, Dee Dee Sharp’s 1963 single ‘Wild!’ weaves its spell. My collection of singles stands at about 4,000 but suddenly feels incomplete without Sharp’s version of a story as old as time itself: what happens to good girls who fall for bad boys.

This may also help explain the turnout for Stylus Stories at the Great Northern Railway Tavern. As one of the regulars, Briony, steps on stage to begin her testimony, event co-founder Dave Scott dons white gloves and places her copy of the Pink Fairies’ ‘War Girl’ into his 1970s Vacorec record-cleaner. Would this work if he did it with downloads? Of course not. The removal of the record from the sleeve; the cleaning; the placing it on the turntable — there’s a ritualistic undercurrent to the process that is magnified at an event like this. ‘Besides,’ he adds, ‘who has download stories to tell? Who on earth can remember what they were doing when they clicked “buy” on a track? It doesn’t happen, does it?’ ES

Pete Paphides is the presenter of Vinyl Revival on BBC 6 Music