The Vinyl Odyssey Introduction

With Neil and Steve

The good people at Press On Vinyl and Fairsound have asked me to write a series of blogs in an effort to produce interesting articles to help increase traffic to the Fairsound platform.

The idea of the blog is to visit independent record stores and write about my experience, to start locally and gradually move to stores further afield. Despite the emphasis on Interesting articles I decided to do it anyway.

To help me in this quest I have twisted the arm of one of my oldest friends Steve. Steve and I are in our 60’s now but have been friends since the age of 8. We started buying records around 1971 and have argued about music ever since.

T.Rex or Mungo Jerry, Led Zeppelin or Yes, The Who or Pink Floyd that sort of thing. One thing we both agree on is The Beatles are the greatest band of all time!

As teenagers we would use our pocket money, babysitting money and any other money we could lay our hands on to spend on a Saturday afternoon in the record shops of Middlesbrough.

Our day usually started and finished in Alan Fearnley’s store on Linthorpe road.

We would hope to buy a new release by at a cost of £2.00 per album this was usually out of our reach and a purchase from the second hand section was the norm.

As of the time of writing I have no idea how many vinyl records Steve owns I don’t think he does but it’s 1,000’s. His biggest fear is that when he dies his wife sells his vinyl collection for what he told her he paid for it.

You will get to know Steve and me more as the blogs start.

So the idea is that every 2 weeks or so we will visit a store and with the magic of words, photos and occasionally video we will try to convey our experience.

Steve and I will buy a record for our own collections and buy a recommended by the store record for the Press On Vinyl collection.

We will aim to give some publicity and business to the store but these blogs wont be critical in anyway even if Steve can’t find a first pressing of some obscure band he’s into at the moment.

So watch this space.