I’ve grown to appreciate the beauty of vinyl more and more over the years. It’s not just music of course – there is a wonderful variety of edutainment too and each disc makes you think of the journey it has made to get into your collection.

The sleeve design and notes can be things of exceptional beauty when done well. Equally, they can have another value when production isn’t so good to the point that it becomes cheesy and garish. Vinyls can give you a valuable insight into the time that they were made and the massive social changes that went on through the twentieth century.

I’m glad to see that vinyl has made a comeback and that sales of new pressings continue to increase. My own ‘re-awakening’ came whilst attending the Eindhoven Carnival in Holland some 20 years ago. I had taken a boat up to Dordrecht and was browsing in a bookshop, when I came across a box of LPs. I ended up taking about 20 or so to the counter (ranging from Joe Jackson to Chilean poet Victor Jara) only to be told I could have the lot for 20 Euros. A new obsession had begun! You would have thought that the inconvenience caused by having to cart so many vinyl back from a foreign country would have been a one-off. But no. There were subsequent trips to Spain, Portugal, France, Germany and Austria which also involved shipping back the weighty blackstuff.

Some of my collection came from my brother, my sister and father. The majority, though, of which I have only put up a small part, was collected during my days as a tour manager for a ballet company maybe 20 years ago, After dropping the dancers off at whatever theatre they were performing in that night, I would wander around town and hit all the charity shops. By the time we headed back to London at the end of the week there was not a seat in the minibus that didn’t have a stack of LPs under it.

The one vinyl I saw the most, but always refused to ever buy, was Paul Young’s No Parlez. I don’t particularly know why. Maybe it’s because I’m a francophile and I didn’t appreciate the jokey title.

As the aim of this website is to encourage me to embark on further creative endeavours and to give up the day job before I retire, everything on the site is for sale at a price. That includes my freelance skills. Any money will be channelled into making more art, whether that be film, writing, poetry and performance.