Between the ages of about 10 and 15, my bible - and yes, that is a deliberately chosen word - was a book published in 1975 and written by a couple of guys called Roy Carr and Tony Tyler. The Beatles: an Illustrated Record sustained me pretty much daily as I worked through my first, and by the looks of it, abiding obsession. Judging by the incredible interest in anything vaguely Beatles-related that still seems to characterise an insanely large number of otherwise sensible and rational adults the world over, I am thankfully not alone in this. At least this is the straw I clutch at when, as is increasingly the case, I begin to doubt my own sanity, gripped as I am by the strange, Spock-like 'amok time' that stirs when the Jones descends. George - you know, the one in the band who played guitar - probably had it right when he said that, rather than stirring up Beatlemania themselves, the band had the madness of others projected onto them. I think he's right. And some of us are still doing it to them even now, and that number would have to include me.
Rewind to 1975. We're in a quiet side street in my home town. Church Street is still there, pedestrianized now but with a quite different assortment of tiny shops tumbling before you as you steer off the noisier, busier high street into the quieter reaches of its tributary. There's even a record shop there once more. I saw my first bubble car here, a vision of fast-fading sixties chic and it was the palliative treats on offer from the toyshop a few doors further on - farmyard animals, dinky toys, airfix models - that enabled me to endure whatever tortures might have befallen me at doctor's or dentist's surgery. Later there was Parlour Sounds, appropriately named and probably in reality so small a parlour that it can't have housed more than about a hundred records but which then had the aura of an Aladdin's cave. But then all record shops had/have that - even the Woolies in the high street, where I bought my first Beatles L.P., long since annexed and absorbed into the People's Republic of Poundland. There was a bookshop in Church Street too, just up from where the new record shop is. Langton's only fairly recently closed down having hobbled on for a few years beyond the rise of Amazon as a bizarre biblio-cafeteria hybrid that seemed only to cater to the same three or four youngish hipster families of caffeine-addicted bookworms.
So here we are, just about to enter the wonky Olde Curiositie Shoppe gentility of Langton's. Inside, a space that would now seem cramped, low ceilinged and airless was then a boundless continent to be explored by a small person. And on that particularly sunny day - but then they were all sunny days back then - there it was, The Beatles; an illustrated record, standing there resplendent, square and proud. The shop was owned by Mr. Langton - a bow-tied Philip Larkin type, beautifully described by a Geordie ex- of mine who used to work for him as 'The Bloater'. The resemblance to the fish really was remarkable, even down to a few scales. I can't remember whether it was him or one of his minions who served me. The truth is, I was already lost in it, oblivious to the boring details outside of goings on beyond its pages. It's quite possibly selective memory, but I genuinely can't remember looking at another book for at least a couple of years - and that next one too was probably also about the Beatles.
Despite its immense spiritual significance, that first copy ended up being swapped - I can't remember for what ridiculously toe-curling aggregation of Wings LPs or similarly lousy bounty - with my friend Toby, who promptly cut all the pictures out and blu-tacked them all over his bedroom ceiling, filling every available space above his mezzanine bed. Well, we were young. But I had a second shot at redemption sometime in 1978 when I walked into WH Smith's in Richmond - still there, but unrecognisable - and there it was, all grinning, collarless suited and azure, the second revised edition. That got me through to my early teens when the Beatles bug briefly gave way to new wave, then hardcore post-punk and then David Bowie. Its purpose long since served, that copy at some point must have gone the way of the first edition, only this time, most probably cut up and blu-tacked to my own bedroom walls.
And then a lot of time went past. The records I'd assiduously collected, with the invaluable assistance of my Bible, had mainly given way to their more compact, digital equivalents, the cornerstone LPs of my life given away as casually as valentine's to girlfriends who would soon themselves be released in the same carefree way. All that remained of The Good Book were a few torn and wrinkled pages, a blue-barnacled wreck of useless, faded parchments shoved in a cardboard folder under the protective eye of a face painted onto the body of a pregnant woman from that other Old Testament favourite, The Beatles Complete. Then I met someone I didn't want to give away, we fell in love, moved into a flat, then another flat and before we knew it we were going through our parents' things, settling their affairs and closing their accounts; The Intro barely begun, preparing for The Outro ourselves.
* * *
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot
And this will be some kind of shoring of the fragments, I suppose. The plan was/is to follow the familiar path of The Illustrated Record; through the discography, through the records, through the lives; theirs and mine. By the glory that is eBay, I now have copies of both the first and second editions. In fact, it's as if they'd never been away. I've come by most of the records again too; those that were lost now are found. In fact, it's actually a much better collection than the one I amassed between 1975 and 1978. The 1970s reissues were so easy to get hold of and relatively cheap. Indeed, if you look closely, all the artwork used in the book seems to come from 70s pressings. Only the singles and EPs I collected, mainly from my beloved Jive Dive, a local rock n roll specialist collectors' shop, were true period pieces. And that's another strand in this narrative: the search for the source.
Because the real beauty of the records is that - clue's in the name - they do bear witness. In other words, intrinsically they stay pretty much the same. They are the truth. There's no fake news deep down in the groove. Oh, sure, there will have been much bruising and bumping, wearing and tearing (and tearing, boohoo) and dogearing along the way. But deep down in the valleys of sound, where it really matters, little has actually changed. One of the things I hope my fellow vinyl devotees - and I'm sure there are an ever swelling congregation of you - will also have discovered as they've stood by or reconnected with the format is that these are far hardier beasts than any of us ever realised. Dig down deep into the grooves with that prospector's spade of a stylus, once you've excavated away all those years of accumulated grime and caked on residue of spliff, and you'll often find something immaculate and true. In this increasingly binary and ephemeral world, the enduring appeal of vinyl is nothing short of miraculous.
Oh sure, it requires a lot of belief - in fact, sometimes, faith bordering upon the absurd. But I've reclaimed enough, some that even I felt to be so far beyond salvation that I questioned my own sanity in trying to redeem them, to know just how much of a beating these things can take. And when that does happen, when you've buffed away at the black seam, peeled away all the distorting, muffling, blurring effects of the passage of time, to reveal the pure, unwavering truth....well, it's about as close as you'll get in this cynical modern world to something truly magical. It might even be some form of alchemy. Woo, to turn back the hands of time - now, that really would be something. It's a folly as old as mankind I suppose. But sometimes even a fool can be onto something.
OK, if none of this is making much sense, I'll try and map out the plan a bit more simply. Using the template of the Illustrated Record, I'm going to write about the records - the actual bits of plastic, that is - how I first knew them, how I lost them, how I found them again, what they did to me then, what they do to me now. Hopefully then a few themes or strands will start to emerge. So if you like records, you might like this. And if you like the Beatles you might like this. And if you were young in the 70s, well, some of this might seem familiar. But I hope that if none of the above applies to the reader, there might still be something here that will keep you tuning in every now and then; in the same way that any tale of obsessive, odd behaviour and human folly might pucker your interest. We'll move through The Early Years, onto The Studio Years and, if I can get hold of a few more of the records, The Solo Years. So I hope there'll be at least a couple of you still here if and when we get to The Outro.
