About

This site exists because a few records came back into my life and, somewhere between cleaning them, playing them and staring at the dead wax under a light, the whole thing got completely out of hand.

Music first, collecting second

I have always loved music. I have played it badly, researched it obsessively and, for a couple of years, presented a weekly community radio show where a two-hour programme could easily involve hours of digging into the stories behind the tracks.

Vinyl has turned out to scratch the same itch in a different way. The music is still the point, but now there is also the object: the pressing plant, the label, the matrix numbers, the odd little marks in the runout, the previous owner, the charity shop, the brocante, the battered sleeve and the record that looks terrible but somehow plays beautifully.

Not an expert. Just very interested.

This is not an attempt to become the definitive authority on record collecting. It is me learning in public, documenting what I find and building a collection one record at a time. If I get something wrong, I want to correct it. If a runout tells a better story than the internet, I want to follow the runout.

How did this become a website?

The short version is: clean some records → buy more records → build a catalogue → investigate the pressings → invent a better grading system → apparently buy a domain and start publishing the whole bloody journey.

So that is what Not Another Vinyl Collector is: a collection archive, a music journal and an unnecessarily detailed answer to the question, how the fuck did this record get here?