‘This bloody station’s a right bloody cuss, no bloody pubs and no bloody bus;
Nobody cares for poor old bloody us. Oh, bloody bloody bloody bloody bloody!
For a MidCentury boy like me, brought up on a steady diet of 1950s war movies, Airfix kits, Action Man and War Picture Library comics – all of which […]
If sometimes I give the impression that my boyhood was characterised by an obsession with the Second World War, that’s because it’s largely true. I have a theory that, for any boy of the immediate post war generation (the baby boomers as sociologists would categorize us), you could place each one of us firmly […]
If I wrote that I’d first lost my heart to a Dansette in my early teens, you might well imagine some schoolboy crush on some baton-twirling cutie. If I added that she was a present from my great-aunt, and was covered in slightly scuffed red and grey leatherette, you’d start to wonder if you’d […]
Vintage typewriters seem to have become all the rage, these days. After years gathering dust amongst the bric a brac on the shelves of bad theme pubs, they’ve joined the ranks of the items of analogue technology much beloved of the hipster crowd (are they still a thing?), and a quick on line search […]
When I wrote about the untimely demise of the Vintage Magazine Store in Soho (which you can find here), it was very much done in the heat of the moment, which didn’t give me much of a chance to dig out any of the things I’d bought there over the years. We’ll, as I’m […]
Is it a paradox that the rapid passage of time, combined with nostalgia for one’s youth makes it seem that some shops have been there forever, and yet forever just seems like a few years? Perhaps that kind of timewarp feeling is quite appropriate when it comes to a place like the Forbidden Planet […]
It was all so easy when I first started collecting ‘old stuff’. For one thing, it wasn’t that old – in the late 70s and early 80s, stuff from the 50s and 60s was at most 30 years old and much of it was simply classed as secondhand, rather than collectable. Charity shops were […]
After a week touring south Devon, from Exeter as far down as Plymouth, it would be easy to fill an article with a blow by blow account of the antiques, vintage and collectibles shops we found and the purchases we did or didn’t make in each but, frankly, you could get the former from […]
WARNING: this article contains material that non-vinyl devotees may find incomprehensible, or just plain weird.
When I made my first attempt at capturing the world of the rock’n’roll DJ, I’d just embarked on my own quest to bring the cornucopia of music from the Big Beat era to the ears of my unsuspecting neighbours. With […]
I’ve long been in awe of collectors of original 45s. Their knowledge and dedication in tracking down rare slices of vinyl, often from small production runs on obscure labels, leaves me with a feeling of cheating somehow when I load a CD chock full of rarities, farmed, sifted and labelled up for my listening […]
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