by Malcolm Toogood

Created on: December 26, 2008

The first record I ever listened-to was on my Auntie's wind-up gramophone, the type where the needles were kept in a tin, and you had to replace them after just a few playings, or they would become sharp and start cutting through the soft wax material of the records themselves. The record was "Tubby the Tuba" by Danny Kaye. We listened to it every week, when I went to my Aunt's after school for tea. We also listened to "Sparky's Magic Piano", but not for long because that became a casualty of the frailness of 78's, when it was accidentally dropped and shattered into a dozen pieces on the kitchen floor, much to everyone's disappointment.

A few years afterwards, my parents acquired a small electric Dansette record player, which had the "latest technology" in a reversible needle that allowed not only 78's to be played, but also the new-fangled 7-inch vinyl records. All of these records were, of course, very expensive in the austerity of the 1950's, and came in brown-paper sleeves with a hole in the centre through which the label could be read. Occasionally, there may be printing on the sleeve, sometimes publicising the record company, but often just an advert for the local record shop where it had been originally sold.

I was fascinated by the different colours and typefaces on the labels, and the exotic names of the companies producing them. The red "Capitol" label with the dome above the name, the blue "Parlophone" with its pound-sign at the top, and of course "His Masters Voice" with Nipper the Dog resplendent on his burgundy-coloured background.

By the time I began spending my pocket money on my own records, they were exclusively vinyl 45's, and the sleeves were as colourful as the labels, pink for Pye, grass-green for Columbia, London's blue and white stripes, and so on. Then the first LP's began arriving in the house, with their colour-photo's of my parents' favourite artistes in a demure pose on the sleeve, plus paragraphs of sleeve-note information on the back about the artist, musicians and writers. This was probably the first truly multi-media product; you could listen to it, you could read it, you could even stand back and admire it, making a vinyl album a truly-wonderful thing to acquire. As time, and production techniques, progressed, the information provided expanded to include full lyric sheets, fabulous airbrushed artwork, double-albums in gatefold sleeves, box sets with complete books of band biographies, and so on.

Of course, it wasn't necessarily

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