Evangelical About Vinyl - Viva la Revolution(s per minute)

I'm an early bird, weekdays I can often be found in the office by 7:30am.  The sooner you get there, the sooner you can leave right?

At that time of day the place has a Marie Celeste air about it but I do have one colleague who is usually up with the lark.  Being the only one in, he is often bombarded with my tales of record collecting adventures, which I presumed he always tolerated as one of my eccentric (but hopefully endearing!) activities.

He has one of the most logical, methodical minds I've ever encountered.  Digital music is perfectly aligned to be his format of choice, all those zeros and ones.  I always fancied that analog would be too unpredictable for him by far.

However, I must have piqued his interested because he dug out his Dad's old record player and gave it a whirl.  He agreed that it had a richer, warmer sound to playing music through his computer.

One lunchtime he accompanied me to Terry's Music in Pontypridd to pick up some records I'd ordered and I was a little surprised to see him inspecting the record players and asking lots of questions.

Then when I told him that most new records come with download codes, I could see the tide turning.

A little while later, he came in and announced that he was getting a record player for Christmas.  I was most chuffed to have influenced that particular letter to Santa.

So when I pulled his name from the Secret Santa hat the other day I didn't have to think twice about what to get.

I picked up these little lovelies from my all time favourite music shop, Red House Music, Aberdare.  I really hope he likes them, but to be honest if you don't like the music of Ella Fitzgerald and Sam Cooke then your ears are broke.

Dear Santa I would also like a present which is 12" x 12" please

My younger cousin recently helped me with some decorating.  We couldn't agree on a radio station, he's more Radio 1, I'm more Radio 6, so we settled on playing some records instead.

I couldn't help but smile to see him scrubbing paint off his hands in a rush to turn over the record.  Soon he was devouring them, with several queued up ready to be played.  He started asking lots of questions like how to tell a 1st press from a reissue, and pawed through the lovely book in my copy of The Who's Tommy when we had finished.

Then on the last day of decorating, after I'd worked the poor boy ragged, we flopped down on the sofa and with a grin he says to me:

"Guess what, I was talking to Uncle M about records when I left here the other other night and he's digging his old record player out for me to have."

So that's my second convert... who's next?