When I think back to how my lifelong love affair with music began, I always return to the moment when I was about fourteen. It was a very different world then. If you wanted to hear a particular piece of music, whether it was classical, pop, or anything in between, you really had to go hunting for it. You couldn’t just click a button and have it instantly. Records were expensive beyond belief. A single LP could cost thirty-seven shillings and sixpence (£1.80) which for a teenager like me was practically a small fortune—weeks of pocket money, in fact, maybe even more than that. So discovering cheaper labels, little treasures hiding in the corners of shops, was like stumbling upon gold.
At my local WHSmith I found the Saga label (so young and already dealing with Saga (!)). And in 1963, with a careful saving of pennies and shillings, I managed to buy my very first two LPs. One was Bartók’s String Quartets Numbers 5 and 6, performed by the Fine Arts Quartet, and the other contained symphonies by Sammartini who I’d never even heard of but the record sleeve blurb describing him as an early symphonist intreagued me – it remains exquisite listening.
To be able to afford them—just over ten shillings each—felt like achieving something incredible. I could hardly believe that these works, the music I so desperately wanted to hear, were finally mine. I carried those records home with a sense of awe, and they opened doors to worlds of sound I had only glimpsed before.
But even before those LPs, my earliest encounters with recorded music came from my father’s old 78-rpm shellac discs. They were weighty things, collected in large, heavy albums, each containing several discs for a single work. I still have the set with Artur Rubinstein playing Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, another with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and even my mum’s Italian pre-war set of Cortot playing the Chopin Ballades.
Later, I discovered that more 78s could be hunted down in a local junk shop behind Forest Hill station. They were cheap—almost given away—and I would bring them home, carefully clean them, and then record them onto cassette. This way, I could listen to an entire work, say Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto, without having to get up every few minutes to change the disc. It was a kind of liberation, a way to immerse myself in music fully, uninterrupted.
Yet the first recording that truly knocked me out, that made me fall in love with classical music as something both alive and magical, was an EP by Dinu Lipatti. On it, he played Bach’s playful Partita No. 1 in B-flat and Mozart’s haunting A minor sonata composed at the time of his Paris trip when his mother who accompanied him suddenly died. The Bach immediately captured me. It was like a patterned tapestry of sound, a musical magic carpet woven from every note and every phrase. I could see the music in my mind—figures, designs, patterns, all interrelated in perfect harmony. It seemed impossible that something so intangible could feel so tangible. And the Mozart? It moved me in a completely different way. More emotional, more delicate, melancholic even, but always balanced within a perfect structure. The combination was intoxicating.
Listening to records in those days was a ritual. My setup included a Garrard SP25 Mark II turntable and two valve amplifiers, one for each stereo channel which needed to be warmed up just right. Every step mattered: sliding the LP from its sleeve, balancing it with both hands, wiping away dust, checking that the stylus was pristine, and then carefully lowering the needle onto the grooves. There was that faint, gentle crackle at the very start—the soft whisper of the world before the music began—and then, suddenly, the full sound blossomed. An LP side lasted roughly twenty to thirty minutes, and that became a measure of time itself. One side might be enough to drink a cup of tea, to cook a meal, or to simply sit in wonder. Music was not just something you listened to; it was something that shaped your hours, your days, your very life.
The Forest Hill Record Library was another revelation. I could borrow two records a week, and I kept a tiny notebook, diligently recording everything I took out. This was my personal catalogue, a way of building a private universe of sound. One of the first recordings I borrowed was Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, conducted by Ernest Ansermet. Hearing it for the first time was utterly overwhelming; it left me breathless. I also recall the electrifying performance of Berlioz’s Roman Carnival Overture conducted by Charles Munch—so vibrant, so alive, it practically danced off the record.
Radio was an essential companion as well. If I wanted to hear something rare or new, I had to read the Radio Times carefully, make sure I was in the right place at the right time. I experimented with recording programmes on a small Philips reel-to-reel tape recorder, particularly when the BBC began broadcasting its complete series of Haydn symphonies, the only way one could listen to the entire series before Antal Dorati recorded his pioneer Haydn set. Each recording seemed a triumph, a way to capture music as it lived in the airwaves, fleeting and immediate.
Everything changed again in the early 1970s with the arrival of the compact cassette. Suddenly, I could not only play LPs more conveniently but also record them, record radio broadcasts, build a library of music that travelled with me. I became meticulous in my cassette recordings, helped enormously by my wife, almost as if I were creating miniature archives of musical life. This cassette era lasted for roughly a decade, from 1974 to 1984, a period of intense collecting and recording.
(My Sony TC 146 stereo cassette recorder-player).
Then came the CD revolution. Libraries began discarding LPs to make space, and I rescued as many as I could. Some were quite filthy, and I carefully washed them in lukewarm water, reviving them so that they could sing again. Vinyl seemed obsolete, yet of course it would later make a stunning comeback. Lucky I kept them…
Today, my collection is vast and varied: hundreds of LPs, thousands of cassettes, some treasured 78s, and a large archive of CDs that have mostly been transferred to digital files. All of its contents. also occupying whole shelves and cupboards, can now fit comfortably on a tiny hard drive I could slip into my pocket. Music has never been more portable, more accessible—but even with all this convenience, the essence of pleasure remains unchanged.
I often return to the LP, for the tactile, sensuous joy it brings: the large, intricate artwork on the covers, the liner notes on the back, the careful sliding of the vinyl into place, the gentle lowering of the stylus into the groove, and then the music, living and breathing in the room.
Certain pieces have remained constant companions through the decades. Bach’s great keyboard concerto in D minor has always captivated me, with its driving bass lines, intricate patterns, and inexhaustible depth. Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major, which I once performed as a violinist in the school orchestra. remains for me the most delicate, sensuous, and beautiful of all his piano concerti. Mozart’s piano concerti, in fact, remain some of the greatest achievements of his musical life, each one a world unto itself.
Looking back, it is extraordinary to reflect on how far things have come. I grew up in a time when a single LP was a treasure, a prized possession that one might ask for as a birthday or Christmas gift because it was too expensive to buy otherwise. Now, music flows endlessly, streaming as freely as water from a tap. And thousands of recordings can be carried effortlessly in a device no larger than a wallet. Moreover music available now stretches back beyond the baroque to renaissance polyphony to mediaeval Ars Antiqua and indeed to all countries on the earth, the repertoire now executed in historically informed performances with period instruments and true savoire faire.
And yet, for all the advances in technology, the fundamental pleasure remains exactly the same: sitting down, letting the music unfold, immersing oneself fully, and being transported again and again to that magical world of sound that first opened before me when I heard Bach’s Partita so many years ago, and never left me since.